Wrapping Up Wrath

After we burned through the entirety of Burning Crusade's level range in about two days, I should have known that Wrath wouldn't take very long either. I couldn't quite believe it though, because somehow I still remembered seventy to eighty as this massive slog, and I figured that Wrath of the Lich King wouldn't have quite as many dungeons to keep us busy either.

In truth, it only took us another two days or so to get through that stretch of content as well, and the only thing that felt slow was moving across Northrend. It's still huge, and neither of us were able to afford fast flying yet, which meant that transportation was a bit of a drag. Still, when we weren't trying to get from Howling Fjord to Boring Borean Tundra and back, we were making swift progress. Quest-wise we only did Howling Fjord and about two thirds of Sholazar Basin; the rest of our XP came from gathering experience and two-manning dungeons - and while there were fewer of them, there were still enough for us not to need to repeat anything.

Initially I was a bit disappointed that we still didn't seem to have any trouble two-manning things. Wrath instances were never particularly hard, but I recalled the normal ones being at least a little bit of a challenge initially, especially when you were coming into them with sub-par gear. But no, even with mid-level Outlands gear, the two of us cleared everything up to Drak'tharon Keep with no problems.

Old Kingdom was the biggest disappointment to me personally, though not because of the difficulty. First off, they redesigned the quests to guide you straight past the optional boss, à la Gnomeregan. Not just that though, they also removed the little bonus quest you used to be able to get in the cave with the mushrooms. Mustn't reward people for straying off the main path, oh no! It was a funny quest too: if I recall correctly, you gathered all these "interesting" looking samples from the elementals and then the Nerubian you handed them to gave you a bit of an odd look because they were essentially elemental poop and worthless. The worst thing was the final boss though, as they changed the insanity mobs into generic red blobs that didn't seem to have any abilities whatsoever! Was that mechanic really that confusing as it was? Killing lookalikes of your party members was what made that fight fun! Le sigh.

When we hit seventy-five halfway through Drak'tharon Keep, I put a Glyph of the Treant into my third minor glyph slot and spent the rest of the instance bouncing around like a loony. It was so nice to be an ugly little tree again! I still remember the "save the trees" parade I observed at the end of Wrath. And I have to admit that making it a minor glyph is actually a great solution, as you can keep the look if you want it, or drop out whenever you feel like it, without incurring any practical penalties either way.

Gundrak was the first dungeon where we ran into a genuine challenge, as we couldn't kill the first boss and his adds fast enough before they cocooned both of us and we got hopelessly overwhelmed. Eventually we succeeded by having me switch to my feral spec and going for a quick burn before he even had a chance to summon any adds.

In Halls of Stone we had a funny moment when I DCed and died during the Brann fight, and thanks to talents and self-healing, pet tank managed to stay alive long enough for me to not only come back online but also run all the way back into the room where he was fighting. During the NPC conversation afterwards I also had the embarrassing realisation that I've been spelling vrykul wrong for a whole five years - for some reason I always thought that the r and y were the other way round ("vyrkul").

The Oculus was the next instance that turned out to be a major challenge, as our gear was crappy and the drakes only had the absolute minimum amount of health. After a couple of failed attempts on Eregos we eventually managed to get him down by having pet tank circle-kite him on a red drake, spamming his main ability to do damage and get rid of the whelps, and occasionally using his dodge (especially whenever the boss enraged). Meanwhile I sat on top of the boss on a green drake and alternated between focusing on dpsing him and casting heals on the red drake as needed. With the kiting the damage on the drakes was manageable, though it was a very long and slow fight with no bronze drakes to do proper dps.

Trial of the Champion was also pretty tough, and not just because the jousting was quite a drag with only two people. Argent Confessor Paletress did absolutely nasty damage, especially to me, since she does a lot of non-aggro-based attacks and I was the only target that wasn't the tank. I'm not sure I would have been able to survive being feared around and smited as much had I been playing any other healing class, without the druid's heals over time ticking away whenever I was incapacitated.

