Ignis, Trial of the Champion and failure of all kinds.

Ladies and gentlemen, the weekly quest this week on Proudmoore is for Ignis the Furnace Master. You know, one of the three bosses available after Flame Leviathan in Ulduar. Pretty easy mechanics, not a terribly difficult fight.

My buddy Majik (a DK frost tank) and my brother (on his hunter… who is now Officially Better Geared Than Kurn!) wanted to go do the weekly. Well, why not? It’s not like it’s Marrowgar.

So, on my druid, I started up a group, inviting them, then converting to raid. “LFM,” I bellowed in Trade, “Ignis the Furnace Master Must Die!” I was, of course, overwhelmed with whispers.

I got two shammy healers (the only healers who whispered, of course) and asked them if they could 2-heal it. “Yeah, sure,” they said. So I said that Majik and myself would be tanking.

One of the healers, who had whispered me previously to say they could heal and tank, whispers me to invite a friend of theirs. So I invite their friend, a warrior.

Who here sees where this is going?

Well, we fill the group, head up to Ulduar, I warn people not to talk to anyone and that I would talk to Brann Bronzebeard instead of the Lore Keeper of Norgannon, to ensure we don’t accidentally do 4-tower Flame Leviathan. :P

Surprisingly, the trash to FL goes quickly, as does the FL fight. People (including. but not limited to (!), me) interrupted Flame Jets in the siege engines and we got Shutout without issue. My brother “engineered” FL’s corpse and off we went to Ignis.

The giants caused a bit of havoc, but it wasn’t too bad.

The rest of the trash wasn’t too bad either — except I kept losing aggro.

I noticed, from my Grid, that the only person in range of me was a warrior. There were two warriors in the group, including the one the shammy had me invite. So I assume, as I generally do, that he’s out-threating me, because I KNOW I can’t keep aggro off a well-geared DPS warrior. So I keep taunting off of him.

But he always ends up with the damn mob!

So I mark Majik’s trash targets with the Skull and, when I see the warrior on my mob again, I say in raid “Skull”.

Warrior stays on my target, which keeps switching to the warrior, in an attempt to bash his face in.

And then, I finally, finally notice that the warrior is wearing a shield.

“… is the warrior PROT?!” I ask over Vent, to just Majik and my brother.

“I don’t know,” Maj says, “wait, yes, there’s a shield.”

Sigh. “Switch to DPS please, [warrior name]”

And yet, there he is. On the very next bloody mob I’m trying to tank. Again. I mean, seriously. I’M A FREAKING BEAR. You can’t tell that I’m a tank? Rawr?

Finally, we get the trash cleared out.

“[warrior], do you have a DPS spec?”

“No.”

/facepalm

The shammy says in raid: “that’s why I said I could heal and tank!”

“I thought you meant you had another toon of yours who could tank,” I respond. Majik asks me in Vent if I want him to go DPS, but knowing that his DPS spec is a PVP one, I figure I’ll just go resto.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I very much LIKE having three healers in a 10-man. It’s even helpful on Ignis if a healer gets put in the Slag Pot. But my problem is that I did not do a ton of research on the group, figuring that 2 healers, 2 tanks (one of which being a DK, who not only does more damage than your average prot warrior, but has a ton of cooldowns) and six DPS is going to render the Ignis fight easy.

Take away a DPS, though, and you have a slight problem for the strategy we were going to use.

You see, I’ve done Stokin’ the Furnace. It requires burning the boss hard while the OT holds all the adds. So even with just five DPS, I figured hey, we can do it this way anyways. Everyone should be in at least T9, right? Which is better than most of the junk out of Ulduar. It’s obviously easier to tell everyone to just burn the boss than to expect anyone apart from my brother and the actual well-geared DPS warrior to switch targets to the adds.

Of course, we don’t have a “tank healer”. Which is a bunch of crap, IMHO, since I think that, if circumstances dictate, any class can “tank heal”, but I will admit that were I in there on my paladin, it would have made the fight a ton easier.

We also don’t have a healer with any defensive cooldowns. No Guardian Spirit, no Pain Suppression, no Hand of Sacrifice or Divine Sacrifice.

Still, I don’t think we have a problem.

Until we’re about at the 3 minute mark and I suddenly realize that we are NOT going to be done in four minutes. We’re sitting at about 60%.

“HERO” I type, all in caps, in a raid warning.

Heroism goes up and I start making sure Rejuvenation is on everyone in the raid, in addition to rolling Lifebloom on Maj. I keep Swiftmending either myself or him because the stacks of Strength of the Creator were just getting out of hand. I don’t remember what they were at, because I was busy healing the crap out of Maj, but he was taking TONS of damage and rotating ALL of his cooldowns, sacrificing his ghoul, everything.

Shockingly, 5m13s after we pulled, Ignis died, everyone alive.

Great healing by the shammies, really. And very good off-tanking by the OT, to be honest. I probably couldn’t have stayed up as long as he did with the same number of adds. Although, if I was going to tank, we wouldn’t have had the same number of adds, because we would have had six DPS and killed the sucker earlier. :P

So part of that is my failure for not researching the group well enough. Part of it is the warrior and the shammy’s failures for not realizing I said Maj and I were going to tank. It all just led to extra stress, which no one needs when doing a stupid weekly.

But all that pales in comparison to the priest that healed most of my Heroic Trial of the Champion yesterday. I was tanking.

We get Eadric the Pure, we down him, but the rogue dies. The hunter pointed out to the priest that they still had the Argent Lance equipped.

The following is a paraphrased reconstruction of the conversation that ensued.

Priest: so?

Hunter: So… maybe if you had your healing weapon on, the rogue wouldn’t have died.

Priest: lol no its fine, I can heal with the lance

Hunter: I think you might heal better with your real healing weapon.

Priest: we killed him didn’t we?

Hunter: That’s not the point, the point is that you might have been able to keep the rogue up with your healing weapon equipped.

Me: I’m with [hunter].

Priest: i was chatting with someone when he died

Somewhere in all of this, someone (not me) started the Black Knight event. The rest of this is, honest to God, what happened, as I’m copying from my screenshots.

The Black Knight says: I’ve come to finish my task.

Priest: i looked away and talked until he died

Hunter: so that makes it alright?

Priest: he died and i said “oh someone died hang on”

<Deadly Boss Mods> The Black Knight engaged. Good luck and have fun! :)

The Black Knight yells: This farce ends here!

King Varian Wrynn yells: Don’t just stand there; kill him!

Priest: fuck you [racial slur for a person of African descent].

Priest leaves the party.

Okay. The priest didn’t say exactly what I wrote. They ACTUALLY used the n-word. I refuse to use that term, even while quoting someone on my blog.

So, I was tanking, I slammed on the “yes, I would, in fact, like to find a replacement for the healer who just left my group” and popped every single cooldown I had — Survival Instincts, Barkskin, Frenzied Regeneration, Lifeblood, Glyph of the Indomitable.

A pally joins the group and all I can think is “please, dear God, let him see I’m in trouble and heal the crap out of me”. But he was still zoning in. I died. I ran back. Everyone else died, they all ran back.

Everyone was discussing the racist priest and I was like “Uh, didn’t the priest and the warrior in the group know each other? Same server. :P” And then the warrior left the group. We got a mage, the pally apologized for zone lag, it was all good, we all had another shot at the Black Knight and we even got I’ve Had Worse.

FYI, the racist priest is Emisana from Khaz’goroth and the warrior was Obsession (?) from the same server. I highly recommend anyone on Bloodlust just ignore the priest right away. Terrible healer, worse person. :P

Okay, my ranting is done for now.