Hello, all you party people. Here is a little update from my corner of the world.

Love is in the Air

I have, in general, ignored this holiday event. I had all the achievements from last year, and they all carried over. I did run through the new questline, and did all of the new dailies precisely once. Did the new boss to get the achievement, and that’s about it. If a friend asked, I would lend them my summons for the day, but I’m not actively pursuing the stuff off the holiday boss.

In a general, abstract “I haven’t looked that closely” sense,  I think the changes they made were a good thing, especially over the RNG screwage of last year.  You still have a chance to not get all the candies you need, but at least you can buy all the candy BAGS you need, without depending on a random drop for those, too.

I have not looked at ALL at the Lunar festival stuff. Hopefully they’ve done something similar, perhaps added one new achievement or something that I can do peacefully and go on my way.

Raiding

Raiding is going well. Has Aggro (my primary guild) is doing 10 mans, and on Friday 1 shot the first 4 bosses, Festergut and 2-shot Rotface. We had a couple wipes on the Princes, made it to Blood Queen with 1 minute to spare on the quest timer, then got our faces et.

I did the whole run on Timov which was nice, since they usually have me run Cali for the first 4, then swap over. I don’t mind it, but it locks both toons to the same instance and locks them out of loot.

On that note, Muradin’s Spyglass is the hotness, and everyone should get one. Except dorf rogues.

On Friday I sat out of raid because I was on call for the weekend. They had rostered me on Cal, and rostered out the warlock who’d gone on Thursday. (We do a random roll, high roll wins, with some fudging for role-balance). That let him follow through, and meant that if I got paged for work, they wouldn’t be waiting on me.

They got a first “kill” on the Dreamweaver event, and got a 2nd kill on Putricide. Go team.

Pug Madness

In general, I love the new PUG system. There are always specific cases of pure suck, however. Three tales of Pug Horror behind the cut.

Strangely enough, or perhaps not, all three take place in the new ICC 5-mans.

The Ugly

My DK got into a PoS run yesterday that couldn’t make it to the first boss. The pally tank acted like he knew the instances, bypassing the caster mobs up top and running towards the path on the right.

But he managed to butt-pull that caster with the skeles on the first hill. While he was tanking that, the 2nd pat came in and we proximity-aggroed that. He completely ignored them. We were able to AOE Them down, and I deathgripped the 2nd elite over to him. He ignored it.

I finally went frost presence and tanked it while he stood there. He said something in party chat about “letting him pull mobs.” When we pointed out that both of those were proximity pulls and one was a pat … he made some other excuse.

Halfway to the first boss, he skipped the first dragon rider and went for the 2nd. The hunter aggroed the first rider when it pathed back, and ran it to the tank. Again, it was ignored. Unfortunately, it ate the healer that time and we wiped. The hunter dropped group. The druid healer said he wasn’t healing the fail tank and also dropped. Group imploded.

Take Home Lessons:

  • People are noobs. Unless you know your group, clear anything that might aggro if you look at it funny.
  • Don’t be a dick. Accidents happen. Don’t hide your incompetence by trying to blame someone else.

The Bad

Another POS group, this time on Caliban. Oh wait, I already posted about this one.

Nevermind.

The Good.

Halls of Reflection makes me cringe. Every time.

Timov got it for his daily yesterday. It was a full pug. There was a mage. Who had never been there before. On ANY toon.

See? Now you’re cringing, too.

That said, it went REALLY well. We had one death on the waves, and it may have been on a boss fight. The Mage’s DPS was low. REALLY low. Like < 1500. The prot-specced warrior tank (a gnome!) was doing more DPS.

The first time through the chase, the mage died at the 3rd wave. (And it was really close for the rest of us.) We almost, ALMOST had it at wave 4. If we’d had 5 more seconds, we would have survived.

Thankfully, no one dropped group after the wipe, we rezzed (thank you Ankh-ing shaman) and did it again. The mage still had low DPS, and it was still REALLY close, but we got it done.  We all cautioned the mage (politely) that she really needed to put out some more dps, especially in the ICC instances.

But we got it done, and that’s what matters.

And now, I need breakfast.

No Comments »