The ICC five-mans were interesting as well. Again, the bosses in there had a lot more mechanics than previous ones, and I basically had to deal with everything at once since there was nobody else to do so. I always had to kill my soul fragment on my own on Bronjahm; I always had mirrored soul on the Devourer of Souls. On the last boss of Pit of Saron, I was almost constantly incapacitated or transferring damage and healing to the boss, which made for a very long and touch-and-go encounter. Halls of Reflection actually defeated us initially, as we didn't quite have the dps to make the fourth wall, but we came back once we had upgraded our gear a little and made it without problems after that.

We were level eighty-one by the time we moved on into Cata content.

Return of the search terms

More strange search terms that led people to this blog:

cap the amount of death knights allowed in one pvp match - You know, I could totally get on board with that, especially for the 50-59 bracket. I shudder to think back to my shaman's Warsong Gulch experiences in that level range...

celestial steed floppy legs - I believe the word that I used to describe the sparkle pony's legs was "spindly", but yeah, I agree that something about its legs looks off.

drakes oculus cannot dismount - Well, there is this button with a big red arrow on the right side of the vehicle interface; pressing that should dismount you. That said, I have heard of cases where it bugged out for people and pressing the button seemed to do nothing. Puggers that I ran with seemed to be able to solve this problem by either reloading their user interface (/console reloadui) or by relogging.

eu stormscale jerks - Now, now, no need to be so harsh. As my almost scientific observations of pug composition showed, Stormscalers simply like to pug a lot in general, which is why you seem to meet more rude players from that server - simply because there are a lot more of them around. Don't judge them too harshly.

humminghippies.com - I had to go and have a look at that website after spotting this search term, but it only has a front page that seems to have been under construction for several months and nothing else. Just going by the overall look of it, I'm guessing that it's probably meant to be about proper hippies though. I'm only a hippie in the eyes of certain rage-quitting tanks.

lalapala - Okay, I made fun of a guy with that name once, but am I missing something here? Is he someone famous? Or is this actually a proper word in a language I don't know? I'm not sure why people would be googling for this repeatedly...

lfg tfa/cit - Assuming this wasn't meant to go into general chat instead of Google, I'm guessing that people searching the internet for this are trying to find out what that acronym actually stands for. It means "looking for group for Threat From Above/Battle Before The Citadel" (though on my server they tend to shorten the latter to bbc instead). These are daily group quests in Icecrown that become available once you've become a champion of your home city at the Argent Tournament.

old guild feels betrayed - Yes, yes, we do. Especially if you've been raiding with us for a year or longer and then just leave without as much as a word of goodbye. Hmph.

pukaja sport day - Pukaja is the name of my tauren hunter, and upon reading these words I couldn't help picturing her in a tennis outfit - something that makes for a very bizarre mental image, let me tell you. My curiosity was piqued enough that I investigated a little further and from the looks of it pukaja is actually a word or a name in a language that I don't speak. Anyone happen to know anything more about that? I think it's kind of ironic, since her first incarnation was called Pünktchen (German for "little dot"), but when I mentioned this to a friend he told me that it was against the naming rules for roleplaying servers, so I deleted and re-created her with what I considered a completely random name instead. Seems there is no escaping those pesky real words.

running around zul drak and sometimes all objects disappear and and i only saw the main frame of the terain i hope this is only a 1 time error - Holy convoluted search term, Batman! I really don't know what else to say to that.

tail sticking out near the drakkari colossus / elemental room in gundrak - Well spotted, though it looks more like a giant snake to me. One of my friends pointed this out to me during one of our earliest Gundrak runs and we got all excited about what it might be, but there's nothing in the game that gives us any further information about it. I've only heard vague speculation about how it might have been part of a scrapped plot for Zul'Drak involving a raid instance, but nothing official.

what is the weekly raid quest this week - I really hope that this one was meant to go into general chat instead, because Google isn't going to tell you the answer to that one, buddy.

Strangely enough, being squishy is fun!

I got my seventh character to eighty the other day, a draenei mage. After briefly testing the waters in a couple of normal mode runs I decided that my 2-2.5k average dps in a mix of greens and levelling blues should be enough to not draw anyone's ire in heroics, even more so as the average skill level seemed to be pretty low across the board in that battlegroup (that is to say, I saw people in full tier nine doing about as much damage as me and nobody complained).
So I jumped into a couple of heroic runs... and hilarity ensued! Why, you ask? Well, mages can be all kinds of awesome if the person behind the character knows what they are doing, like that guy who made all the "funny mage tricks" videos, or Euripides. However, if the player is not that good at being a mage (like me), the class really lives up to its reputation of being a glass cannon.

