Lo-Quality WoW

Work decided to keep me busy the past few days, although I did squeeze WoW time in of course. Not that this is being read anywhere. But quite a bit has happened over the past few days, so let’s see how much I can remember.

Monday night was a bit busier than normal. It started out with a 25-man Obsidian Sanctum. Which had me worried for a bit. When one joins the raid and the first few things you see in the Raid channel is “I wasn’t in the queue for this?” and “I’m locked to the 25-man OS”, well I get worried. The first few minutes, I just sat there and watched the raid composition go all over the place in almost a weird hypnotic fashion. It was obvious that the leader and assist was rampaging through the whole LFG system looking for anyone they could grab.

This brings up a point about blind invites. I think they’re rude in general. When I get a sudden invite, my first response is “what is this for?” Rarely am I in LFG for just one instance or raid, so I want to know what’s going on and whether it’ll be worth it to interrupt whatever silly thing I’m doing. A brief whisper of “H OS?” is sufficient to at least let me know what I’ll be getting in to. On the other hand, players should be smart enough to ask the same question I ask when they get such an invite. It’ll cut down the amount of time wasted on both sides of the conversation.

Anyway, we eventually get 25 people and go in. It goes pretty well, even when someone sneezes very loudly in Ventrillo. (It got a good laugh though.) On the last drake someone asks if we were going to keep a drake up but that idea was shot down in short order. We then take on Sartharion and whittle it down fast. Once Sartharion, I’m surprised when the Heroic: Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows achievement pops on my screen. Didn’t even know there was such an achievement. Guess I’ll have to see about getting the normal version someday.

For most of the place I was in the top three of damage and dps, but it dropped significantly in the Sartharion fight, primarily because I ended up fighting adds. When those buggers show up, the OT is supposed to grab them and when they enrage, Rogues with Anesthetic Poison and Hunter’s with Tranquilizing shots are supposed to hit. Not as easy as it sounds since I need to not only target adds, but especially focus on the ones enraged to hit them with the tranq shot. Either way, I spent way too much time tranquilizing things and being forced in to melee when I pulled aggro on the adds. But I’d rather be fighting them in melee then letting them go off on the healers. I’m getting to like druid healers in tree form, mainly because it’s obvious who they are, so they tend to get priority help when they are being attacked. Either way, this drops me down to 6th in damage overall, still pretty decent for a 25-man group.

I thank the group and head over to Kalimdor where I do a quest in to Maraudon that apparently I never got around to doing. Then I get an invite to a 10-man Vault. For some reason, the portal isn’t up but I wing over and hike the rest of the way in. We go in, smash Archavon (boy my buffed dps was up there), and suddenly I see Archavon the Stone Watcher achievement pop up, which made me laugh. According to my statistics, I’ve killed Archavon 5 times on heroic but this was the first time I ever did him on normal. I guess I have been focusing on the 25-man raids a bit.

And to end the night, I went back to Kalimdor, desperately trying to find 7 more quests I hadn’t done. And I finally find a quest chain in Silithus that I never finished. It takes some effort but I end the night with Loremaster of Kalimdor finally completed. Now I just need to finish off some Icecrown quests.

Tuesday night was an exercise in lunacy as I go around Icecrown looking for quests. Most quests are group ones, and being the idiot I am, I at least try to solo them. Some are doable but most end up with either Mudgie or Fluffy dead and me running for my life. But while doing this, I get an invite for a 25-man vault. Again the portal isn’t up so it’s a long ride over to Wintergrasp. There’s one Warrior being snide about Hunters, but he’s in the guild doing this run, so I keep quite. Yes, I know the “Huntard” label has been around for a long time but why not wait until we do at least one fight before insulting me. Especially since I end up topping the damage and dps charts for most of it. Ironically, I didn’t even know there had been a hotfix nerf to exploding shot during the maintenance. I knew it was coming, so it’s announcement wasn’t a surprised and apparently it didn’t ding me too badly. Either that or the rest of the raid just wasn’t putting out the damage. Bah, it was done and I got my emblems so whatever.

I putter around Icecrown some more when I get an invite to a 10-man Vault this time. Again, no portal but I’m used to it by now. Except, with 25 minutes left and at least one person who DIDN’T EVEN KNOW WHERE THE INSTANCE WAS, well, things were going to be dicey. 14 minutes before the next battle is to begin, suddenly a tank drops out. A minute later, a healer drops. Then a dps goes. Well, no way we’re getting replacements, getting them over to the instance, and doing the fight before the next battle of Wintergrasp starts, so the rest of us meander off. The leader tries the very ineffective insult of calling those of us leaving “girls”. (Which I told the females in our guild, who laughed at that.)

Since I was in the area, I decided I might as well do the Wintergrasp battle. This one was interesting in that it was really the first one I was involved in since the latest changes to the battle. Namely the towers to the south. I was guarding East, but since the main attack was hitting the West side, that freed me up to grab a catapult and head south. I know there was at least one more Alliance player in the area, who either was knocked out of his vehicle or didn’t know that you needed a vehicle to take out the tower. Either way, he was very good at taking out mobs while I concentrated on the tower. At some point, two other catapults joined me and we quickly take the tower out and move to the next one. We move to the Southwest tower but a Horde warrior comes up and waylaid two of us, the other catapult made it to the tower to begin working on it. I try to rescue the other catapult and take out the workshop I was near at the same time. Didn’t accomplish either but it didn’t matter when shortly thereafter, we lose the battle. I had a busy day at work the next day so I call it a night at that point.

Which leads to last night. I notice I was running low on consumables, so I spend some time doing dailies and farming food products. I also get an invite to a 25-man OS. The funny thing is, I start recognizing names from the other two nights of raids. Oh well, that at least tells me who I’m dealing with. Very straightforward run again, and I manage to pick up the 25 Emblems of Valor achievement at some point during it. Again, working on add duty drops my damage and dps output a bit but I only fall to 3rd place this time. I also didn’t win anything but everyone did their jobs so I’m okay with no winning.

Otherwise the rest of the time was in Icecrown again and examining my runs. I’m still averaging about 1-3 misses in about 500 shots with just my knobby stick. Not bad, except the misses tend to be with my explosive shot which is rather important. After awhile, since I’m getting no headway with quests in Icecrown and instance runs seem a bit dead, I switch to my warrior for the rest of the night.