Lo-Quality WoW

Odd title since as far as I know, nobody reads this other than myself. Either way, things have conspired to make it difficult to post. One, work has been busy and I tend to write these things throughout the day at work as a break. Two, this computer, which holds all my web authoring software, has been acting up lately. So finally, a compilation of all the silliness I’ve done in WoW over the past few days…

Which actually wasn’t that much with the “Love is in the Air” event that is going on. This event is a little different than most of the others. It has a relatively short period, only about a week’s time. It is also a bit time consuming if you’re trying to get the achievements. For example, the Nation of Adoration achievement. This takes a little over 2 hours to do minimum. Why? Because you can only get the Gift of Adorations you need for it when you don’t have the “Adored” debuff on you. And the debuff lasts one hour. So you get your first gift, wait an hour, get the second gift, wait an hour, get the third gift.

And that’s “minimum”, assuming you’re not me. For instance, I forgot that you have to speak to a non-guard NPC to get the Gift of Adoration, otherwise you get a Pledge of Adoration. So once I had figured that out, I had already wasted a couple of hours. Then I didn’t realize that which Gift you get depends on the “home city” of the character you are talking to, not on the city you are in. For instance, in Stormwind, I gave a love token to the nice Night Elf standing next to the moonwell in the Park district. I ended up with a Gift of Adoration: Darnassus instead of the Gift of Adoration: Stormwind I was expecting.

And that doesn’t include the achievements that are based on more random luck. The Lovely Luck Is On Your Side achievement for instance took me a few days to finally get. So this event ends up having two side effects. One, you spend a lot of time running around cities in the Classic area and two, because everyone else is also running around like a lunatic, getting competent groups together is a lot harder.

Okay, maybe for certain things. Since Utgarde Keep was one of the places you could get the bouquet for the My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose achievement, my guild did do a brief run on Utgarde Keep. On normal. With 5 of our lvl 80 characters. Overpowered? Yup. But we still tried to challenge ourselves. Since we only needed to beat the first boss to get the drop, we timed ourselves on how long it would take. Our first try took 15 minutes and we eventually dropped it down to 11 minutes on our 5th run. Prince Keleseth’s fight also became a timed thing. At first we took 32 seconds to take him down but we managed to shave it down to 19 seconds. Couldn’t get any fast than that though.

But this leads to a horrible 25-man vault. Normally, even without being picky, you get a relatively nice distribution of classes. When I joined, we had 6 Hunters, 5 Paladins and something like 3 or 4 Druids and absolutely no Warlocks. Now why is that last point particularly important? Because most of the 25 people were in Kalimdor or Eastern Kingdoms, usually with cooldowns pending. So now we have a slightly odd makeup, but we kill a lot of time WAITING FOR PEOPLE! Which wouldn’t have annoyed me so much except we kept telling people “No lock, get here on your own” and then five minutes later “uh, can I get a summons?”.

When the majority of people have arrived, we start clearing. Then we get to Archavon himself and we wait for the rest. Including the off-tank. When one brilliant idiot says “let’s just do this already, we don’t need an OT” What?!? And before I can protest, we rush forward! Now the reason why this fight in particular you need an OT is because on occasion, Archavon will grab the main tank and then rampage through the rest of the raid if there is no OT to distract him. Which is what happens. It takes a few seconds for Archavon to one-shot a bunch of squishies and there’s a particularly hilarious moment when I somehow become the OT, mainly because I can survive the first hit he does on me. But since I’m not a tank in any way, shape, or form, I die and so does everyone else.

Second try, OT has shown up along with everyone else. We last longer because the OT is there…right up until he dies and the same mayhem ensues. Someone points out that only four of us are doing over 2K dps, the rest are, to put it bluntly, much lower than that. I’m not in the mood to do the math but it does bother me a bit that the top four dps are over 2K, the next two are mid 1500’s and everyone else is 1K dps or lower. Just off the top of my head that seems extremely low.

Third try, again the OT goes down and this time there is a call for “Druid Tank!” to take over the OT duties. Which, I guess would have been fine, IF IT WASN’T THE HEALING DRUID WHO SWITCHED TO BEAR FORM TO DO IT! So not only do we have an OT who’s not really equipped to be doing any sort of tanking, but we lose out on a healer because she’s busy playing tag with the big giant. So again there’s a wipe. Someone else points out that three people disconnected during that fight, including the raid leader!

At this point people start dropping out. (Okay, two of the d/c’s just never came back.) This includes the OT, and two healers. The leader keeps insisting “We can do this. Dammit people, stay!” Which works fine if he really had some authority over us but since this is a PUG, all that does is convince a few more to drop. Amazingly we do find people. Who are in Darnassus or Ironforge. Who want a summons. I try to stick it out, I really do. But after wasting the past night or two trying to do event achievements, I no longer have the patience to be sitting in a 2 hour raid that can’t get it’s act together. So I finally leave.

I end up doing a Scholomance and Stratholme runs, the later with a couple of guild mates. Good thing they were paladins, I couldn’t do Stratholme nearly as fast by myself. Neither instance is really one I’ve done a lot of, so I wasn’t quite familiar with them. But when you have two paladins, a hunter and a death kngiht, all lvl 77 or higher, running around the place, it’s a breeze. At the end of the night, I find myself with three achievements: Scholomance, Stratholme, and Classic Dungeonmaster. At least I got something done.

