Lo-Quality WoW

I’m not quite sure why but I could be online for a couple of hours, doing stuff like earning my 100 Dalaran Cooking Awards achievement and doing the odd dailies here and there for money and not get a single bite in the Looking For Group channel. Then I fly into Sholazar Basin and suddenly I get an invite. Usually for somewhere on the other side of the continent. I’m starting to think I’m hidden on the LFG lists until I enter Sholazar.
Anyway, of course I land in Sholazar intent on getting the last few rep points I need to become Exalted with the Oracles when I get an invite to a 10-man Obsidian Sanctum. This time, to make sure, I request a summons. And request again. “Who needs a summons?” “Me!” “So is everyone here” “No!” “Buff up” “Okay, will summon please summon me?”

Finally a summons comes. The raid leader is straightforward, immediately telling everyone we’re doing a normal clear, no funny stuff with keeping drakes up, and that he will be master looter with priority being main spec, off spec, then everyone else. And then we start. I’m doing well, generally about third in dps and damage. We get to the first drake, the portal opens, I jump in, and then I die from the shadow damage from being inside the portal. Huh? Looks like the healer who came in with us was a Restoration shaman and his Chain Heal wasn’t hitting me because I’m the only hunter and as such, the only guy at range to the mob in the portal.

So while I have a nice rest, I drop down to sixth on the damage charts, which was pretty good considering. Generally a 10-man raid has a Main Tank, Off Tank, two heals and six dps. So my damage and dps lead was able to keep me in the “dps area” of the raid chart. Normally you’ll see your dps as the top six, then the tanks, and lastly the healers. If any dps is doing less than the tanks or healer, either your dps is really bad or our tanks and healers are just that good. The trick is figuring out which case it is.

Well, someone is nice enough to heal me and we head for the second boss. Where we get into a brief argument on whether a pat will be coming to us or not. Seems like some people got confused on which boss we were on and what we had taken down. But we get to the second drake and down it goes! During that battle, I actually manage to crawl back up to the third dps and damage spot again, which is nice. For the third drake, this time I make very sure that I’m standing near enough to get hit by the chain heal and I make it through the fight. Live and learn.

The Sartharion fight itself goes well, even though we have to explain it to a few people. I do make note that being the only hunter and no rogues in the group, I’ll have to keep an eye on the adds to tranq them if they enrage. There is a brief rough spot when two adds enrage at the same time and the one I didn’t tranq manage to rampage through the group briefly while my shot cooldown was waiting but we make it through. The two shamans luck out when the Gloves of the Lost Protector drops, the warrior and myself already had them. Which was made funnier when both shamans roll in the low teens. But a win is a win right?

So we finish looting and I wing back over to Sholazar. And get an invite to a Heroic Gundrak. Go figure. Another long, long flight to the instance. We summon and then it’s on to the instance.

Oddly enough, a warlock from the OS raid I was in is in our group. He hadn’t been there before so we had to explain the fights a bit. The Slad’ran fight as usual is a pain in the butt. Except this time the tank is actually pretty good at grabbing the adds, allowing me to focus fire on Slad’ran. Except when the tank and rogue suddenly go down. Slad’ran then runs up to the healer while I desperately try to finish him off. We barely manage to finish him off before he rampages through me, the healer and the warlock. I hate those tight fights.

The tank is a little annoyed with us saying we did the fight wrong. I’m guessing he expected us to aoe the adds better. Not exactly the forte of either a hunter or warlock, or a rogue for that matter. Ah well, at least he’s not pissed off enough to just ditch us.

We move on and I saw the mobs start to attack someone, so I do my normal thing which is to hit my Misdirect first. Except I see the MD icon go off next to me. Now normally that means one of two things. One, I had accidentally reset my focus to someone other than the tank (usually the healer for some reason) and I have to be careful to either wait for the MD to wear off, or use my less powerful attacks. Two, my focus was set right but it wasn’t the tank getting whaled on. Neither case is a good thing, especially in this case since apparently it was our healer who had run ahead and was getting hit.

The Drakkari Colossus is next and our warlock dies because he didn’t quite realize how fast the pool of mojo damages you. Moorabi is nice and straightforward. Then comes our miscommunication. The warlock wanted the elder and since we’re in a heroic, might as well take on Eck anyway right? Well our healer goes running of to go face Gal’darah and the warlock follows him while the rogue and I follow the tank towards Eck. When I point out that we said we were doing Eck, the healer replies “it doesn’t matter which one we do first”. Huh? Well, considering the path to Eck’s room is right from Moorabi’s room, most people who are doing Eck, do it right after Moorabi. There’s also another reason, but I’ll explain that in a bit.

So, we finally regather and go for Eck. Fortunately, we kill most of the small ones fast enough that the tank never really loses aggro on them. However, when we hit Eck himself, I do warn that when he hops he drops aggo. I probably should have said “wipes” instead of “drops” because the warlock didn’t realize that we need to give the tank a second or two when Eck jumps to reestablish aggro and the warlock died because of it and complained that we didn’t warn him. Oh well. And unlike the last time I was in here, I made sure to get hit by the Eck residue at some point during the fight? Why? You’ll see…

So now it’s Gal’darah. The tank warns everyone to bunch up when he changes form. I sort of listen, because bunching up is nice and all except I’m the one who’s dps goes in the toilet by sitting at melee range. So I stand a bit further back, enough so that I can dps effectively at least. Now why do we do this? In his Rhino form, Gal’darah has a charge attack and the further away you are, the more damage it does. So, while we explained what to do, not why, the warlock again dies. But we still have enough to kill Gal’darah and I get to earn the silly What the Eck? achievement. (See, I told you I would explain it.)

I do feel a little sorry for the warlock since he did get killed quite a bit. We did try to give him enough information without slowing down too much by going in detail over the fights. That’s why reading up about these instances often helps. You’re not going to remember the specifics until you’ve done it a couple of times, but often you’ll better understand why we’re doing something and where sometimes you can get away with not doing it, like when my hunter was standing a little further back on Gal’darah instead of bunching with everyone else. Live and learn.

So, in the past week I managed to get in 6 WoTLK raids, everything except a 25-man Naxxramas and 25-man Eye of Eternity. Not bad for a guy not even in a raid guild. Granted the 10-man Naxx was a wash, but 90% of my Karazhan runs were the same way. Hopefully this week goes a bit better.