Lo-Quality WoW

It’s probably ironic that when I decide to start writing a WoW blog, I actually start playing WoW less. But that’s more a factor of the new television I bought. And since my xbox 360 is the only thing that can use 1080p, it’s what I’ve been messing with. Then again, this weekend would have been limited WoW time regardless with a dinner with friends and having to rush over to my parent’s house to fix their computer. Now I know I was going to write up a bit about my hunter first but some interesting things happened on the weekend that I wanted to write about so my hunter’s introduction will be later. Fortunately I did get some WoW time in and it was primarily on my Hunter. Managed to run a Heroic Violet Hold and finally finish the Lockdown! achievement by killing Erekem. For those who aren’t familiar with VH, the first two bosses you face are randomly chosen from a group of six and for “Lockdown!”, you need to kill each one once. I’ve been to Heroic VH 6 times, and the majority of the time I’ve face Lavanthor and Zuramat. But when Erekem popped up, I remember thinking: “hmm, don’t quite remember this fight” and then when he died and the “Lockdown!” popped, I went “oh, that’s why.” But it was nice getting that achievement.

A Heroic Nexus was also in the offering. I’ve run Heroic Nexus with various groups and it seems like each one does it slightly different. My personal preference is to kill the bosses in the order of Kolurg, Telestra, Anomalus and Ormorok last. That’s mainly because I absolutely despise the little Crystalline Frayers. Non-elites but they can be a pest when you’re trying to eat or drink something. To be honest, I find most of the VH fights to be of the “man that’s annoying” type. Whether it’s Telestra and what I refer to as her “yo-yo” attack, Ormorok and his little flower buddies or Keristrasza where I find myself becoming a hopping maniac, the fights are different then stuff I faced before but different in an annoying way.

Now for the lunatic PUG run of the weekend, my Oculus run. It was a druid tank, druid healer, Marksman hunter from one guild and they picked myself and I think a Death Knight up in the bargain. So, we travel to Coldarra, run inside and three of the others immediately run to the Nexus instance instead of Oculus. That always scares me. Granted, I know I tend to get the entrance to the Zangarmarsh instances confused, but I usually double check or say I can’t remember rather than just running randomly into an instance portal. But fine, I can live with that, I try not to worry and just go.

So we start making our way through the beginning of the instance. I quickly notice one thing, the MM hunter is not using his pet. That always bothers me when I see that. I know it’s not critical for the pet to go in for a MM or a Survival hunter like I am as it is for a Beast Master but every bit of dps helps. And generally, as long as growl is off, most tanks should be able to hold aggro without your pet pulling it off. Again, fine, I’ll live with it since I don’t like telling other hunters how to play their character but it still bothers me.

As we get to the first boss, I quickly realize that most of the group hasn’t been to Oculus before. This actually doesn’t bother me because there’s a first time for everyone. What does bother me is that to discuss the fights, one of them starts quoting strategy from wowwiki verbatim! This bothers me because it’s often quite a lot to read and unless the fight is complex, usually not necessary to go over as such, you can summarize the fight most of the time. For instance the first boss, Drakos, the key things to know is to avoid the floating bombs if you can, if you get the bomb debuff you need to move away from the group so you don’t aoe the group when you explode and that he does a stomp that launches melee into the air and a pull which teleports people to him.

Now this doesn’t become a factor until the third boss, Urom. The recitation of the fight starts and I interject that we don’t need to know about it right now, we need to chase him first. That when we first engage, he summons mobs and teleports to the next platform and that the real fight isn’t until he teleports to the center ring. The problem is, with the recital going on, nobody else sees what I say and consequently we wipe when the tank rushes forward, doesn’t expect the mobs to pop and the mobs then proceed to eat our healer. When the tank asked “what happened?”, I explain again and then I’m told “well if you know what’s going on, you need to pipe up!” I pointed out that I did but left it at that.

