Lo-Quality WoW

Because of a late start to the night, I didn’t get nearly as much done as I would have liked. But I still got a few instances in, knocked up one more Elder and even got a brand new staff, the same staff I passed on the night before. Now why couldn’t the Sonic Spear drop like that when we were running all those Shadow Lab runs over and over?

The first instance of the night was a Nexus run. Still trying to finish finding all the Elders hanging out in instances. Why do they hang out in there anyways? Probably to laugh at people like me when we misdirect on to a healer or a mage by accident. Nexus is an instance I tend to do for the heck of it, but otherwise I really don’t enjoy it. It was pretty straightforward for most of it until we hit Ormorok the Tree-Shaper and for some reason our healer decides to run ahead while the rest of us are talking to the Elder. So we talk to the Elder, turn around, and see the splinters left over from our healing druid. I really don’t play healer classes that well but to me, you would make sure you have the tank in front of you while traveling through an instance. So we have to wait for the druid to return, fighting those annoying little weeds as they pop up. Then we take on Ormorok. Which I usually don’t have a problem with. Except this time, I have to concentrate on adds, and as a consequence, just as we kill Ormorok, I’m rooted from an add and a crystal spike pokes up under me and I end up very, very dead.

Since we did my preferred sequence, Ormorok was the last one before Keristrasza. This fight is just annoying because it’s hard to sustain dps while pretending to be a rabbit. We whittle him down when I see the brief message from the tank saying “we need more dps!”. I assume he had just died at that point because I saw the message, then I saw a big angry dragon bearing down on me. So I do my normal scamper, disengage, and shooting like crazy and take the dragon down. Then I look around and realize that I’m the only one standing. Now since as far as I could tell, the tank went down and I was the next on the list, it seems like everyone else got killed by the various aoe or cone effects while I was running for my life. And people keep making fun for my high stamina.

So we finish and then comes the low point of the night. Now the healer had been greeding everything, so we assumed he was an enchanter. Except, as soon as we were done and we looted Keristrasza, he hearthed out. The rest of us look at each other then asked him if he was disenchanting or not. No answer. A couple more inquires with no response. Then, pissed, we each put him on our ignore list and then head off to our individual lives.

I start puttering around Sholozar Basin when I get an invite to a 25-man Vault. No problem, a quick warlock summon and I’m there. And Archavon goes down smoothly on the first try, even with only 24 people around. (One hunter was apparently saved and we engaged before we could replace him.) This run was especially nice because I ended up in the top three of the damage and dps charts with about 3300 dps. Normally this is actually a bad thing but it looks like the top three was averaging over 3000 dps, the next 7 over 2000k and then spots 11 and 12 were doing just under at 1800 and 1900 dps. In the past, if I’m in the top three, usually the 12th dps spot is closer to 1k dps. Didn’t get any of the drops other than the Emblem of Valor but I can live with that.

Last of the night was a fast Utgarde Keep run. Ironically enough, with the priest from the previous night, who I teased. “You are healing this time right?” In fact, the priest whispered me “I don’t know what he was thinking last night, grabbing two healers.” Guess it’ll be a mystery of life. But this run was much better with a correctly balanced group. The funniest part was while I topped the dps and damage charts, the tank wasn’t that far behind. Now, as I’ve said, I generally get scared if dps classes are being beaten by the tank but looking at the dps charts, the other two were doing a typical 1600+ dps, it was just that the tank was spiking his dps up to 1800. Basically, the tank was being an extra dps! No wonder everything went down so fast.

Oddly enough, somewhere in the middle of all this, I ended up with the 500 Stone Keeper’s Shards achievement. Didn’t even realize I had that many, but doing a lot of Wintergrasp does that. I also ended up getting the Enraged Feral Staff off of Ingvar. Since staves got reworked, this staff beats my pointy stick in all aspects except hit rating. While that bothers me a bit, I’ll have to run a couple more instances to see how much that drop in hit rating hurts me. I’ll probably still carry my pointy stick if I end up in a raid but otherwise, we’ll run with the knobby stick. What is it with me and sticks anyway?