Lo-Quality WoW

Well, our regular raid leader is off for the week so I wasn’t positive about the invite for a 25-man.  When I did receive it, a quick check showed that the guild only had 22-people on, which explained my invite.  After all, if they’ve been complaining about our 10-man team being a “PUG” team picking non-guilders or guildies, it’d be silly for them to drag me along if they had the people for it in their guild.

And since our raid leader also acts as one of the main tanks, it meant that the tanking assignments were a little different than normal.  And it didn’t start well.  Clearing the trash should be a simple and easy thing.  Nope, for some reason they started pulling half the room on top of us.  Losing people at the start of the raid to trash mobs, is never a good thing!

Marrowgar was straightforward.  And then on going to Deathwhisper, one of the mage’s ran into THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM and then cast Ice Block.  Then came the “uh, can one of the tanks come and pull aggro?”  I wasn’t paying attention but why the heck the mage did that in the first place is beyond me.  And it didn’t help when someone did some sort of knockback attack, kicking all the mobs away from the center of the room and making AOE attacks useless!

Comparatively, Deathwhisper herself was simple.  We had more than enough to dps all the adds and then hit the boss.  I do know that at some point, one of the Priest got mind controlled and was almost immediately killed by the party, but I missed that particular conversation as to why that happened.

Fortunately the weekly in-raid quest was the one for the patrolling giant.  Everyone actually played that straight and did a good job on the plague debuff thingy.  Gunship was practically an afterthought. 

Saurfang found me in the back row for some reason.  Neither the warlock or shaman was willing to give me a spot further in of the fight.  I was half tempted to not even use my Frost Trap then, but decided that with my luck, the Blood Beast would come and kick my ass.  I did put the trap behind them though. 

Once inside, we headed for Plagueworks.  Which usually meant we take out the Valk’yr closer to the outer circle.  Except we attack the one from the inner circle for some reason.  Then we move on and get ready for the mobs before a few of us pointed out that we had taken out the wrong Valk’yr and that the other one was inbound. 

We cleared trash and then headed for Festergut, where things were just “off”.  We start out with the raid leader saying “group 3 on the left, group 4 on the right for ranged.”  Except a quick check showed that I was in group 2.  I pointed out that I was neither group but I HAD to stay at range.  I was then told to just go left.  But I know they moved the other Hunter, I have no idea why they didn’t move me into a different group as well.

The rest of it was a positioning nightmare.  In 25-man mode, Vile Gas should only hit 3 people if everyone has proper spacing.  I saw one instance of the Vile Gas hit 7 people!  Most of the time I saw at least 4 people hit by the Gas each time!

Then the spores.  It seemed like people wasn’t sure what to do half the time.  The Boomkin next to me wouldn’t even move from his spot when he had the spore and he was back near the wall like I was.  More than once he did that. 

Then came the time I got the spore.  I was moving into position and saw that there wasn’t one in melee, so I detoured to head to them.  Which was when the mage who also had the spore, cast Blink and ended up in front of me.  So I immediately revered back out to cover ranged.  However, he must have realized what he was doing so he moved back out as well.  We then did a slight dance of each of us moving back and forth for a bit.  I finally said “hell with it” and just ran to melee.

As a Hunter, I hate running to melee.  Mainly because it kills my dps.  But when it comes down to it, it’s more important for the melee, and the tank specifically, to get the spore buff than it was to keep my fellow ranged up and alive. 

We do wipe once, and the second try was almost as bad as the first.  Positioning was just off the whole fight and we lost people when we really shouldn’t have.  I just couldn’t figure out why.

We cleared the trash and then setup for Rotface.  We had a Paladin, who was acting as third tank, on Ooze duty.  I can’t remember what he said but it made me worried about it.  I wasn’t the only one, our 10-man Death Knight offered to take over if the Paladin died. 

Now I tease our DK ever since a few weeks back where he forgot about the stacking slow debuff from the ooze puddles that got him killed and had me suddenly kiting the Ooze.  But that was heroic mode, and he’s not normally a tank for us, so I just make fun of him about it rather than really getting on his case for it. 

Which turned out to be fortunate because the Paladin just wasn’t kiting the Ooze correctly.  Instead of relying on stuff like Hand of Freedom to allow him to cross the Ooze Flood with minimal issues, he went around it and subsequently dragged the Ooze through the raid!  Why is that important?  Because of the Radiating Ooze aoe attack!  Other times, it looks like he just took the completely wrong angle.

He said later that part of it was because other people kept attacking the Ooze but I didn’t see anything like that and he should have had solid threat on it.  Especially as a tank with taunt and threat increasing abilities.  So I don’t know where that came from.

Then, as expected, he died.  I happened to be nearby, so I tossed a Distracting Shot at the Big Ooze to keep it away from the raid.  Fortunately, it was just a few seconds later that another small ooze merged into it and triggered the unstable explosion.  Our DK was able to pick up the Oozes after that.  As on person said “that was the ugliest one-shot we’ve ever done.”

Then on the way to Putricide, somehow the encounter in the hall in front of his room got activated.  And most of us hadn’t even gotten to the hall yet.  We didn’t lose anyone but it was a very wierd occurance.

Putricide’s fight was just as bad.  I know I died when Volatile Ooze locked on to me and blew me up.  The stupid part was, it wasn’ t like I was off by myself, I was standing in the middle of most of the raid and yet only one person bunched up on me. 

Someone was nice enough to battle resurrect me but the rest of the fight was just as off.  We actually got Putricide all the way into the third phase but somehow we lost a bunch of people and it just cascaded from there.  And since it was getting late, we called it there.

I don’t know what it was last night but the whole raid just seemed off for some reason.  Hopefully tonight’s continutation goes much better.  And hopefully I can grab a few winks beforehand.  Not feeling 100% as it is.