Lo-Quality WoW

Some nights, I just really don’t have any plans. So I log on and figure I’ll do some dailies to build up my gold reserves. And for the heck of it, I put myself in Looking For Group, because you just never know when you’ll get to go somewhere interesting. Well, it wasn’t interesting, but I did get an invite to a Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle.

Oddly enough, I’ve been to UP 4 times, but this was only my second time in Heroic. And slowly and steadily we wind our way through the instance. And have no problems until we get to Skadi. (Although Gortok did seem to have something against my cat and me, since we got impaled twice.) On the first try, we decide to do the normal gauntlet, and I was assigned to get the harpoons. And boy was it ugly. By the time I had gathered and shot enough harpoons to knock Skadi down, I was almost out of mana and our other dps being squishy, they went down fast. So did I when Skadi caught me in a whirlwind against a harpoon launcher. So the second time we do the “gather first”. This goes better except I must have had some lag because I wasn’t able to get him in one pass and it was enough to get us overwhelmed.

So we sit and think about it for a sec and our tank, who was a death knight, decides he’ll pop his Army of the Dead. Again, I’m unable to get Skadi in one pass but the extra ghouls give us enough breathing room that we’re actually in good shape when Skadi comes down. Right until he kills the other two dps again. Oddly enough, this doesn’t bother me because I’ve done numerous BC instances where it ends up being myself, the tank and the healer. (My emphasis on armor and stamina tends to allow that.) Then it becomes a funny game of me at range blazing away, the tank hold aggro and the healer trying to keep us both alive. For some reason, when Skadi would whirlwind, he’d target me. Being so far away, it was easy to see him coming, timing my Feign Death just before he reached me, allowing the tank to grab the aggro and we reset to our positions. It only takes a couple of times at this before Skadi goes down and we go on.

For some reason, I keep forgetting that some of the mobs at this point can fear and it’s a bad fear that gets us when the tank gets feared out of LoS of the healer. We wipe but on the next go around, we make sure to pull quite a distance into the room before hitting them. Then it’s on to Ymiron, which actually ends up being pretty straightforward, and we’re done. Nice PUG group for once, we had some missteps but for the most part everyone kept their humor about them and there was no finger pointing.

Again I’m goofing off, having a nice beer, when my guild decides they want to hit Gundrak. In this case, for the elder. Unfortunately, except for our other hunter in the group, the rest haven’t even done normal Gundrak, much less heroic. And we wipe on Slad’ran when our healer gets piled on. We rez on the other side and go for Moorabi instead when we wipe again when we accidentally pull the three mobs from the other balcony area. But we’re a guild and pretty demented about such things, and we go in and take out Moorabi. Then I’m surprised when suddenly I see a couple of Emblem of Heroism achievement notifications pop up. I shouldn’t have been, most of the group with us this evening tend to focus on general quests and pvp, whereas I have more of an instance focus.

We then go and face of against Eck. Fortunately, it doesn’t go badly and two of our people get their Elders of the Dungeons and To Honor One’s Elders achievements. (I also suddenly notice that we all have different titles up. Not important, just an odd observation.) Well since it was the first time for three of the others, we decide to continue instead of calling it.

Now by this time, the rest of the team knows I’ve ever so slightly drunk. So I’m not sure why the other hunter decides to let me describe the fights. Oh well. We wipe twice on the Drakkari Colossus, mainly because he was getting caught in one of the pool of mojo attacks mid-cast. But we manage to barrel through and we go against Slad’ran again. This time, we set up in the entrance area to give myself and the other hunter a chance to try and intercept the snake adds. And we fail. Well, our priest, who had been healing, goes to respec holy at this point. (Last I had checked, he was holy but he had gone to discipline at some point and I didn’t know.) While he did that, the other hunter grabbed his tenacity pet to see if we could handle the snakes. It goes better but not enough and we wipe again.

Oh well, we’re a bit pig-headed so we still go for it. I think we wipe one more time before we try something slightly different. This time, our ret pally and the other hunter work on the adds while I focus on Slad’ran. This actually works better since I could put out more dps and with it focused on the boss instead of the adds, it brought him down and our ret pally, the other hunter and the healer even manage to get their Snakes. Why’d It Have to Be Snakes? achievement.

Gal’darah comes up next and we actually make it in one go, which was amazing to me since by this time I was pretty drunk and wasn’t making complete sense when I was trying to describe the fight. But he goes down and suddenly a bunch of Heroic: Gundrak achievement notifications. We loot and our other hunter manages to get his Superior achievement. While there was a lot of wiping, it was a fairly productive guild run.

Again, I’m off getting drunker when again a guild activity pops up. This time we’re off to fight Omen. At this point, our MT has logged off (it’s rather late for him) so it’s up to either my warrior or one of paladin’s setup for protection. We decide to let the pally tank since that frees up my hunter for dps, and at the moment my hunter is the most effective dps we have. So we gather, about 7 of us, and decide to go for it. And naturally we get our butts kicked. Unfortunately, between myself and the other hunter, we pull aggro way too easily. We try a few more times, even picking up a warlock who happened by, but we get smashed. At this point, I figure I need to switch to my warrior since if we can at least keep aggro on the tank, it’ll just be a very long, very annoying, fight. So my hunter retires for the night and it’s my warrior the rest of the way.