Now on to the second time and we wipe again, mainly because the tank couldn’t quite grab the aggro of the mobs before one or two killed our healer. Now remember how I mentioned that I don’t like telling other hunters how to play? Well, the MM had no such compulsion and immediately berated me for not using a misdirect. I pointed out that I was using MD but that he was keying his off first so I had to wait until his wore often before I could shoot. For the most part, I was actually doing more damage than him and with him doing an MD first, it had essentially two effects. One, since my damage was higher, an MD from me would have a better chance to redirect aggro off the healer and to the tank from the start but since his MD was going, I couldn’t do anything and his damage aggro didn’t offset the healer’s healing aggro. Two, I held off my dps until I could do an MD, meaning for those critical first seconds, I was effectively a 0 dps. This is because I want to guarantee that my MD is based on my most powerful attacks instead of being interlaced with an auto-shot or sting or something silly like that. It didn’t help that the MM’s first three shots took forever to get off. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to know exactly what his shots were but it was usually several seconds into the fight before his MD cleared and mine would kick off.

His natural retort is “well then activate yours first.” Which would be fine if he didn’t hit his MD while the tank was marking and was constantly renewing it as soon as it wore off. Now, when I PUG with another hunter and I know the other hunter is doing more damage and is using misdirect, I let them have precedence. He never learned that courtesy but again, it’s part of the insanity of PUGs. So he says he’ll hold off until my goes off and then a few seconds later, proceeds to activate his MD again before we even finish healing from the wipe! To tell me to go first then immediately early-cast your MD, that’s just rude.

Anyway, the third platform actually goes well and we get to the inner ring fight. Again, not bad except for the DK running in the wrong direction for part of the fight. But then afterwards, the MM looks at me and goes “Hey, you need to turn your growl off.” I look at my bar and verified that I had growl off, and since my pet was also a cat, that cower was turned on and told him so. He then says “oh nvm”. WTF? Now I tend to pay attention to what the boss is targeting and it’s usually very obvious if I forgot to set up my pet correctly because the boss will turn to my Mudgie and whap him a few times before the tank grabs aggro back and I know it didn’t happen at all during that fight. Plus, this was the third boss, it would have been noticeable during the trash mobs if it was on. My only conclusion is that he heard the noise from my kill command and misinterpreted it as a growl.

Sigh. It is then on to Eregos, which is both complex and not. For one, you’re fighting from dragonback and that means you’re using your mounts buttons, not your regular ones. And for another, there’s the fact that you are now in a three dimensional battle. Which wouldn’t matter except at one point where you flee a bit and it’s very easy to fly off in three different directions, which we did, and as such are out of support of each other. But we kept trying, including a couple of laughable attempts of me on a green (healing) dragon. If you read my other posts, my top classes are a tank and three dps. Healing isn’t something I do at the moment. But we persevered and I got the nice achievement for completing Heroic Oculus.

Now I seem to be bashing that other hunter quite a bit and maybe he’s great normally but having an off night. But I hold myself to certain standards and from that night, he wasn’t meeting them. I don’t expect perfection but you have to at least be decent at the character your are on. Otherwise, stick with groups of friends instead of strangers and don’t tell me what to do, especially if I’m already doing it. That’s just a good way to make me pissed at you.

Oddly enough, he doesn’t take the cake for the weekend. It was actually in a Wintergrasp battle. We lost, but I’m okay with that. It’s having to put up with the one idiot in the bunch that drives me nuts. Two minutes into the battle, he’s complaining that nobody is getting into vehicles. Well, considering you have to be a certain “rank” before you can even get a vehicle, and to get ranks requires at least some PVP action, wondering why there isn’t 16 vehicles running about in the first two minutes is just silly. Five minutes in, he’s already yelling “FAIL!” on the Raid channel. Eight minutes in, people are yelling at him to buzz off or go afk but he keeps whining. At about ten minutes, either someone kicked him out of the raid or he dropped himself because we then got twenty minutes of him demanding to be invited back into the raid and everyone refusing to send him an invite. There are some people are just begging for an “ignore” label and he was one of them.

Not much else this weekend other than getting exalted with the Ebon Blade and then realizing there wasn’t a single thing I wanted from the Ebon Blade at exalted. Oh and as you can guess from the title, I picked up my Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth. So even more so, I expect to be the guild taxi for a while. Some might think the mount is not worth it but I’m the type who picks up even vendor trash and being able to clear my bags without having to fly to a town is wonderful. Not to mention getting repairs or being able to replenish my ammo on the spot is nice. I have a 28 slot quiver but after a long day of gaming, I can get pretty near the bottom of the quiver.

Egad this is long. Not that anyone is reading this anyways but I guess I need practice in being a bit more concise…