Lo-Quality WoW

Right before the weekly downtime is always a slightly odd period. People are rushing to finish up raid instance runs or other weekly things before the reset. So I figured I’d get a chance to maybe slip into a Naxx 10 or 25. And I did, I got invited to a Naxx 10 that was planning on going through the Military quarter, although they weren’t sure if they were going beyond that. Since the Military quarter was the one I never did in the Naxx 10 version, I thought it would be a nice way to end the week.

So I get warlock summoned directly to Instructor Razuvious, which told me I was replacing a dps that had disappeared for whatever reason. We get setup, and then realized that a paladin was d/c. Since that paladin was also a healer, they waited a bit then replaced him. Again, setting up to go and then we saw the warlock d/c. Which started to worry me. Granted, the raid instance lock would expire in 6 hours but I still would have been pretty pissed to have gotten locked only to not do anything.

But eventually we got sorted out at a full 10 man group and went for it. When I did it as a 25-man encounter, we used priest for the mind control but this time we used the actual orbs. Pretty simple for me, I just shot things. Otherwise, a straightforward encounter and we moved on to Gothik.

Again, last time I was actually on the “live side” of the fight but the pushed me into the “undead side” this time. I was a little worried that while they did do the 4-6 split, with an extra dps on the “undead side” but they also put all their highest dps people on that side as well. And for the most part, the add phase was easy. With so much firepower on our side, we would constantly kill stuff before the tank even had a chance to grab the aggro. Actually I started worrying about the “live side” team since the amount of adds I saw in the DBM announcements were not adding up to the adds we were seeing on our side. I needn’t have worried because Gothik came in and we took him down easily.

Next up was the Four Horsemen encounter. Which is quite different in the 10-man version than the 25-man. We actually wiped the first couple of tries and had to reorganize who was tanking what to finally get a good configuration together. Even then I almost forgot to move when I started getting the marks from one of the bosses stacked on me too high. But we put in a good showing and I got my The Militar Quarter achievement. However, this was also where something external intruded.

I got a whisper during the last try from one of the guys from the Ulduar raid I was one earlier this week. He wanted to know how much longer I was going to be in Naxx and if I knew where my guild druid was. I got a hold of the druid’s alt to let him know they were looking for him and concentrated on my fight. Once it ended, I asked them if they were continuing on or not. I found out they had actually skipped one boss in the Plague quarter but they were planning on taking him out as well as the last two bosses in the instance.

Which stuck me with a slight dilemma. While I had only committed to only the Military quarter, I had never fought Sapphiron or Kel’Thuzad in the 10-man version. Also, I was one of their top two dps and the chances of them pulling another person, even another dps, this close to the server reset was miniscule. However, I really wanted to go to Ulduar and see the Freya fight at least. Plus, I’m still working on getting more gear.

It was a hard decision, I knew a couple of the guys on the Naxx raid had either not done Naxx at all or were doing them on alts. If I left, would they find another dps and finish up or would they just call it since it was 6a.m. for some of them? But I really had no obligation to them to continue, right? However, I had now two groups waiting for me to decide what I was doing. It was hard but I felt I had committed to this group and plus I knew the Ulduar team was in a better position to replace my dps. So I let both raid leaders know my decision.

Fortunately, the Ulduar guy was cool with it, which I really appreciated. He even told me they would hold a slot for me on their regular run later this week, which was even cooler of him, considering I’m not even in their guild. The Naxx guys were happy because they could quickly continue on and get things done.

So we went up against Loatheb. Now, the fight has these spores that you can kill which gives some of the people near them a buff. Normally you use this buff to help increase the damage and kill Loatheb before his enrage timer hits. In the past, what usually happens is that everyone groups up and either some one (like myself) will ping a spore softly so that it draws near the group or have a death knight do their little grab trick and pull it in to the middle of the raid where we kill it. Considering we had two DK’s and two hunters, it should have been easy. Except instead of pulling the spores to the group, they expected people to run to where the spores were, kill them and then run back to the group to continue. Even then people were killing the spore with either one person or nobody near it to get the buff! I know I ran out at least twice and couldn’t get to the spore before someone else killed it, although my third try I did manage to get close enough for the buff. Not sure what “doom” we hit but I think we ended up cutting it close before Loatheb actually died.

