Lo-Quality WoW

Well, this weekend was just a bunch of expenses for my hunter. Some of the expenses were good, those related to newly upgraded equipment. A lot more expenses were bad, primarily from multiple, multiple wipes.

So as usual, we start the weekend with our guild’s Naxxramas run. Except the PKT was only able to muster up three people, one of our priest, another hunter and myself. We again tried to run with Fever, who provided two tanks, a healer and some dps. However, we were still short and still had to PUG some people. And since our normal raid leader was able to be on, that left me trying to run a raid. And if you haven’t figured it out by now, I hate that.

First thing we gather and for some reason, at least one of the others was saying he couldn’t connect to our ventrillo server. Considering we had 5 people in vent, that meant that at least two people were non-PKT people and they apparently had no issue logging on. Nobody else complained, so I assumed they just didn’t have vent. Hopefully they had Deadly Boss Mods though.

We go in, clear trash and then get to Anub’Rekhan where a mage from Fever starts to describe the fight. This is where I made a mistake, I probably should have done the explaining especially since I realized he was mostly copy and pasting from wowwiki or similar site. But I let him and he described a strategy that seemed off especially since he told the main tank to tank the boss where he was. Pretty much all the groups I do it with move the boss to the side so that the off-tank can pick up the add easier. Then he briefly complains that both of our tanks didn’t know the fight. Well, considering they were both from his guild, I’m not sure what he was expecting. And to be honest, most of Fever has good gear, just little experience with the raid. But I couldn’t find any other tanks at the time, so it was either sit around trying to form the raid or go in with the two Fever members who said they could tank.

After the first fight, one of the PUGs drops out calling us doing this the “noobish” way, which was true. Like I said, that’s on me because I let the mage give the strategy rather than doing it myself. I then pointed out that we were doing this run mainly to help people learn the fights, but it would also mean a slow, painful learning process and that anyone who wasn’t fine with that should speak up. Nobody did, so we grabbed another tank, who said he knew how to tank that fight although his gear was slightly worse than either of the Fever tanks. In general, yeah, having someone experienced with the fight can offset lesser gear, but only to an extent. Either way, one of the Fever tanks switched to dps while the other acted as off-tank.

Again, I screwed up as a raid leader because I wasn’t paying as much general attention as I should have but we again wipe and I didn’t see what happened to cause it. The mage starts to berate the new tank, which bothers me because you really don’t start whaling into someone, especially not a key person like a tank or healer, after one wipe. But we go in again and again wipe and again the mage is giving the tank grief. I give out some pointers for people and the off tank says he’s starting to get a feel for the fight so I said we’ll do it once more as is and then we can switch off. Then the mage goes “well, I would switch the tanks around now but I’m not running this raid.” Yeah, good of him to notice.

So again wipe and the mage decides to leave complaining that he didn’t come here for this newbie stuff and didn’t want to keep wiping while people were learning the instance. Which sort of annoyed me since it was mainly his guildmates who were learning, And I later checked and he had only beat Anub’Rekhan once. Granted, he might have done it numerous times on another toon, maybe as a main tank himself, however given that he was given a non-standard strategy and described it using the wowwiki description verbatim, I sort of doubt it. And actually it seemed to make a couple of others happy as well. Oh well.

Anyway, we did try a few more times with the Fever member as the MT. And again, constant wiping. The tanks had worked out how they wanted to move the boss and the add around but I guess it wasn’t working for whatever reason and they were getting a little annoyed with each other. After a while, it was again obvious that we weren’t going to get anywhere again and I called it. So after all that, all I had was a big expensive repair bill and lost my temper somewhere.

So I grumbled a bit on guild chat. Then the other PKT hunter mentioned that he needed to get some new gear. For the most part, he did have decent gear although he definitely could have used upgrades to his rings and trinkets. Then I found out he had 67 Emblem of Heroism so I immediately suggested he get the Mirror of Truth for 40 emblems. It’s an excellent trinket and pretty much every hunter I’ve run heroics and raids with has it. So he picked it up and went to see what else to upgrade. As for me, I didn’t get much else done so I went to bed.

On Saturday, I had been busy all day doing personal stuff, so by the time I logged on, I was a bit tired. I did try the new Isle of Conquest battleground, picking up the Back Door Job and Isle of Conquest Victory achievements. But otherwise, I figured I would do my dailies and then go to sleep. And as I was about to turn them in, I get a whisper inviting me to the new Trial of the Crusader. So much for sleep.

Now the very first fight is actually three fights in one. You fact one boss, then two bosses, then a last boss, however you don’t have any rest in between them. Since it was the first time for all of us, we had to learn the strategy of all three fights since it would be one after another. The first of the bosses, does this mean impale attack that can be avoided if you disarm the boss. He also drops these areas of fire and throws Snobolds at the party. The Snobolds, after thrown, attach themselves to someone in the raid and you need to kill them, especially if they are on a healer because they can interrupt spellcasting.

So we tried it and wiped. Often. I think the main problem we had was the snobolds. They’re not one at a time so there can be two or three characters with a snobold attached to them. This made it hard to focus fire on one of them and more often than not, they would attach themselves either one of the people doing the disarm or the healers. We did get to the second stage fight except by the time we got there, half the raid was dead, including one of the tanks. We did several tries but afterwards decided we needed to study it a bit more to get our strategy down and we went to Ulduar.

Well, it was back to Ignis in Ulduar. Which again, we couldn’t get pass. We tried a slightly different strategy then we used to but still couldn’t get through it. Of course, since we had spent so much time in Trial of the Crusader, some of us were tired. However, I still benefited because among the loot on the mobs, a Golemheart Longbow dropped and as the only hunter it was mine, all mine. Except I had finally finished replacing all my arrows with bullets and now I was back to arrows. With my luck, I’ll finish replacing the arrows back and I’ll get some sort of awesome gun. Oh well, I can think of worst problems to have. Although getting a new scope and ammo is another serious dent in the pocketbook.

Sunday was again a focus on dailies. Then I got invited to an Obsidian Sanctum run, the 25 man version. This time we got 19 people before we decided to run through so several people got the Less Is More (25 player) achievements. I already had it previously when we ran it with 15 people, so I had no doubt we would do it.

Then we decided to try the 10-man OS with all 3 drakes up. Well, that was interesting to say the least. We were focusing on Sartharion exclusively. To do the dps we thought we needed, we had only one tank and one healer, the other 8 were all dps. At first they were saying we needed a sustained 4.5k dps per person so I didn’t think I would be suited for it but they dragged me along anyway. One of the other things we did was to have a rogue aggro then wipe aggro to have Sartharion briefly despawn. While he was despawned, we’d set up. That actually went well.

The problem we ran into was for the first few times, the healer was standing a little too close to the front and was getting killed. We moved him a bit then we ran into the problem when a fire wall came, we sometimes had to shift positions. And since our healer was a paladin, this meant he had to briefly stop spellcasting to move. We made adjustments and except for the funny time when Sartharion spawned, gave our mage a dirty look and the mage died in that first second, we usually got well into the fight before we wiped. I think we were getting Sartharion down to close to 25% but it gotten rather late for me, about 2a.m., that I just couldn’t continue and still be able to work in the morning. I don’t know if they got it after I left, I guess I’ll just find out tonight.