Lo-Quality WoW

My warrior got a bit of a workout this weekend. At some point last month, I had finally set her up to duel-spec as a Fury since she wasn’t getting called on too often to tank anymore. This has allowed me to more or less retire my hunter for heroic instances and have her go in instead.

So on Friday we went to the Halls of Lightning. Which I absolutely hate doing as a hunter, primarily for the Loken fight. And fortunately, I also wasn’t tanking on this one, I was completely dps. I’ve done dps with her before and just haven’t been happy with her dps output. Generally I was hitting just a tad over 1k dps, barely acceptable at this point.

I had to read up on fury warriors and how to play them. Also managed to tweak her build a bit, and this was going to be the first time trying it out. This run was a little different from our norm. One of the other guild hunters was with us as his death knight while our guild leader, who started out on a paladin, started using his death knight and was on this run back on his paladin. Our druid was tanking and our holy priest was on heals. Usually we have one ranged dps but heck, it works best for this run.

We started off with Bjamgrim which was pretty straightforward. Or at least enough that we picked up the Lightning Struck achievement while downing him. Of course, this was when it was realized that everyone hadn’t grabbed the double daily quests, which was the whole purpose of this run.

Volkham was also up next. In the past, I was used to being real careful about the golem adds and making sure we didn’t have them blow up next to us. So, naturally as a PKT, we just went in and kept hitting him. Again, it worked for us so we got the Shatter Resistant achievement.

Ionar gave us some trouble. Primarily the static overload was slaughtering us. Took us a couple of tries but we did eventually get him down as well. It’s so different being up close during the fights. So used to being far enough away that aoe’s centered on me just doesn’t affect others.

Ah well, then it was on to the fight I always dread, Loken. But with all our dps being melee class, we could just bunch up on the tank and not worry about it. Which of course didn’t stop us from wiping at least twice. Actually, in our attempt that did succeed, all three of us dps died and it was our druid tank who finished him off. Considering he was doing more dps than the rest of us, it wasn’t that surprising. But he went down and I managed to get both the Halls of Lightning and the Heroic: Halls of Lightning achievements. No drops but somewhere in the middle of it I also received the 50 Stone Keeper’s Shards achievement. Just wish I could think of what I wanted to spend it on.

Then Saturday came along and we tried to go to Heroic Utgarde Keep with my warrior tanking. We had our druid as healer and our other hunter on. We also managed to pickup another hunter and a death knight. And for some reason, I kept dying. I just was taking too much damage, too quickly for our healer to keep me up. It really didn’t help that the hunter we picked up kept running up to do melee combat. Even if he wanted to level up his weapon skills, that’s something you do when running with your guild or by yourself, you don’t do that in a PUG!

Anyway, I kept dying and it got to the point that I had to stop and fly out to repair because my gear at drop below 50%. And yet I still kept dying! So I finally called it just before the first boss, I didn’t want us to go get locked and then fail to complete it. I was rather depressed because I had thought I had kept my tanking gear and abilities up enough to keep up with the dungeons but this was obviously not the case. At this point, I believe it’s mainly a gear thing, which I’ll need to work on.

And for some reason, the pickup hunter kept bugging me afterwards. Not sure if he was just being irritating or what but he wanted me to run instances with him and his guildmate, even offering me gold. I was definitely not in the mood, especially after failing so miserably at my job. Just not sure what was up with that guy.

Which is ironic because we went into Heroic Utgarde Keep the next night as well. This time, our druid was tanking and I was in dps mode. We picked up two of the Solitaires’ death knights and we found a paladin to act as healer. And this turned into the oddest UK run I’ve ever done. Since everyone was in plate except for the druid, and with the druid in bear form it even out, we were one heavily armored group. Plus, somehow our healadin was almost always at close to full mana, which I still haven’t quite figured out how he pulled that off. I know he was doing an excellent job of keeping us all alive and well.

The upside of all that is that we ran through the place like we had a time to beat. I really wished I had been timing it. We would kill one group, I’d stop to loot and look up to see our tank already engaging the next group. I think the only time we really paused was to loot the bosses and the few times we saw the Paladin’s mana bar close to 50%, which wasn’t very often. I think the only time any of us died was myself at the very end when his little spinning blade thingy killed me. I’m so used to seeing it come flying at me and then moving out of the way that I didn’t even notice it was up after the boss itself died. Ah well, still got my Heroic: Utgarde Keep achievement.

So, over the weekend I found out that I really need to upgrade the gear on my warrior. And while I’m not thrilled by her dps, which was around 1.4k usually, I find it at least at an acceptable level. Again, I think it’s primarily a gear thing and I’ll just have to run more instances in the hopes of getting those numbers higher. That and learn when I have to run away again. I’m so used to being afar and pinging the heck out of something.