Next night, a little more rested, for some silly reason I decide I’ll work on some old world content again. So I’m puttering around Scholomance when I get three whispers, each asking me if I had the “iris”. Takes me a minute to realize they mean Key to the Focusing Iris, which means an Eye of Eternity run. Unfortunately, I don’t have it but I get an invite anyway. From the same leader as the disaster of a raid the previous night. Okay, maybe it was just an off night previously, I’ll give him another chance.

Yeah, I’m that stupid. But we gather. A quick check to see who doesn’t know the fight and nobody says a thing. Which also brings to my attention the fact that we were going to be doing this fight without Vent. Now, Vault and Obsidian Sanctum don’t really need it, I like having Vent when doing almost any other raid. The fact we’re doing it without, does bug me a little. Then there’s a small argument that occurs when the raid leader talks about how we need to grab floating discs for phase 3. I argue that it’s dragons, the discs are phase 2 and he apparently doesn’t believe me. Fine, I can live with that since it’ll be obvious when we get to phase 2. So we summon the big guy and we’re off.

And it’s obvious that the tank has no idea what he’s doing. The first thing he does? Backs Malygos to the edge of the circle, but still has him facing towards the center. Why does this matter? Because Malygos has this fun Arcane Breath cone attack to people in front of him which does something like 18 to 21k damage to people. (Not to mention causing people to explode afterwards.) Now unlike most other dragons, Malygos doesn’t have a tail swipe attack, meaning we can all stand safely behind him and poke him in the butt. That is, if he wasn’t up against the side of the platform. Leaving the rest of us a very odd corridor to either side of him to attack. And naturally, we wipe.

We gather back and the first thing the raid leader does is complain that we wiped because nobody killed the power sparks! What? Now I kept track of the power spark that did spawn and it didn’t even get close to Malygos! But the raid leader insists that’s the problem and details myself and the two death knights to kill the spark. I glance at my recount and realize he has detailed two of his top three dps people to do this. Now, this just screams to be a mistake, but it also let’s me know that I’m topping the dps and damage charts. If you go back to the last time I was in the Eye, I was one of the lower dps outputs that time and we barely took Malygos down in the 10 minute timer. If I’m topping the charts this time, we have a serious lack of dps.

But we go in and the leader calls out “Power Spark”. So myself and the two DK’s break off to go chase down the spark, which is a bit of a distance away from the group. It’s also when the tank decides to turn Malygos to face where the three of us are running. Yup, Arcane Breath up the rear and all three of us are killed. Wipe.

Third try and we’ve already had to replace one person who was much smarter than myself and ditched. This time, we’re also going in using the WoW chat channel voice input, which, while it isn’t the greatest, is still something. Again the tank tries backing Malygos up when we yell at him, verbally this time, to just tank him in the middle. It’s at this point that I find out that the person who left was the healer who had been paying attention to the rest of the group instead of the tank. Why? Because after one Arcane Storm and Vortex, I have to quickly pop a potion to stay alive and I see no other heals incoming. It also lets me know that two or three of our less robust members are dead from that combo. So again, wipe.

This time two others drop out and we try grabbing someone else. I mention that this is gonna be the last try for me. Despite the fact that I constantly have to stop and go hunt down wayward sparks, I’m still topping dps and damage charts and that’s bugging me. It doesn’t help that I get into an argument when someone insists that we can still do it, after all we have 10 minutes to wear Malygos down in the first phase. I point out the fact that the 10 minute enrage timer is across all three phases but again I’m ignored.

I don’t know if my argument was the catalyst, but another person drops out at this point. The one with the key. Well, that’s it I guess, and I head out. Just as I’m leaving the group, they find another person with the key but at this point, I can’t take it anymore. I make a note not to join any more groups that raid leader puts together and hopefully he’s put me on some sort of list as well since I’ve now ditched him twice. Why don’t I just ignore him? Because I’m okay trading or if I’m in a group he’s not leading, but I’ll be damned if I follow him into another raid instance.

But my anger is my guild’s benefit since that freed me up to do a Gnomeregan run with two of the lower alts. Which is actually pretty relaxing. For quite awhile, before BC, Gnomer was a place where I could solo the majority of it but I still had to be careful and I remember all that. Now, I purposely do what our guild calls “the train of death” and it just tickles me pink to see a pile of bodies at my feet after I deal with it. (I’ll explain what it is later, this is a darn long post as it is.)

Beyond that, the weekend was spent doing silly things like getting my Well Read, The Argent Dawn, and The Argent Champion achievements. I briefly get invited to a Naxx group but a personal matter cropped up and I had to drop out. Which I feel guilty about but I was in such a rush, I forgot to write down the raid leaders name to send an apology to. At least I ditched at the very beginning instead of in the middle of a fight or something. I also decided to work on a Gorilla pet, for the heck of it. Fluffy, my bear, does decent tanking but I wanted to see how things went with the thunderstomp attack on holding aggro. We’ll see how that goes. Hopefully, now that the world event is over, I can finally get into a decent raid or three…