Lo-Quality WoW

I’ve been distracted by a couple of my xbox 360 games so I generally log in maybe an hour before the regular scheduled raid time. That usually gives me just enough time to make sure I’m stocked up and to run all my argent tournament dailies. Any spare time after that, I then roam around, usually farming cooking ingredients.

Now, the Agency has pretty much two 10-man Ulduar groups. But for some reason, my group’s run was cancelled for the night so I was asked to go with the second group. I’m under the assumption that the second leader had asked the other if he could poach me. Then again, I’m dps so I’m a lot easier to switch around rather than one of the healers or tanks. Too late now…

Anyway, we start in on Ulduar as usual. I hope in the gunner’s seat of a Demolisher. Similar to when I’m in the siege tank gunner slot, I have a ranged ground attack and an anti-air attack. I also have two other main abilities, one is doing a temporary speed boost to the demolisher, but that uses up pyrite which is more or less a fuel. The other allows me to grab pyrite that has been shot down to refill our tank.

So we go in and we start clearing the area. We don’t clear quite as much as I used to but people were saying we’re doing it on easy mode so I don’t worry. We go up against Flame Leviathan and it goes well, although it seems to be taking longer than normal. We lose on of the siege tanks when the gunner wasn’t able to get the shield up for some reason. Then when FL went after the other siege engine, there was nobody to interrupt the flame vents which meant we lost the choppers when they got too close. And either the other demolisher had grabbed the other pyrite lying around or they despawned but we used up what pyrite we had and I couldn’t find any others to grab to refill our tank. So with half the raid down and our vehicle without a speed boost, we got killed and the raid wiped.

A combination of things caused problems, between losing the siege engine early and some of the gunners had been under-geared, meaning they weren’t able to hit as hard as they were supposed to. So we came in and since the demolishers had gunners this time, I instead hopped into a siege engine as a gunner. This time, we were able to take out FL rather fast, I think he switched targets only once or twice. Much different from the first try.

Next was on to Razorscale. We go forward and the first time the dragon lands, we actually got it down to 70% health, so I was pretty sure we could ground it on the next try. Which was true, except during that time there were still adds up and for some reason our off-tank died. With the off-tank dead, the main tank couldn’t switch off and died as well and again wipe.

At this point I was a little worried, I know usually on the Agency runs they don’t wipe on FL and rarely on the 10-man Razorscale. (The 25 man one isn’t quite as clean.) But we go through again. This time, our timing was a bit better, the adds went down shortly after Razorscale was grounded and that allowed all the dps to focus on the dragon. So on the second try we get Razorscale and I got the A Quick Shave (10 Player) achievement, which was rather nice. The description of that achievement is a little confusing, it means that you only allow Razorscale into the air once after the first time you use the harpoons to bring her to the ground. Which means you need enough dps to bring her down to 50% of health sometime during the second time you ground her with the harpoons. Usually the grounding happens on the third try so getting it this time was very nice.

Next was the XT-002, which was worrying me. The last time I did the XT-002 fight, it was glitched so that extra adds would appear during phase 2 of the fight. And being ranged dps, I knew it was my job to help with the adds. For this run it was myself and a shadow priest doing the adds. Now phase 2 pops up every time the XT-002 drops 25% health. So at 75%, 50%, and 25%, adds come out and must be dealt with.

I know previously the boss would be tanked off to one side but now we had it directly in the center. We didn’t really talk about it but I ended up taking the left side and the shadow priest handled those on the right, and we would assist the other if we had free time. Which was surprisingly little since I would clear my side, run back to help the priest and returned back to my position only to see the next set of adds come up. I know I barely had any time to dps the boss and I’m not sure the shadow priest did either but XT-002 went down so fast that we were wondering if it had gotten nerfed.

Either way, we ended up picking up the Must Deconstruct Faster (10 player) and the Nerf Engineering (10 player) achievements. I’m actually surprised I didn’t get that second one previously but I guess one always seemed to slip through on other attempts.

Next we headed for Kologarn. Except when we got there, we noticed that we were missing a healer. Apparently he had gone afk back at the teleporter. We killed time for a while but he never came back. Since it was getting close to the time some people had to log off, it was decided to call it for the night. Which was rather disappointing to me since we were going at a rather good pace despite the two wipes. We’ll see how tonight’s continuation goes.