Lo-Quality WoW

Last night I actually was put on to the raid team.  Since nobody had remembered to extend the raid-ID from last week, they started with a “clean” instance.  They had managed to clear the Lower Spire and Festergut, which is the point we started.

So the first boss we faced was Rotface.  This went relatively smooth.  Dps was doing well, although we did have two instances where I could see that the person with Mutated Infection was not prompt in getting out of the middle of the melee group.  Fortunately nobody died.  As for myself, I never got infected, so my fight was straightforward.

Rotface goes down with little fuss and we move on to Professor Putricide.  This is where things started to go wrong.  And I should have realized that the group in general was out of sync.  How should I have know?  Fish.

Now among my many other duties, I also tend to bring and place Fish Feasts down for everyone.  And for a lot of runs, I’m the only one with the required Cooking level to do it, and thus I’m usually responsible for putting it out for the group.  This time we were running with two others who had the Feasts on them and the proper skill level.  And all night, 2 out of the 3 of us would put down Fish Feasts, almost simultaniously. 

But that sounds like you’re in sync, you say.  It isn’t because it’s a waste of a feast each and every time.  Usually one of us puts it down, and the others know not to even try.  Except here we were, wasting a whole lotta fish…

We begin the Putricide fight.  The first time we end handle pushing him into phase 2 perfectly, we had just killed the first ooze and before Putricide could cast another one.  Then it we were overwhelmed when the off-tank in the Abominiation wasn’t able to correctly clear the ooze on the ground and well before phase 3, a good majority of the place was filled with ooze. 

Then we had a couple of wipes because people weren’t positioning themselves for the oozes correctly.  People were either too far away from the group, making it hard to take out an ooze locked on them.  Or they were too close, being knocked back from an explosion, running back in just in time for the ooze to lock in on them and cause another explosion.  So people would drop left and right and we just couldn’t recover from that.

We also started having major problems with the oozes and the phase transition.  I’m not positive, but it seemed to me that the problem was that people weren’t listening to the callouts to stop dps and/or was not focusing on the ooze when they came out.  It was pretty obvious when we’d end up suddenly with an ooze and a gas cloud out and people running all over the room.

Now the part that gets me is that I’m pretty sure most of us have done that fight before but people were making rookie mistakes.  I know one time, someone bubbled the person being chased by the gas cloud, causing the Expunged Gas attack to trigger, which in itself isn’t too bad.  However, if the gas cloud then immediately aggros on a melee right next to it, there’s another Expunged Gas attack and so on.  At least one wipe was by this method. 

We finally gave up on it since we couldn’t get our coordination down.  So we moved on to the Blood Council.  As I mentioned before, as a hunter part of my duty is to have my pet on the Bombs.  We had two hunters, so we should have no problem with two bombs.  And we didn’t.  Until the other hunter died and suddenly I had to juggle the two Bombs. 

And unfortunately, depending on which target needs to be attack and where that target is being tanked, sometimes I’m too far away, handling the bombs, to effectively dps.  Plus, at some point, I’m not sure how, we ended up with three bombs in the air all at once, meaning my attention was divided even further. 

But that in itself did not cause any wipes, and the only time we had a death due to a bomb, I was already well and dead.  Not sure how we kept wiping but I know in one case, the off-tank died which caused havok as one of the bosses starting running around.  Another time, aggro was pulled off the main tank.  Somewhat basic rookie mistakes again and we just couldn’t figure out why.

Thus we gave up on the night, only downing one extra boss, which is sad.  For the most part, all the fights up to Sindragosa, we pretty much have them down except for an occassional wipe or two.  This time, it seemed like we were all thumbs, getting our heads handed to us repeatedly. 

We did call it a night for the standard ICC raid but before I logged off, they decided for a quick Vault of Archavon run.  At least this time, we hit absolutely no snags.  Someone did ask if we could try for the achievement where you pretty much have to tank the originally three together and kill them all within a certain time frame but we were too tired and frustrated at this point.

I assume we’re continuing our ICC raid tonight.  Hopefully things will go much better.  At this point, this instance shouldn’t be a “learning experience” for most of the raid but a “learned” one.  Wish me luck!