The scene: Halls of Lightning. Having struggled with healing the Loken fight often enough, I knew that I didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of surviving the lightning nova with my piddly 14k fully buffed health, but I didn't quite trust myself to run out properly anymore either, so I thought I'd be clever - put on mage armour for some nature resistance, ice block through the first nova, throw up a mana shield before the second, and again for the third (yes, our overall dps was so low that we got *gasp* three novas) but I died on the third one anyway. Boo.

The scene: Utgarde Keep. We start the second fight, I run close to avoid getting charged (but not close enough as it turns out), have just enough time to shoot about three arcane blasts at Dalronn the Controller when Skarvald charges me for 11k damage and then instantly melees me for another 7k. Mage go splat! I whinged about that one a bit because I'm still not sure what happened. The charge is one thing, but I don't know why he started to melee me afterwards when I hadn't even touched him.

The scene: Gundrak. I knew that it was a run in progress when I accepted the popup, but what I didn't expect was to land right in front of Gal'darah, with the tank being the only person still alive. "Uh, not the best moment to join in," I commented and the rest of the party chuckled in agreement. I tried to go invisible but got slashed by his whirlwind before I could get out of range, so it broke and I died with everyone else.

On our next attempt I blew all my cooldowns right at the start and did great dps... then I got impaled. I didn't get any heals from our visibly struggling healer (who said that it was her first heroic) but figured that I should be able to survive the dot anyway... except that the moment I got thrown off, the boss decided to add a 30k damage crushing blow to my face. Yay for getting aggro while incapacitated! They still managed to kill him without me though.

Now, all this might sound more bitter than amused, but I actually had a ton of fun, (though I'm not even sure why). I guess I like the whole glass cannon concept and that it works both ways. I can't help giggling out of sheer surprise when something unexpectedly one-shots me. Not to mention that being so extremely squishy actually forces you to pay attention and play sensibly again because you simply can't survive being sloppy (pulling aggro, standing in the AoE). Or maybe it's just that seeing my mage dead on the floor cracks me up every time, seeing how female draenei have this rather silly death pose which makes them look like they just tripped and fell flat on their faces.

D'oh, fell over my own hooves again!

I was almost disappointed when I made it through my last instance for the night, heroic Old Kingdom, without even dying once. Though I have yet to figure out the best way to deal with the evil clones on the last boss as a mage - when I used my mirror images I could kill them easily, but without them I just spent the whole time flailing about and being unable to kill anything, only staying alive due to repeatedly spellstealing the tree's lifeblooms.

The good, the bad and the puggee

Let's talk about a couple of pugs I had as of late. None of them were interesting enough to deserve a whole post of their own really, but there were still a couple of noteworthy occurrences.

Heroic Pit of Saron on my night elf priest

I had been running this repeatedly in hopes of getting the Surgeon's Needle to drop. And it did! A warlock rolled against me and I won. As we made our way to the next pull he whispered me to suggest that I should give the weapon to him because I "already had an epic". I compared our old weapons: I had the staff from normal Forge of Souls; he had an ilevel 200 blue heroic drop, I think it was this staff from heroic UP; so item name colour aside, the difference in quality wasn't really that massive. I'm all for treating your fellow puggers fairly, giving main spec priority over off spec, taking into consideration whether certain items might be more suited for some classes/specs than others and so on, but nonetheless there is a point where it simply comes down to straight rolling. The dagger was a considerable upgrade for both of us, we rolled off and I won. I wouldn't have said anything if he had won it... and I didn't respond to his whisper either, because I was afraid of getting into an argument no matter what I said. I still felt vaguely guilty however because I'm easily manipulated like that. Is it so hard to sometimes just let someone else enjoy their good luck?

Normal Gundrak on my draenei mage

The second we zoned in, our druid tank hit a macro to inform us that her computer overheated sometimes but that she would be back within a few minutes and asked us to not kick her please. As it turned out she was fairly new to tanking and completely new to the instance, taking it all in with great interest. "Are they fighting to the death?" she wondered about a couple of Drakkari Earthshakers, and on the last boss she squealed with delight as I got impaled, wanting to ride the rhino too. I thought it was absolutely adorable - there's nothing quite like the wide-eyed amazement of a newbie.

