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.

Does this ever happen to anyone else?

I generally tend to avoid participating in seasonal or new activities on the very first day of their release, because a lot of people seem to be hell-bent on doing exactly the opposite, which often leads to lag and crowds and general unpleasantness. After a few days I'll finally get over myself and start to get involved, but in the case of events that are only available for a limited amount of time I usually won't remember until the very last day of the holiday that there's still something that I wanted to do, and eventually I end up panicking and acting like a numpty.

Latest case in point, midsummer. Having got the Flame Keeper title on my main last year I didn't feel particularly inspired to work on it again on any of my alts, but I did participate by killing Ahune a few times for cloaks and paying tribute to/extinguishing the occasional bonfire, regardless of which character I was on at the time. Today, on the last day of the event, I found myself casually exploring Outland on my night elf druid, and as I did so I also picked up a couple of burning blossoms from the Outland bonfires. I didn't really have any particular plans for them, but at the end of my exploration I realised that my count had gone up to over a hundred, which meant that I could still buy something with them before they expired.

Then I got distracted by levelling up, learning new skills, spending my talent points and so on, and absent-mindedly queued up to heal a random dungeon. Only when the Old Kingdom loading screen popped up I suddenly realised that with the time zone difference, I had less than thirty minutes left until the end of the fire festival. Crap! I contemplated immediately dropping from the group to go and spend my blossoms instead but decided that I would feel stupid and selfish if I did so. I simply should have thought of it before queuing up. Besides, we could probably finish the instance in twenty minutes or so anyway, right?

We actually did pretty well, but on the trash shortly before Jedoga we had a wipe. As I watched at least one guy not even bothering to release, I looked at the clock, said "brb" and quickly teleported to Stormwind to still hand in my blossoms. But as I mounted up after hurling myself off the mage's tower, I heard the church clock strike midnight. Uh-oh, that's just cosmetic right? Doesn't mean anything, does it? I reached the spot where all the midsummer NPCs used to hang out and still saw a couple of people mill about in what seemed like slight confusion, but nothing else. The blossoms in my bag disappeared shortly afterwards. Bugger, what a waste.

I went back to complete the instance run, but the group insisted on skipping Jedoga so I didn't even get the achievement for completing Old Kingdom. I guess this is what happens when you try to have your cake and eat it too - you end up with sticky fingers and feeling no less hungry, or in my case, wasting your burning blossoms because of an instance run that wasn't even all that great. /sigh

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.

Funniest rage quit ever

Now, I've seen a lot of strange things in my pugging career, but what I got to witness today was definitely a special kind of bizarre. The scene: normal Old Kingdom. I'm on my draenei mage. We have a warrior tank, a paladin healer, and the other two damage dealers are a gnome death knight and a shaman.

Things go perfectly smoothly until after the first boss. There's this bit where you run around the corner and down some stairs, and there's a patrol there that you can avoid. The tank does so and we follow, but the healer trails a little behind and aggroes it anyway. The dps notices and jumps to his aid. Meanwhile the tank has obliviously continued down the stairs and repeatedly tells us to come, IN CAPS, until he finally asks us where we are and what we "useless people" are doing. "We're fighting some mobs here," someone explains. By the time he makes it back they are dead anyway, but he angrily demands to know who aggroed. We explain what happened and I fully expect him to start chewing out the healer for being stupid or something, but to his credit he restrains himself. For now.

On the terrace below, with the patrolling giants that fear, we somehow end up pulling more than we can handle and wipe. I don't know if this was actually because of the fear or if one of the melee dpsers simply body-pulled, but I thought that it was quite obvious that it was an accident either way - as opposed to an overeager dps deciding to pull for the tank or anything of the like.

