Lo-Quality WoW

As is usual in my life, things are just a bit chaotic which then reflects in other areas like this blog. Fortunately, there’s little to no readership so nobody misses anything. This whole blog is generally a conversation with myself but since I’m writing it down instead of speaking out loud, I appear less crazy.

Let’s start with the other night. I logged in and a guy whom I used to regularly run heroics with pinged me. The full graphics for Darnassus hadn’t even finished when I got his message. He asked me if I was up to facing the new Vault of Archavon boss and I told him I had already done it on 25-man. But they were doing the 10-man so I tagged along.

Plus, I owed him from an aborted VoA 10-man last week. Because of some confusion among players, I had gotten him locked to an already cleared instance. This was after he was nice enough to agree to tank for us. He’s a tank I trust to do his job and he’ll occasionally ask me to join his group for other things, so I assume he thinks I’m decent dps. But even though it wasn’t my fault and he didn’t blame me, I felt bad to get him locked to a cleared instance after asking him to come. I figured the least I could do was this to make it up to him.

In this case, we had a slightly unusual 10-man configuration. 2 tanks, 3 healers, and 5 dps. Which mainly meant the dps had to step things up. I expected Koralon to be the same as the 25-man fight, just not hitting as hard. Plus, the Deadly Boss Mods add-on had been updated to deal with his fight although it’s still a little buggy. (I kept getting warnings of his meteor fist attack while we were clearing trash.) This mainly meant that I could stay near the center of the room and then get a warning that I was standing in the ground flame attacks. It wasn’t perfect since the warning persisted for quite awhile and there was no way of knowing if you had been targeted or if the guy next to you was and you were just on the edge of the ground flame.

We go in and we wipe rather quickly. One of the tanks died almost immediately upon engagement and then left the other tank getting heavily hit by Koralon’s attacks. We go in a second try and similar to the first, the main problem is that the heals aren’t keeping the tanks up and next thing you know, he’s romping through the raid. At this point one of the healers blames himself and he leaves.

We replace him and try once again. This time, we succeed. Although I did notice that guys still had a habit of standing in the flames and getting damaged when they didn’t need to. Especially dps, you can stop your cast and move then re-engage. Healers have it tougher since it comes down to “do I get this big heal off to heal the tank but take damage and maybe die, or do I move out of the aoe but possibly lose the tank?” So while we did lose a few people, we had enough to plow through and get my Koralon the Flame Watcher achievement.

Emalon’s fight was only notable in that we wiped once when an add exploded. The complaint was “well we have 3 healers so our dps suffered.” Except this wasn’t the first add with overcharge, this was the 4th. Meaning we had sufficient dps the other 3 times but suddenly didn’t on the 4th? So what actually happened is that an overcharge happened on an add and somebody wasn’t paying attention and didn’t switch to target it or targeted the wrong add. It wasn’t a dps issue. But Emalon went down on the second try and Archavon shortly afterwards.

Not much else happened that particular night. Couldn’t get into any other PUGs so I spent my time doing various dailies. The recent string of upgrades to my gear has left me a little thin in the wallet and I have to make up the difference.

Last night was also relatively quite. Despite my attempts to get into a Heroic Trial of the Champion or a regular 10-man Trial of the Crusader, neither occurred. And no Uldar raids by the Agency teams. So I spent most of my time fishing for the ingredients for Fish Feasts. I used to have quite a stack of them but a lot got used up over the past week between the Ulduar 25 and the new Koralon fights.

I did go with a group into Drak-Tharon Keep, which was the daily heroic. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone in there, but fortunately I remembered the fights in general. At the Dred fight, the group asked if we could shoot for the achievement. Myself and the other PUGger asked what was needed. “Oh, we just have to engage Dred with the adds up.” Okay by me, it means more work for the tank and healer but they weren’t complaining. We go in, take down Dred, but no achievement. That’s when I read the achievement: Better Off Dred which says we needed to kill 6 Gutrippers or Scytheclaw while Dred was up and fighting. Oops, we had just focused fire on Dred. That’s what happens when you don’t actually read the achievements.

Otherwise, it was a smooth run. After I took my leave of them, I went back to my fishing. Maybe an hour into it, I get a whisper for Heroic Utgarde Keep. I hadn’t put myself into LFG for it but I guess the guy was desperate and I could use the emblems, so I agreed.

I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by my other runs, especially the Heroic UK speed runs my guild has been doing. We had two paladins and two death knights, with the first two being tank and heals and the DKs as dps. We get in and then we stand around, waiting. For what? I have no idea. And then we start to move forward, then the two paladins realize they haven’t buffed the rest of us. Now the two DK’s were doing equal or more dps than I was, and we were blazing through individual fights. It was just that between fights, it was like the tank would stop and either wait for the healer to get to full mana (which took awhile since he wasn’t drinking and rather unnecessary really since the fights aren’t that healer intensive) or just look around trying to decide what to do.

So although I was hitting record kill times on the bosses, the overall run took around 40 minutes. The PKT speed runs complete the instance in 20 to 25 minutes, and I just couldn’t figure out why there were so many delays. That and there were times where we’re waiting for the tank to do…something and the healer was sitting doing nothing when he could have been productive. I know one of the DK’s and I were sitting at half hp for awhile and the healer did nothing. I mean, top off your dps health now instead of waiting just before the boss…

Sigh, guess I’ve been irritable for awhile. At least I got my marks. Or enough so that sometime during the run I ended up with the 500 Dungeon & Raid Emblems achievement. I would have thought I had more than that but I guess it just seems like I’ve been doing some of these instances for a long time.

Tonight is the scheduled guild run for Naxx, but that depends on who shows up. Otherwise, I think this will be another weekend devoted to Alts. Or maybe sleep. Sleep is good too.