Next was Sapphiron, which was a slightly annoying fight. And lack of communication started to hit us. On our first try, we somehow got spread out all over the room which causes two problems. The first is that it makes it hard for the healer to cover someone because they may be out of range. Two, is that Sapphiron will freeze a couple of people in ice blocks and the rest of the raid has to hide behind these blocks when Sapphiron does his frost breath attack, and with the raid spread out it was hard to get behind the blocks in time.

Then we got in to an argument on positioning. Two people were telling the tank two different things. One was telling him to turn the dragon 90 degrees, the other 180 and they kept arguing that the other was wrong and didn’t know what they were talking about. They were sort of both right, what they wanted was Sapphiron facing a certain direction and the rest of us all on one side so that we didn’t get hit by either the breath attack or the tail swipe. I personally sided with the first guy since he wanted the tank to come in from the left, while we would just run forward, setup and attack. The other guy wanted the tank to run through Sapphiron and the rest of us run to the right to setup, which didn’t make any sense. You more or less want your dps on top of the boss as soon as possible and running forward would cause less confusion than everyone running to the right and then going for it. Eventually the first guy won and we went in. And wiped of course.

But it was noticeably better than the first try. I’m not sure what happened but I do know that at some point I realized I was the last guy alive and had Sapphiron chasing me around the room. I think what happened was that we lost one or both healers during a frost breath and things went downhill from there. I started to wonder if I had made the wrong decision in my raid choice, especially since they began to argue again. But we went in and pulled it off, Sapphiron died and I got my Sapphiron’s Demise achievement.

Kel’Thuzad was up next. They set me and the other hunter on the skeletons for the first phase. The warlock and I think a shaman were on banshees and the rest on the abominations. Phase 1 went well, and we were into Phase 2 where things went wrong again. This time it was some of the melee stacking too close together, causing the tank to get banged up faster than the healers could cope and we wiped. Second try we made it to Phase 3 but I believe that time the offtank died and the adds ran through us.

On the third try, we got to Phase 2 and the tank died, and we wiped. This one, the healer was complaining that we screwed up in Phase 1 because he ended up going into Phase 2 with less mana then we should have. They blamed it on a multi-shot pulling a room of adds. Which pissed me off since as far as I could tell, the other hunter wasn’t using multi-shot and they were blaming me. Now, the way I do Phase 1 is to stand in the middle of the circle and spin around, shooting targets. From there, I simply cannot fire far enough to go into another room. And I know that one of the DK’s ghouls was on aggressive and he was also running around instead of staying in the circle, so I suspect it was actually his fault but they blamed me. And once again, I was wondering if I had made the wrong choice.

But on our fourth try, we did it. Surprising when we actually had some people drop, including the main tank! But he died just before we took Kel’Thuzad down, so it worked out. I gathered the Kel’Thuzad’s Defeat and The Fall of Naxxramas achievements. Then I looked at what he dropped and started drooling.

Among the loot was a nice, shiny Nerubian Conquerer. I immediately rolled and nobody else wanted it, so it became mine, all mine! Er, sorry, still excited. But upgrading my ranged weapon has been a goal of mine for a while. The main problem is that I need to get a new scope and I have to replace my supply of Saronite Razorheads with Mammoth Cutters.

So in the end, I guess I did make the right decision. I got a nice piece of loot and several achievements. And from a less materialistic standpoint, I also believe I did the right choice from a general grouping prospective. The Naxx run guys knew I had an opportunity at an Ulduar, yet stayed with them, didn’t sulk, and still did my job. The Ulduar run guys respected my decision to honor my commitment to the other group and didn’t “penalize” me for it. Now if only I can find an awesome replacement for my hand weapon…