Wednesday, July 28, 2010

To boldly go... Oh, who am I kidding?

This morning, I managed something I've never done before, and not in a good way.

I queued up for my morning run, and I got the Old Kingdom as my destination.  I was surprised --and pleased-- to find nobody immediately dropped group when we finished porting in.  Surely this was a good omen.

The tank even put up raid markers on who he wanted us to kill first in those Ahn'akar pulls before Nadox.  He took his time, and we didn't wipe on that trash.  As one of my guildies likes to put it, there's something wrong about an instance where the trash hits harder than some ICC bosses do.

As runs go, it was pretty average.  Two of us wiped on aggroed Twilight trash (courtesy of the Warlock), but otherwise nothing special.

Until we got to the Herald.

We settle in, the Warrior tank runs up and starts the fight, and I pop Avenging Wrath and close.  One swing and...

I pulled aggro.

With one swing.

On a boss that a tank had a good four or five seconds to get a lock on aggro.

If it wasn't for the fact that everybody else in the house was sleeping, I would have been shouting at the top of my lungs.  As it was, I kept a good stream of invective going.  "WTF is that?  How the hell did that happen?  It was just a Judgment!  I was behind him, dammit!  I wasn't even the first DPS to close!  I didn't even do anything like Divine Storm or Consecration!"  And then... "Oh crap, HoS is still on CD!"

I stopped hitting and bubbled, allowing the tank to draw aggro back, but I've never had that happen before in a boss fight.  Even with tanks geared as new 80s.  After that, I had to essentially reduce myself down to auto attack to keep from pulling aggro the rest of the fight.

Talk about embarrassing.

Anyway, last night I got Tomakan out of the garage to run him through the LFD tool.  He's about at that stage where most of the LFD instances are ones where I've been in several times, with one lone exception.

And naturally, what pops up into view?

Gnomeregan.

If you check Quint's list of achievements, you'll find Gnomer in there.  However, that comes with two caveats:  I was L80 at the time, and I cheated and bubble/dropped down to the bottom level.  Therefore, I had almost no clue about how Gnomer was for a properly leveled toon.

We ported in, and immediately the tank says "I don't know anything about this place."

"Me either," said the Warlock.

"Don't look at me," I said.

The tank wasn't thrilled.  "Does anybody know their way around here?"

"I do," the DPS warrior said.  "It's been a couple of years, but I've been in here before."

Well, something was better than nothing, so off we went.

Gnomer would make MacGyver think he'd died and gone to heaven.  Bots, wires, gizmos, airplanes, and all sorts of stuff littered the place.  Infected and/or irradiated Gnomes everywhere, with Dark Iron Dwarves at the bottom of the city --with land mines!-- ready to help out ol' Thermaplugg.

Given that we didn't really know where we were going for almost all of the run, I got plenty of chances to drink while the guide poked around in different directions.  Still, I was eternally grateful that the Lock didn't rely upon Spirit Tap to replenish his mana.  I even whispered him my thanks, to which I got a "lol np" in return.  Dude, you have no idea how nice it is that I can concentrate on the tank and not worry about getting my mana depleted after every trash pull.

There was only one brief moment of uncertainty when a wandering group of trash aggroed on us while we had our hands full with another bunch, but in general the run was pretty smooth from a fighting standpoint.  After Tomakan's last fail pug, having one go smoothly was a pleasant surprise.  Hey, and I even got a few items I could use (as in, I remembered to Need the items I wanted).

In a bizarre way, I'm looking forward to the Scarlet Monastery.  I know those instances, and every time I think I'm done with that place some random quest sends me back there for another item.

8 comments:

  1. You know, the reason you get behind mobs is so that you can avoid your strikes being parried, and in turn giving your target a free instant counter-parry attack on your tank - it doesn't actually have anything to do with threat....at all.

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  2. Seriously? Then I wonder why it's easier for me to pull aggro from the side or front than from behind.

    Ah, of course. The time factor. It takes longer to go behind and line yourself up.

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  3. "Gnomer would make MacGyver think he'd died and gone to heaven." LOL

    I've got a map with direction to Gnomeregan somewhere...

    http://www.hotsdots.com/2010/01/breaking-down-gnomeregan/

    There it is. I was really looking forward to SM dungeons too. And then I got so sick of them I was almost looking forward to Uldaman. And that is just plain wrong.

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  4. @Cassandri: Thanks for the link!

    You want to know something funny? Tomakan just spent some time putzing around Stormwind Keep, and you know what I blurted out when I went through? "Hey, this looks just like the Scarlet Monastery!"

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  5. I once got a group lost in Gnomer for about 4 hours :(

    (I'm saying 'once' like it was a lifetime ago but it was actually fairly recently)

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  6. @Tam: Yeah, the place is pretty frustrating. At least twice did people suggest jumping early on, and I put a stop to that. "Guys, we'll all wipe if we jump from this high!"

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  7. You can slowly, carefully, jump down, using the large machinery to break your fall. (or hope you have a mage with feathers or the glyph)

    As for your OK run... what type of tank? Was he in the wrong stance, aspect/whatever?

    I pull aggro all the time on multi-mobs, when the tank has to swap a lot, but I haven't pulled a boss off the tank in a while... (almost makes me sad that I don't have the DPS to do that anymore *sniffle*)

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  8. @SlikRX: It was a Warrior tank. I couldn't tell you what stance he was in, but I wasn't having any trouble with the prior bosses. The trash was kind of hit or miss; some trash stuck to him like glue, others were more prickly.

    Maybe he had changed stances in preparation for the madness phase to come, but whatever it was, it was definitely an unwelcome surprise.

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