Lo-Quality WoW

Well, there was no blog yesterday, not because I was lazy or busy. It’s because Microsoft decided to have me frothing at the mouth for a couple of hours. There was a Windows Update that hosed a bunch of computers, including my brand new laptop. It took me 3 hours of troubleshooting and recovery before I was back up and by then I was too tired and pissed off to really play. But I tried to make up for it last night.

Early during the day, I actually played a little during lunch, trying to get the dailies out of the way. I didn’t finish and had planned on finishing that night. I started when my guildmates decided they wanted to do a Trial of the Champion on normal. So I went to my warrior for that run, but as we were finishing it, the Agency was getting ready to head back into Ulduar.

So back on my hunter and I flew over to Ulduar. We get in and there some brief confusion on where we were going to start. Some wanted to hit Thorim, others wanted to hit Freya. Personally, I and my guildmate wanted at least Freya which neither of us had done. For whatever reason, they always took on Freya when we weren’t around. But this time we lucked out and headed for Freya.

The fight against Freya wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The mob clears were okay and we took out the Elders before engaging her. One cast something called Iron Roots which I didn’t realize we were supposed to shoot people out of, although we didn’t lose anyone to it either. And then we got a briefing on the fight and we were on Freya.

The various waves of mobs didn’t give us too much trouble. For the Detonating Lasher one, we grouped up on the tank to take them out. This forced me into melee combat but since we didn’t want to be taking down too many of them at the same time, it probably helped. The group had mentioned that there’s a healing tree thing that Freya throws out that needed to be taken out. What they didn’t say was that it was called “Eonar’s Gift” which made the targeting macro I tossed together useless. Either way, we cleared her and then it was off to Thorim.

This was a fight I had done before and like last time, I was assigned to the tunnel group. However, we had several people who had not done the encounter at all or had done either the arena or tunnel parts but was being assigned to it, in this case the tank for the tunnel group hadn’t done it before. This caused some slight confusion when during our first try, both tanks ran into the tunnel with us. Those still out in the arena tried to compensate but couldn’t and we wiped. On the second try, everything went exactly as planned. In fact it seemed those of us in the tunnel group ran through it faster than the last time I did it. Either way, the main thing was that Thorim got defeated.

Then it was on to Mimiron, the keeper fight I hadn’t done. So one of the raid leaders was explaining it on vent when I saw on the chat channel “So Keya you’re ranged tank.” Wait! What? The vent explanation I was giving didn’t say that but I took it on faith that there would be a part where I’d be taking the damage focus of the boss. The last time I had this happen was in Gruul where I was designated as the ranged tank the first time I did the fight. Oh well, I trusted the healers in our group to keep us up.

The first try was a wipe in the first phase when the melee wasn’t able to get out of the shock blast attack in time and died. Second try went better, getting all the way to the fourth phase. The third phase was where I was acting as the ranged tank except I did screw up during one point. A mob hadn’t been picked up by the others and started hitting me and I did my normal reaction, feign death. So the air command unit locked on to our Shaman. Fortunately the healers noticed and kept him up. Not sure how we died in that fourth phase though.

And that’s sort of how the rest of the night went. Usually we’d make our way to the fourth phase, however we usually would lose one or two people in an earlier phase. They got battle resurrections but it didn’t always help. I know during one try, we had just gotten past the third phase when a mob came up behind me and killed me. They believe it was a bomb bot since I and one of the druid healers died at the same time. I know I was already still a little dinged from ranged tanking and whatever hit me finished the rest.

Unfortunately it got late for us Hawaii folk so we didn’t get him down, but I believe I have the general hang of the fight. I know they plan on going back in a couple of nights. Tonight they were going to try to form up an Ulduar-25 run, which I hope I get invited to. I’ve done the 25-man version of some of the fights but I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more.

I also finally earned enough to pick up the tier token through emblems. However, I could also get the ilvl 226 belt as well. I still need to figure out which one I’ll pick up. And also, maybe I’ll actually get around to finishing those dailies…