Lo-Quality WoW

Didn’t really plan on doing much last night. I put Keyalnon into Looking For Group for a couple of raids just in case. But otherwise, I felt a bit aimless. So I figured I’d spend some time puttering around Shadow Labyrinth for some Lower City rep.

 But first that meant stopping by a stable to pull my bear “Fluffy” out of storage. Only to realize that since his points reset during one of the patches, I needed to redo his talent tree. I just hadn’t studied up on the tenacity pet tree so I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I ended up tossing the points around pretty aimlessly and then was off to Outlands.

Got off to a slightly rocky start because it takes only a shot or two to crit and aggro is pulled off Fluffy with no problem. Especially if I used any of my special shots. And as I said before, the way I play my hunter, my pet is almost a side-thought more than anything else. I had to get used to dropping a quick Mend Pet before I had a bunch of angry mobs on me. So there I was trying to juggle my pet, threat, and trying to remember where I was going, I suddenly got an invite to Ulduar.

I actually almost missed the invite in the chaos I was going through. But as soon as I figured out what it was, I was rushing out of Shadow Labs pretty quickly and heading for Northrend. A quick stop to pull my cat “Mudgie” out and I was all set.

Fortunately, we started off with one of the few fights I did know, the Assembly of Iron or “the Iron Council” as the group called it. (I’ve heard it called both.) Granted I did get lost since I couldn’t remember which teleport to go to. And I can’t remember if we wiped or not, I don’t think we did. I know the fight was pretty straightforward. The three big guys went down and then we were off to face Hodir.

Hodir is the other Ulduar fight I actually knew. We couldn’t quite kill him last time though. This time, I knew we wiped a couple of times because I again kept getting lost as I tried to teleport back to the right spot. (I used to get lost in Karazhan pretty regularly as well.) Running around like a maniac during that fight is rather tiring. And more than once I almost got struck by a Flash Freeze because the safety circles appeared across the room from me. I know at least once I had to jump on one right next to Hodir, which isn’t exactly a place a sensible hunter should ever be.

But we kept at it and suddenly I see the achievement Cheese the Freeze pop up. I think I saw it pop up for everyone which told me that this group had been on the ball. It’s actually a pretty nice feeling, since it usually meant an increased chance of success for a run.

However, since I’ve only done two boss fights in Ulduar, it meant that whatever boss we took on next was one I’ve never done before. Our next target was Thorim. I frantically tried to read up on the fight as we went in. I got the fact that we needed to split up the raid for part of this fight. There was a brief moment where I was assigned to be in the “tunnel group” but then was told to stay out. Not that I was worried, I figured if I was in the tunnel group, I would just follow one of the others.

For Thorim, there’s a bunch of mobs initially that you fight before the raid splits. Once the raid splits, the tunnel group runs a gauntlet of sorts while the remainder outside gets hit with wave after wave of mobs. The problem I had in this fight was that you need to stay pretty much in the center of the room to avoid the charged orbs around the sides of the room. Which meant you were right on top of the mobs and that’s definitely no place for a hunter.

We do wipe and fortunately somebody noticed what happened and switched my hunter with the rogue who had been with the tunnel group. Of course this meant I was doing something completely different from just a few minutes before. And I know part way through the tunnel, we just suddenly died. Which happens more times than I like to admit.

I only found out later that if the group outside wipes, the group inside gets taken out and vice-versa. The second time with the tunnel group, it was our group who messed up because Key and the other dps went down early and the tank couldn’t kill things fast enough by himself. Another time I screwed up and pulled an add. I did a quick feign death to try and drop him off me but he resisted. To make it worse, I was tagged with a Rune Detonation as soon as I did my FD. Normally that would just immobilize you but since I was on the ground “dead”, I was stuck there while the add beat the crap out of me.
I also finally got to see the big lightning orb which appears if the group outside wipes. We had just opened the door to go after Thorim himself when I saw this big energy ball shoot at us. And when I looked, I saw I had taken 65,000+ points overkill damage! Ouch!

It was getting late so we decided on one last try. And naturally, we finally had everything down pat. Our little tunnel group made it all the way to Thorim and the fight was on. Not bad really, I had been worried since I had read that there was a cone attack he does and that you determine where it’s centered by where a stream of energy was going from an orb to Thorim. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to see it correctly but it was rather obvious when we started. The main problem I had was that whenever it reset, it almost always reset to an orb just behind me and I had to scramble for my life to get behind Thorim! Either way, the big guy went down and up pops the I’ll Take You All On.

The Hunter/Warrior/Shaman shoulder token dropped but I was out rolled by the warrior in the group. We did laugh a bit since his roll was 27 and he had moaned that he wasn’t gonna get it, right until I rolled my whopping 6! So, while I didn’t get any cool loot on this run, I was actually pretty happy to learn a new fight and pick up a few more achievements. that group said they may continue tonight but they also have a Naxx 25 scheduled. The PKT also have a Naxx 10 scheduled, so we’ll see what happens.