Her threat generation was a bit dodgy however, and I and all the other dps bit the dust repeatedly before we even made it through the second room. I didn't complain though - I'm old-school enough to consider my threat my own responsibility, so even if I feel that a tank isn't putting out as much as she should, I should still be able to adjust. I felt nothing but vague embarrassment about my own noobishness as the resto shaman scraped me off the floor for the third time.

In the second room we accidentally ended up getting three groups of mobs at once and only survived barely, at which point the healer sat down and declared that she was going to leave because the tank couldn't hold aggro and took too much damage. No shit, she just tanked nine mobs at once while being on the lower end of the level range for the instance, of course she's taking lots of damage! I didn't actually say that though, because I hadn't really been watching the tank's health myself and wasn't entirely sure whether the healer didn't have a point. Still, I couldn't help feeling that leaving like that was a bit of a dickish move, especially as the other two dps dropped group as well just as our tank begged people not to leave. It felt like watching people kick a puppy.

Fortunately we got replacements really quickly, one of them a female dwarf rogue. With an eye patch! I expressed massive amazement at the sight of such a rare creature, and she was very amused.

The rest of the instance continued to be amusingly bizarre. Our tank ordered people to give her more time to get aggro, "or I'll be a fail tank!" I've never seen anyone refer to themselves as a fail tank before while managing to make it sound like a threat. Do as I say... or I'll be a fail tank! Dun dun dun! One of the dps claimed that we didn't have time to wait for three swipes... erm, why not? We had a wipe on the Drakkari Colossus and the other dps told our tank that she had to work a bit harder, use taunt and so on. She took it gracefully and did great on the next try, and people commented positively on that too. Constructive criticism and some patience to teach do so much more than just saying "you fail" and dropping the group.

Heroic Pit of Saron on my tauren druid

Inspired by my night elf's luck I decided to try for the Surgeon's Needle on my druid as well (it had been eluding me for months) and it finally dropped for her too. Hurrah! The rest of the run wasn't as fun though, as it never ceases to amaze me to what lengths people will go to avoid one more trash pull, even if it frequently leads to wipes. Pit of Saron is already infamous in that regard, with people riding up the ramp before the first two packs on it have fully spawned and hugging the wall to skip the group right after that too.

What I got to see last night however was new to me, as our tank left several Geist Ambushers alive and then snuck along the edge of the ramp to pull Ick and Krick without having killed any of his trash. We got two of them as adds, and as I frantically tried to find a piece of ground to stand on that wasn't covered in exploding orbs or toxic waste spewed by Ick and the trash adds, I apparently stumbled too close to the remaining geists and we wiped. (I'm still not entirely sure about that as everyone was all over the place and one of the hunters said it was his fault, but the tank blamed it on me.)

Why is there never enough time to kill that extra trash pack but always enough time to wipe and run back?

Normal Pit of Saron on my night elf priest

Are you tired of Pit of Saron yet? I know I am, but it's got some amazing loot drops and some of the most interesting pug oddities. In this case we had a death knight tank and a draenei shaman who, even though they clearly didn't know each other and weren't on the same server, had somehow figured out within the first few seconds of the run that they were both Dutch. The shaman was of the "gogogo" variety, the tank was annoyed by people pulling for him, and within minutes they started to argue both in Dutch and in English. It got worse when the tank rolled need on some dps plate and the shaman disapproved. They kept calling each other juvenile and dumb throughout the entire run - and yet... we never broke our stride and at no point did either of them try to vote-kick the other. I'm not sure whether to consider the ability to patiently run a whole instance while trading insults impressive or stupid.

AFK in LFG

The other day my shaman got heroic Gundrak as her daily random. The tank was a paladin of the always-in-a-hurry variety, so he pulled almost all the trash in the first room at once and then charged straight at the boss. We managed to down him, but I died under a pile of snake adds, because as it turned out only one of our three dpsers, a rogue, was actually helping us to kill things. The other two, a death knight and a mage, were motionless at the entrance or outside the instance (we couldn't quite tell at first).

