So, on Thursday, Majik and I were doing a random regular dungeon. It was the Lost City of Tol’vir. And we had a druid tank who not only pulled with Growl but was pretty bad at tanking, period. In fact, it was so comical that I likened our bear to Ctrl-Alt-Del’s Fail Druid.
Maj and I were in Mumble chuckling and complaining about it with some other guildies and somehow, the suggestion to start live streaming it came up.
We didn’t get it working in time for Lost City, but Majik did end up getting it to work for our next run, which was a random heroic. The group consisted of me healing and Fog tanking with Majik, Piggly and Srs (mage, warlock, shadow priest) DPSing.
And the instance was the Deadmines.
I should note, at this point, that throughout the entire run, all I could really hear in my head was the song from the Welcome to the Deadmines video, which one of my old guildies helped out with (he voiced a few characters in the video).
I should also note that I had attempted to run Deadmines once on beta and, uh, that’s about it.
So we were live streaming and it was kind of hilarious. I tweeted it out a couple of times and we topped out around 9 viewers (of course, four or five of those were guildies) but I did see Lodur of World of Matticus pop in and Velidra was there watching/listening from work, too.
At one point, Velidra tweeted:
>_> @kurnmogh’s group are aoeing down H DM’s… is it evil that I’m waiting for them to all die horribly?
All in good fun, of course! :)
The run was surprisingly smooth apart from a pull right after the first boss. We had a lot of fun with the idea that people were actually, you know, watching the run. Hope you guys enjoyed it. :)
Speaking of watching the run, you can watch it here:
The actual run doesn’t start until the 13m mark or thereabouts. Please note there is some measure of profanity and much mocking, so you might not want to, you know, watch it at work or whatever.
All in all, I had a good time with the guildies and, apart from a couple of hairy “OMFG LAY ON HANDS” moments, it wasn’t too bad. I really credit the great explanations by Piggly, pro CC by all the DPS and my brother’s awesome use of every cooldown when appropriate. They made it super easy for me to heal, all things considered.
I’m not quite as despondent as I was after SFK attempts on Wednesday, that’s for sure. I’m really, really looking forward to raids where I will not be the only one responsible for keeping up the entire group, though.
Anyways, later on, Fog and O (who was feeling similarly awful about healing) were looking for more DPS for a random heroic. They had Piggly and Mabriam, a mage, and I was like… well… there’s always Kurn.
Trouble is, Kurn was at 325 ilvl. So I borrowed a few BOE blues from the guild bank and just held them in my bags until I hit 329 and we queued up. I warned them all that I was fail DPS, but hey, I could trap! And interrupt!
So we queued. And got heroic Stonecore.
I think O nearly had a panic attack, since the first boss had almost reduced her to tears the other night.
The first pulls, which are always really messy, went beautifully. Camouflage and Trap Launcher are FANTASTIC, by the way, and I revelled in the fact that my trap duration is a minute, now. A MINUTE. After years of trapping things for 20ish seconds, I was basically elated to realize this the other week. A minute!!! Of course, my trap timing is ALL off now, because after about 15 seconds, I start going “shoot, need to re-trap, OH WAIT”.
We had a couple of wipes in general, but we one-shotted the first boss, who is SO challenging, and we one-shotted the third boss.
Hunters are effed on that fight. Neither Serpent Sting nor Immolation/Explosive Traps work to reflect damage back to you. Nor can you out-range the paralyze, at least not that I’ve seen. Deterrence doesn’t seem to do anything, either. I think that what we have to do is actually melee the boss to get the bleed and Disengage out. Horrifying.
The last boss wasn’t too bad, despite a couple of wipes due to huge boulders one-shotting people (*coughFogcough*) but overall, a good experience and thanks to Mabs being awesome, I got a Chaos Orb, which will go towards a guildie’s chestpiece or belt.
Had I known that Chaos Orbs were going to be BOP, I wouldn’t have made myself the go-to LW person, that’s for damn sure.
Anyways. It was a productive evening — picked up my JP shield on Madrana, picked up the Chaos Orb for my guildie and then fell asleep pretty early. If this sleep schedule keeps up, I’ll be on normal hours most of next week, which is key, because most of my out-of-town friends are going to be back in town.
Oh, Blizzard. Why a new expansion right during the holiday season?
Hey Kurn!
Long time reader, first time commenter.
I am primarily a protection paladin, but whenever I need to heal, I am always feel like I’m prepared because I read your blog.
I just wanted to take a moment to make a shout out to Srsbusiness. He raided with me on Eitrigg for a short while in the guild Nerd Rage while we were working on Professor and Sindy.
He probably talked about how fail we were, but I thought it was a pretty small World (of Warcraft) to discover that he is in Apotheosis.
Anyway, cheers.
There was actually a hotfix change, where the shardlings were reduced to level 86 – down from level 88. I’m sure that made a huge difference!
I had an incredible time with you guys last night and thank you giving me back my faith in my healing abilities and my faith in Heroics not being completely awful experiences.
:)
I was similarly amazed to find out that freezing trap is a minute now. I hadn’t even known about the change the first time I CCed something in cata and I kept putting new traps down, waiting for the first one to pop, watching the rest of the pull get killed, etc. And then as survival we have reactive 30-second CC in the form of wyvern sting, which works on pretty much everything.
For Ozruk, the paralyze is dispellable and there’s no penalty for dispelling: I would think most healers would prefer spending the mana on a dispel for the one class with a minimum range over spending mana on healing the bleed. I certainly would prefer that on my priest.
“Oh, Blizzard. Why a new expansion right during the holiday season?”
This.
The holiday season has kicked my ass this year, at least as far as game play time. I managed to get on last night for only a few minutes to post some items that I had stockpiled for Winter’s Veil, and that’s about it for the past couple days. :( Tonight is a write-off as well. [sigh]… oh well.