Now, the conversation that ensued as we ran back was so priceless that I had to take screenshots of it, but unfortunately I messed them up so they aren't really fit for posting. Let me just transcribe things instead, bad spelling and all:

Tank: WHy
Tank: why
Tank: u run over there ang aggro them
Gnome: I need repair now :(
Healer: u line of sighted me sorry stay in the open
Tank: Im gonna say this one time... DONT pull just follow me
Healer: ur extra use of capitlas definantly make me scared :)
Tank: If stupid pulls werent there.. we wouldnt have wiped and theres no sense in wiping in this sad dungeon

I mentally gave the healer a thumbs-up there for being snarky in response to the tank, seeing how he had managed to convey in only two sentences that 1) he thought everything revolved around him and an overpull couldn't possibly be an accident or anything, people were just intentionally trying to be difficult, 2) he clearly considered himself above this dungeon and 3) he hated it anyway. Excuse me, but why are you here again? Anyway, the really good bit came as we corpse-ran back:

Healer: tum tee tum
Tank: tum tee tum wtf is that

Yes. He got angry over someone saying "tum tee tum". I'll give you a moment to let that sink in.

Healer: uhh words?
Me: the written out equivalent of humming a tune?
Healer: u should see a councilor if tum tee tum angers u, I hope u know tht
Tank: Do this instance by ur urselves.. hippies
Gnome: haha
[Healer is now the Dungeon Guide.
Tank leaves the party.]
Everyone at once: lol

And it was enough to make him rage-quit, after calling us a bunch of *gasp* hippies. I couldn't help picturing this really butch guy sitting behind his PC, fuming over the insolence of puggers today, mocking their tanks with "tum tee tum"s or whatever it was they said! I AM THE TANK HERE AND THERE WILL BE NO HUMMING OF TUNES UNLESS I SAY SO!

It probably took us less than a minute to get a new tank and we finished the run without any further problems. We may have been a bunch of tune-humming hippies, but we were far from incompetent, thank you very much!

Some days you should have just stayed in Dalaran

Two epic fail pugs in four days? I must be on a roll. Unlike the Gundrak fail on Monday I saw today's pug through until the bitter end, but not without a lot of exclamations of "oh my god" and "you won't believe what just happened" directed at my boyfriend (who was luckily busy doing something else).

I had queued for my daily random heroic with my paladin, and immediately got a bad feeling when I saw the Old Kingdom loading screen. Now, personally I don't mind Old Kingdom, even if it's a bit on the long side, but it's one of those instances that seems to bring out the prima donna in many tanks. Or, to put it more bluntly, whenever I get ported into Old Kingdom I can immediately start a countdown and the tank will have dropped from the group before it reaches zero, guaranteed. Occasionally I'll be surprised to find that we still have a tank after ten seconds, but then I realise that it's only because said tank is me.

Now, since I didn't fancy tanking that evening I had queued up as a healer, so the tank wasn't me, and as expected he left the party just as I had finished buffing up.

Tank chickening out as soon as the randomiser gives him an instance he doesn't like? Fail.

We queued up for a new tank, but after a few minutes I got fed up, switched to my tank spec and gear and re-queued us to find a new healer instead. As was to be expected that worked wonders instantly, and with me wearing my heavy plate and what looked like a friendly tree covering my back, we went on our way.

We made it to the first boss without problems, but as we fought said boss the healer started to complain. "Omg," he typed out repeatedly, "stop slacking!" After the fight he posted the damage metres, which showed me on top and all the dpsers doing between 1200 and 1600 dps - not great, but sufficient. He then declared that we'd have to find a new healer because he wouldn't run with people who couldn't outdamage the tank, then quit.

Healer throwing a fit and quitting because the dps isn't leet enough for him? Fail.

We got a shaman healer replacement and continued to Prince Taldaram. On one of the platforms we had our first death as the rogue managed to focus on the mob on which I had the least threat, pulled aggro and died. At least he didn't complain about it though, so we resed him and moved on.

As we approached Taldaram, I saw that the hunter was still standing on the platform where we had killed the last group of trash mobs. She had mentioned having lag before, so I decided to wait a bit to give her a chance to catch up. At which point the shaman healer decided to take things into his own hands and pulled.

Healer deciding that the tank is too slow and pulling in her stead? Fail.

