Lo-Quality WoW

Last night started our 10-man run.  We actually started early for once.  Or at least the invites went out early.  We were already clearing trash by the time our second tank showed up but he usually is a little late.

It just wasn’t my night.  I blame the fact that internet connectivity between Hawaii and the rest of the world is a bit goofy at the moment ever since a major underwater cable went on the fritz.  But last night was the worst combination of lag and disconnects I have experienced in awhile.

During Marrowgar I disconnected twice.  Once during Deathwhisper.  None during Gunship (of course) and once during Saurfang.  I even lagged so badly at one point during Saurfang that a Blood Beast came up and ate me in the middle of it.  Fortunately, a quick battle resurrection and I was back at it, but I played the Blood Beasts a little more loosely than I normally do.

Next up was Crimson Hall.  And it was more of the same.  I disconnected once during Blood Prince Council and lagged during the Blood Queen fight.  But it was quickly getting to the point that I was worried that I would have to drop off completely so as not to wipe the raid.

However, we actually we’re going through even faster than normal.  Probably inspired by our 25-man run or something.  Everything up to Blood Queen were one-shots, even with a couple of deaths and disconnects like mine.  We set aside each of the first two nights for two wings, but here we were finished with the second wing and we were about half way through our normal raid time.  So we decided to hoof it to Plagueworks.

Rotface and Festergut went well, although I lagged during Rotface’s fight so badly that I kept warping around the room.  And that still left us with about an hour of raid time left.  Everything so far had been on heroic, so we figured we go ahead and do a couple of tries of Heroic Professor Putricide.

Where the hilarity began.  First we tried using our raid leader’s mob to handle the Unbound Plague but we gave up on that when it told our shadow Priest to cleanse the Plague off himself.  And it didn’t help that our Druid healer was configured twice in the rotation, killing him on the second try.

We then tried to go alphabetically: 

“Okay, Key, then Jajafei,…” 

“Uh, what funky alphabet are we using?” 

“What?”

“I don’t know about you but in my alphabet, J comes before K”

“Dammit!”

We finally got a rotation list down.  However, because of the coordination, I had to turn on my mic which shocked several people.  “Key talked?!?”  Normally my mic is off so I can listen to my music loud, talk to my cats and swear but it was deemed necessary to hear my wonderful voice…

But even then, coordination was a bit off.  On one try, our Druid got the plague and ran through me, giving it to me.  So instead of getting the plague at 50 seconds left or so, I had it at 59 seconds left.  And I don’t know if it’s because I generally have more hp than others and can last longer but it seemed that whenver I got the plague, nobody got it off me and I died.  Heck, one time, someone did pull it off me but it still managed to kill me.

And although my buddy kept battle-rezzing me, I usually lasted just long enough until the next time I had to pick up the plague.  Of the 9 times I died that night, 7 were because of the plague.  I was getting a little surly about the whole thing.

And my disconnects didn’t help.  They were actually getting more severe.  Usually only WoW drops but I was losing WoW and vent.  And I wasn’t the only one since I know our off-tank d/c once and so did our DK.  I know our Druid was lagging all over the place, as was our Shaman. 

And despite all this, and the fact that this was our first try at it, we actually pushed Putricide deep into third phase a couple of times.  Even got him down to 2% when our off-tank died and healed him.  But it was pretty good for a first try along with everyone dropping in and out during the fight.

So tonight we’re doing Frostwing and seeing if we can finish Heroic Putricide.  I’m also guessing that we’ll slap Sindragosa on Heroic as well, but we’ll have to see how well that goes.  I just hope my connection is stable tonight.