Lo-Quality WoW

I’ve been trying for the past couple of days to get into a Heroic Halls of Stone. But, I felt I just had to move on. So this weekend I tried getting into just a regular Halls of Stone. And it still took awhile before I finally got in a group. But heck, I needed to start doing other stuff, so I’ll take it.
Then there was the horror when I realized I was with 4 others who had never been to Halls of Stone before. Not that I mind going in with people the first time in, just that it fell to me to try and explain the fights and since I don’t actually enjoy Halls of Stone that much, I’m not as familiar with it as other fights. But I tried my best to give them the main points they needed to know to succeed in the fight. Fortunately, two of the fights are similar to fights from BC, the Maiden of Grief which is similar to the Maiden of Virtue in Karazhan and Krystallus, which is similar to Gruul’s fight. Except my team wasn’t familiar with Gruul’s fight either. Hmm, still I tried.

And it must have worked. We had a couple of bad pulls and I think our healer was lagging a little, but we made it through each fight. I got my Elders of the Dungeons and my To Honor One’s Elders achievements. And of course my companions got their Halls of Stone achievement. As much as I enjoy getting achievements myself, I still celebrate when the people I’m with get them.

They were going to continue on to other instances but my guild started calling about their own Elder instance run. So I said goodbye to the group and wished them luck and I was off to join my guild. Then I realized we were about to do a typical PKT run, which is, to be blunt, demented at times.

Now, to understand it you have to understand our guild a little. The Plush Kitty Toys, when we formed, had about a dozen players of which four used paladins as their mains and another two would play paladins regularly. We had three hunter mains, with at least one player who played his hunter regularly. So a majority of our guild played either paladins or hunters. And being a casual guild, we also rarely had five people on at any given time, so we would take whomever we could and tried to PUG the rest. Beyond that, we also have a lot of players who have no problem running into an instance just to see if they can solo or double-team an instance.

Well, we formed up and we had two SV hunters, a MM hunter, a protection paladin and a retribution paladin. Notice anything odd about that? Yup, no dedicated healer. But we were all lvl 80, planning on running the instances on regular and mainly going just for the Elders rather than full runs. So what could go wrong?

Fortunately, the paladin pair was one of our husband/wife teams so they could cover each other. Our hunters were all veterans and we know what to do to cover each other. And let’s face it, three hunters, and pets, can put out a lot of dps. It was also interesting how we ended up separating duties. I had the highest regular dps, and I play my hunter the most, so my main duty was to slap things as hard as I possibly could, often leading with my MD to make sure the tank was getting all that threat. The other SV hunter brought his gorilla, which he would MD to so that in case the tank did go down, the gorilla was usually next on the list and would tank. He also was doing wonders with his freezing arrow, which I still haven’t practiced too much with. Our MM helped cover the two of us with his trueshot aura as well as being secondary freezing arrow. And I’m not sure which of the others were doing it but if I placed my hunter’s mark on the main target, I would shortly see hunter marks appear on the secondary and usually the tertiary target. I’ve run with so many hunters who don’t mark their targets, but we make sure our hunters have them up. Every little bit helps.

So we hit Utgarde Keep first. This is one of the few instances we have run a couple of times already as a guild, so we knew what to expect. Since we only wanted the Elder, the only boss we faced was Prince Keleseth. The fight itself can be chaotic with the adds constantly running in. Except we blew threw him. In 23 seconds. Let’s hear it for being overpowered for an instance! Shortly afterwards we got the Elder then scurried back out.

Since we were in the area, we went for Utgarde Pinnacle next. Both SV hunters have been there but I don’t think the others had been. So, naturally, we figure we’d try a full run while we were in there. I swear, sometimes we do these things and succeed because we don’t know any better. Svala and Gortok was pretty straightforward and not too difficult. For Skadi, the other SV hunter took responsibility for the harpoons while I made sure to keep my MD handy to make sure things stuck to the tank. We got the elder and then talked about the Ymiron fight. Now I know his dark slash does 50% damage on the tank. That’s pretty big for a non-healer run. But we said “why not” and went for it.

Ironically, we wipe on the mobs in the room before Ymiron, mainly because the pat in the room joined the fight, then a fear pulled the other group and we had a big 10 on 5 (or 8 if you count the pets) but that’s quite a lot of things running around trying to kill each other. But we rez, clear the room, then face Ymiron. And surprise, surprise, we kill him and now with guildmates with their own Utgarde Pinnacle achievement, we can feel good for doing what I still consider an insane run on an instance.

Since it was late, that’s as far as we got. As for me, I called it a night as well. I had already managed to reduced the amount of quests I needed for the Loremaster of Kalimdor achievement from 70 more to only 15 more. The problem is, in playing over two years and with so many characters, finding 15 more quests for Keyalnon that he hasn’t done, is going to take quite a bit of effort!