Now, I remembered reading before that Taldaram had the ability to teleport anywhere in the instance, so I was not surprised when his second blood draining session took him to the hunter in the far back. "This is why I wanted to wait," I explained not without a certain amount of exasperation, as we helplessly watched the hunter die too far away from us to save her.

I waited for Taldaram to clumsily sprint back (seeing how his magical teleportation powers only seem to work one way), and suddenly both of the remaining dpsers were dead. I checked the combat log afterwards and they had to died to nothing but flame sphere damage and not getting any heals. I'm not sure how much the healer was to blame though, since his weird teleport might have bugged things out a bit.

Anyway, at this point the healer and I were the only ones left. I popped my pally wings to do a bit more damage, at which point the boss decided that he'd like to suck my blood next, and I found myself pinned to the floor, unable to bubble out of it. And the healer... just stood there and watched. He didn't even try to help me.

Healer being overzealous to pull but unable to actually do anything useful? Fail.

Fortunately Taldaram's health drain turned out to be one of the few abilities of this type that are not based on health percentage, and as it happened my tanking health pool was large enough to survive the full duration anyway. I then finished him off, but not without feeling slightly peeved.

I gave the rogue a res and he instantly quit the group. The hunter had DCed completely in the meantime, so we removed her as well while we were at it and got two new dpsers.

We ran down the tunnel to the next section of the instance, and immediately the healer urged me to pull again. I wanted to wait for our new dpsers, but afraid of more healer-pulling disasters I eventually gave in. I also asked people if they wanted to do a full clear or just the last boss, saying that I preferred the full clear but wouldn't mind skipping things either if that was what everyone else wanted. Most simply didn't give a response at all, but at least one spoke up in favour of doing all the bosses, so we went down to Amanitar and killed him.

When we came back up again the healer asked if we could do the last boss first because he'd have a raid soon. "And then you'll leave?" the dps death knight asked. "No," the shaman claimed innocently. Oh, well, if you're going to stay with us for the whole run anyway, then it shouldn't matter which boss we do first, right?

Lying in a thinly veiled attempt to get your frost emblems as quickly as possible so you can then dump the group? Fail.

We continued up to Jedoga and I ran in to AoE down the little initiates in front of her. However, as soon as they were dead, something strange happened. I had read about this bug in a comment somewhere, but since I hadn't heard about it anywhere else I figured that it probably wasn't that big a deal... until I got to witness it myself today. What happened? Instead of summoning her little Twilight Volunteers as usual, Jedoga summoned a whole group of Twilight Worshippers on one side of the platform - and no, it wasn't just that someone aggroed an extra group, we had cleared everything and I saw the mobs' nameplates. We drowned in a sea of flamestrikes and confused "wtf"s.

Wiping to really cruel and unexpected bugs? Fail.

The healer and one of the dps instantly dropped from the group, and once again we had to get replacements. However, this time we decided not to go near Jedoga again, just in case. At least our new healer found our story very amusing. We then proceeded to kill Herald Volajz without any further problems and I was glad to finally be done, but that run certainly didn't do anything to increase anyone's love of Old Kingdom I'm afraid.

Oh, and since we wiped, nobody got to complete All Things in Good Time, which I always have in my quest log just in case this instance pops up.

Missing out on a nice chunk of extra gold due to a bug that wasn't anyone's fault? Fail.

Some days you really wish you hadn't bothered at all.

Insanity!

Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom is one of the less popular WOTLK heroics as far as I can tell. I'm not entirely sure why that is. Do people consider it too long? Is it because of the spell flingers and their shadow blasts of doom? Personally I'm quite fond of it for various reasons; about the biggest gripe I have with the instance is its name. An'kahet? Ank'ahet? I always have to double-check the spelling.

The same is true for the last boss. Harold Voljaz? Herold Volazj? Seriously, which randomiser produces spelling atrocities like that? However - odd consonant combinations aside, I freaking love this boss.