When the pally started to swear at them quite profusely, the death knight suddenly came to life, complaining that he was stuck in the passenger seat of someone else's mammoth. This actually caused the tank to quite miraculously transform into a very decent human being and he patiently talked the guy through the proper steps of exiting the mount. Quite a silly predicament to begin with, but there you go. Eventually he managed to join us and we were one dps up, but the mage remained blatantly AFK at the entrance.

I had vaguely picked up on other blogs that you couldn't kick people from pugs until the fifteen minute timer had run out, but it had never actually been an issue for me before... until that night anyway. With the mage camping at the door and leaving us a member short, we found ourselves in a lose-lose situation: We could either all leave the group, eat the debuff and put up with another ten-minute wait for a new group afterwards, or we could continue to four-man it in less time and accept the fact that we were feeding a lazy loser free emblems. We opted for the latter option, but still felt mildly annoyed. Gundrak is such a breeze these days that we were already at the last boss by the point at which the timer ran out. We kicked the mage as soon as we could, so we could at least deny him the free frost emblems on top of the three triumph he had already received, but that was for all intents and purposes too late already.

This was one of the rare things that actually prompted me to make a post on the official forums to complain, but the response I got was mostly along the lines of "yeah, everyone's complaining about that already but it does us no good, so shut up".

I just found it striking to what lengths people will go to abuse anything in WoW in their favour. I know, hardly a news flash, but even so. That mage must have been paying at least a moderate amount of attention to make sure he didn't miss his dungeon queue... just to go AFK as soon as he got in. Really? What kind of warped mind thinks like that?

I also thought that not being allowed to kick people right away sounded like a good idea before, to avoid any jerks kicking people solely based on their gear, their name or whatever. But fifteen minutes of wait is a very long time to spend with a useless party member in an instance that barely even takes that long to complete nowadays.

The whole incident has also confirmed to me that the dungeon finder really has turned instances into the new battlegrounds, with all the bad side effects - who could forget the times when up to three quarters of an Alterac Valley team were sitting AFK in the spawn cave just to farm honour? I didn't think this would happen in five-mans, but with Blizzard forcing us to keep the AFK guy on our team or wait another half hour for our next run, they made it possible. Good going, that.

I think it also highlights a major design flaw with the current system. You could rant about the people camping in the "peace cave" all you want, but they wouldn't have felt the need to do that kind of thing at all if disproportionally powerful rewards hadn't lured them into an activity that they didn't enjoy, leaving them searching for a solution that allowed them to get the rewards while still avoiding participation.

I've heard more than one person suggest that maybe giving out frost emblems for the daily random wasn't such a great idea after all, and I'm starting to see their point. I like running instances, I liked them even before they gave great rewards, and I could mostly rely on the people running with me to feel the same way and to make it an enjoyable experience. Only since Blizzard has started funneling everyone and their mother into LFG for frost emblems I'm suddenly surrounded by people who hate five-mans and just want to be out of the instance again as soon as possible, looking for ways to skip content at every corner. Or as of now, by people who hate five-mans and go AFK at the entrance, waiting for the rewards to arrive in their currency tab without any participation at all.

Enough of this rubbish I say. Give me back instance-running for fun, with people who actually care.

Epic Gundrak fail

For all the dungeoneering I've been doing in the past months it's been quite a while since I had an epic fail pug. Sometimes I'd get a tank who was unnecessarily rude, or a dps who was quiet but utterly clueless, but nothing to write home blog about. Until today, that is!

The scene: heroic Gundrak, apparently my priest's daily random dungeon.

I zone in, float down the ramp, and before I've even finished buffing, the elemental shaman has pulled. I manage to save him, then the mage gets aggro, the death knight tank tries to taunt something but apparently not the right something... but in the end the mobs die and we're alive. Not the smoothest start for a daily random, but nobody died and I wasn't even particularly stressed out. We continue to clear the rest of the snakes including Slad'ran the same way, with the tank, the shaman and the mage playing some kind of aggro pong.

