Lo-Quality WoW

After all the stress from the previous days instances and raids, I just wanted a nice relaxing time tonight. So I logged in and did a few dailies, but as usual, I put myself up in Looking For Group. It’s rather late so I doubt I’d get a 25-man anything but you never know. But after no bites for an hour or two, I remove myself from LFG. And wouldn’t you know it, I get an invite to an instance about 5 minutes later. Weird.

It’s a Heroic Azjol-Nerub run, which I think is one of the most visually spectacular 5-man instance and something a bit different in the way of boss fights then what I’ve faced before. I do have some lingering fear though because AN was the second instance we ever tried as a guild and Hadronox spent most of it kicking our butts. Krik’thir and Anub’arak were cake, but Hadronox for some reason, we just couldn’t get down, even when we waited for her to web the doorways up and kill all the adds. And that was normal, not even heroic!

The group takes a while to form, mainly because we can’t find a tank for some reason, but we finally get together for the instance. As we enter, the tank says “Do me a favor. Don’t let me out dps you.” Now I’ve run with a couple of tanks that put close to what I consider dps class dps numbers, so it actually depends on how much he himself does. Plus I had run with the mage in our group before and while I don’t remember him being terrible, I did remember that he wasn’t putting out as much damage as I expected.

Now we start with buffing and someone is nice enough to put a great feast out. Which we sit down to savor. Except the tank. Who runs forward to engage the first two mobs! Well, as each of us gets the food buff, we hop up and run after him. We down the two mobs when the tank goes “FEAST!” and runs back so that he can get the buff as well. And I get that funny feeling in the pit of my stomach that tells me this is gonna be one of those runs.

Well, we get to Krik’thir and the tank asks if we want to do the achievement. I’m about to say “no” when one of the others asks what the achievement is. I then change my message to instead say what the achievement involves when the tank goes “nevermind, you can do it with a different tank some other time” and proceeds to pull. The battle goes as well as expected, although it seems a bit long to me since I have to slip into Viper twice to keep my mana up.

As we continue on, the tank lets out a sigh and I ask him what’s up. He then posts his recount figures and points out that he was second on the list. I check and I mentioned that it was the total damage list, not dps. While I was comfortably in front on both charts, our other two dps were below the tank in total damage. But I check and they are both above him in dps. By less than 100 dps each but still above him. I sort of tease him about this since he did ask that we not let him out dps us and fortunately it doesn’t piss him off. Then again, I am doing my job and if I left, things would be much, much worse.

And despite this, the tank briefly considers doing the achievement with Hadronox. Fortunately, it was only briefly and he went ahead and did the pull. He did pull Hadronox herself a bit earlier than I expected since there were a few adds still up, even if the doorway got webbed. Again, while the fight is long, it goes relatively well, even with the healer’s unfortunate habit of standing in the the aoe poison effect.

As it turns out, Anub’arak’s fight ends up being the one that kills us. The first time in, I think the tank and rogue is getting caught in the Pound attack. Or at least that’s what the tank complains about. And we’re doing relatively well until the later half of the battle. At this point, since we’re not dpsing fast enough, I’m running low on mana as is the healer. I switch to viper, which builds my mana back up but since my dps goes down the tubes, it just makes the situation worse. Eventually, we get to the point that the healer’s drained and we go down quite quickly thereafter.

Rez and back in. This time, I try to conserve my mana a bit more. Except this time the healer gets taken out by the adds early and we again wipe. The third time, it’s the Anub’ar Venomancers and their darn poison DoT that kills me early and naturally the rest can’t sustain dps. Fourth time, again the Venomancers wreck havoc and it just happens that I had just done a feign death when the tank dies, and in the second before I can stand back up, the fight resets. Then again, not much I can do by myself so all it does is save me one set of repair bills.

This time, just before starting the encounter, the tank asks the healer what his bonus healing was. He says it’s around 1100. Hmm, sounds a bit low to me, but then again, I don’t have any of my magic characters up at lvl 80 yet so I’m not sure. The tank then asks the mage for his bonus damage and the mage has something like 1300. Now I know the mage isn’t doing quite the amount of damage I normally see out of mages in heroics, so that gives me a baseline to compare against the healer’s numbers. And by my math, it comes out as “not good”.

But we’re already there so we might as well do one last go. This time, I go into viper early in the fight to keep my mana up and I pop a health potion the first time a Venomancers whacks me. Hopefully the others made adjustments as well. But in any case, we finally down him! We loot, roll for shards and then the tank leaves the group. I shrug, because I ask the mage for a portal. Apparently the tank also then remembers we have a mage in the group, because he then asks to be reinvited to the group so he can portal as well.

Quite a bit for one simple instance. And I figure I might as well not push my luck any further at this point. Who knows what I would end up with. So I figure I’ll go play meat shield the rest of the night