I'll never forget the first time I killed him. It was during the first weeks after WOTLK's release and my friends and I were levelling through Northrend at a comfortable pace, taking our time to look at all the dungeons together. Since everything was new to everyone anyway, we never bothered to check guides or anything of the like to learn about boss abilities, we'd just "wing it" as one of our raid leaders likes to say.

So we engage this squidiphant called (/check wowhead) Herald Volazj and at first it's pretty much just tank and spank. Then he casts something called "insanity" and suddenly all the other party members appear to turn hostile. "Aha!" I thought, feeling smart, "it's Blackheart the Inciter v.2, mind-controlling everyone!" Except... I was still in control of my character. What was going on with everyone else? People were shouting things over vent that made no sense to me. I healed myself, waiting for the perceived mind control to end, but it just kept going on and on! Eventually some of my friends managed to break their illusions and started killing mine, so now I suddenly saw double, friendly and hostile clones of the same characters! It was horribly, horribly confusing and utterly hilarious at the same time. We pretty much all agreed that it was a brilliant fight, intentionally designed to confuse everybody who had run Shadow Labyrinth one too many times back in BC.

When I came back to the boss on heroic mode, I soon came to another interesting realisation, namely that it's one of the rare bits of content where being a healer or a tank is much easier than being a damage dealer. I had more than one group where most or even all of the dps didn't even survive the first insanity phase and originally I had serious trouble understanding why.

As a healer, the insanity phase is ridiculously easy. Just heal yourself as needed and wait for someone else to break free and kill your adds, their damage output shouldn't be enough to put you in any serious danger. If you've got the mana pool for it you can also dps them down yourself, if somewhat slowly. On my priest I usually prefer to conserve my mana since the untalented dps spells are quite expensive, but on my paladin I'll gleefully consecrate and spam judgements and holy shocks on my foes. My damage output is still pitiful, but my health and mana never really go down.

Trying to survive the insanity in the role of a paladin tank I found things even easier. Just go for the healer first, whack them with a quick stun the moment they try to heal, use your aoe abilities and watch all the evil clones die within a couple of seconds without hurting you at all. Easy peasy!

Until... the fateful day I decided to run heroic Old Kingdom on my hunter. Oh my.

It was a very embarrassing experience. As soon as insanity hit, my first instinct was to go and kill the healer, except I quickly had to realise that as a survival-spec hunter without scatter shot I didn't actually have any ways of interrupting their spell-casting. No matter how much I shot, the heals just kept on coming and I couldn't get anything down. Eventually I just ended up running in circles like a headless chicken, unintentionally getting the Ultimate Triage achievement as I desperately clung to what was left of my life with a single bandage tick... and I survived, thanks to my guildies being much more competent than me, but I sure felt stupid.

I immediately consulted Google for help on how to survive this particular encounter as a hunter. Despite of all the hunter blogs out there I didn't really find a proper guide to the fight, but I did end up discovering a couple of helpful hints. The key to the fight, they said, was to crowd-control the healer and save them for last. You can trap things, remember? Even if you haven't had to do that since level 70...

Tonight I ended up braving Old Kingdom on my hunter again and I was excited. Would I manage to pull it off this time or get shamed again?

On the first insanity I managed to trap the healer and burn down two of the evil clones before they broke free again, but then I ended up breaking my second trap by accident and help arrived before I could get the situation back under control myself. Still, I didn't take a lot of damage.

On the second insanity I finally got back into the groove of trapping and managed to keep the healer under control until all the other adds were dead. Then I nuked the healer. They healed. I nuked. They healed. I nuked. The mage in the party went down, cursing resto druids. I was starting to feel an additional kind of insanity as I watched the evil tree without a mana bar keep itself topped up with nourish spam no matter what I did. Just as I was about to break into a mad cackle a lucky crit or something must have finished them off, because suddenly I could see the other survivors fighting their illusions. The spell was broken.

I can now happily return to mocking any dps that dies on this fight while I do the "easy" job of tanking or healing. And I still freaking love this boss.