While we do so the shaman expresses a desire to "zerg Less-Rabi", proudly informing us that he can even interrupt once. Wow, you go, shaman! I remember getting that achievement on my own shaman's very first Gundrak run, while she was healing and doing most of the interrupting to boot. I don't actually say that though, because it's one thing to have self-righteous thoughts on occasion and another thing to say them out loud (or type them out, as it might be). I find myself wondering whether the mention of the word "zerg" implies that he'll expect me to go dps, and how he'll react if I have to tell him that I'm dual-specced for healing and... more healing. While the shaman and the mage agree that they want to try, the tank wants to know what they are talking about, and I decide that my spec is probably going to be the least of our worries.

As soon as Slad'ran's body hits the floor everyone gets ready to enter the next room, except for the tank, who has jumped into the water and is swimming across the middle section of the instance, with half a dozen Drakkari Frenzies chewing on his legs. He tells us to follow him. For a moment the rest of the party just stands there, probably going through the same internal argument as me:

"1. I'm pretty certain that whatever he's going for isn't possible. After over a year of running this instance over and over and over again, I'm quite sure that I'd have heard about such an easy way to skip all the trash to the Drakkari Colossus. This can't end well.

2. He seems pretty confident and after all, he's the tank. You go where the tank goes, damn it!"

After a few seconds of hesitation everyone jumped down. While I'm getting disoriented for a moment and trying to survive the onslaught of unfriendly fish, the rest of the party gets ahead of me and up to the next boss. The tank asks if everyone's ready. One of the dpsers says yes; I say no, what with still treading water under the bridge. They pull anyway. What's the point of asking if you're just going to ignore the response anyway?

I hurry to catch up and save the day, only to be greeted by the unpleasant fact that trying to pull the boss from the "wrong" side in an attempt to skip all the trash results in getting the boss and all the trash in his room at once. I don't know, maybe a better party might have been able to come through, but as it was, trying to play aggro pong with four colossi and who knows how many elementals at once doesn't really work well. So we wiped.

I don't recall the tank's exact words afterwards, but I think it was something along the lines of "that didn't work so well lol". The dpsers were less than pleased.

Finding myself at the graveyard, I started to run back towards the little "your dead body is here" symbol on the minimap, entered, floated down the ramp again... and right into a pack of mobs. Damn you, Gundrak and your two instance entrances, and specifically the fact that the "wrong" one is actually closer to the graveyard! Somewhat embarrassed and not wanting to die again, I managed to leg it up the ramp and out of the instance in time to save myself. Momentarily I ended up a bit confused to find myself back in Dalaran instead of in the midst of the snows of Zul'Drak, but then I remembered how the dungeon finder works in such cases, teleported back in using the little minimap icon and found myself at the right entrance this time.

Except, the rest of my party was not there. They had all run for the "wrong" entrance and two of them were already dead again. I was briefly overcome by guilt and worry that my hasty escape had trained the mobs that saw me onto them instead, but as it turned out that was not the case. Instead the death knight had hit path of frost as soon as he had jumped down, and the dps who decided to jump straight after him at half health went splat. They were very outraged about this and threatened to kick the tank "if he messed up again", but I have to admit I was amused more than anything. Usually failpugs tend to make me feel bad as well, with that nagging voice at the back of my mind wondering whether I'm not contributing to the fail myself, but for once I felt blissfully zen, innocent, and above all the anger.

So there I was, standing alone where we had killed Slad'ran. "Priest?" someone asks eventually. I tell them that I'm at the entrance, and that they should and could easily join me by porting out of the instance and back in. "No, we're here now. And there's a boss here." So... what exactly did they expect me to do then? Unlike them, I didn't have the option to magically port to the other side. I usually hate it when people drop group without warning, but at that moment I was just drawing a blank. All I knew was that this party was certainly not worth the hassle, so I just left.

As usual, the right words came to me about a minute too late, when I found myself back in Dalaran after the fact. I thought about how the group should get a replacement healer pretty much instantly anyway, and wondered how they would do...

... when I suddenly realised that their new healer would also get ported in at the "right" instance entrance, and if they still insisted on staying where they were, they'd have to convince said new healer to either a) kill himself and then corpse-run to the other entrance, or b) leave the instance and manually fly all the way to Gundrak to enter the dungeon on the other side. Just to save the rest of them two teleports.

And then I grinned.