This afternoon, after a scrumptious lunch of oriental buffet… relaxed at home and logged in… to see one of my favorite players (a hunter) say that she had just gotten her heroic Coilfang Reservoir key.

Someone else chimes in that they’d love to do a heroic Slave Pens run…. and we’re off!

Now, normally getting three or even four instance runs in guild going at the same time is nothing… but on a Friday afternoon, there were only 16 online… and so we got 4 guildies in a group.

We had the hunter, myself, a draenei Holy paladin and a balance druid playing balance/healer for the run… and after an hour went into the dreaded LFG channel for the last.

That’s right… a heroic run with a PUG member… roll the dice… sixes or snake eyes?

Well, this time it was sixes… we got a rogue that was totally geared out from Kara and SSC that wanted to farm Badges, and had done heroic SP a dozen times… always nice to have a skilled guide!

This next section is kinda fun… yes, I do have fun in game… from my posts, it might be hard to tell. It’s still an awesome feeling to pop my netherdrake and go for a spin… looking for ore, usually.

Anyhooo… we had some teething pains on the very second Bogstrok pull, but we got the mark concepts together and went on inside… and very shortly we ate Mennu the Betrayers’ lunch.

Seriously.

I mean, all together, it was a cakewalk. Having a hunter keeping a mob locked down on chain traps, and a solid kitty that only attacked what she was SUPPOSED to attack, having a rogue that DARN well knew how to sap, and frankly, having myself tanking made for a smooth, boat cruise of a run to that point.

We pushed on past Mennu, being careful the whole run to avoid whatever mobs we could instead of clearing, and reached a point where we were just coming up on the last pat before the broken bridge segment where you have to jump in the pool.

Now this last bit here is where having a good healer makes an amazing difference. And I am going to blow my own horn a little, because for a change I am proud of my performance.

The rogue was stealthing forward to mark and get in sap position, when the paladin clearly said “mana”.

We all know what that means, don’t we? Yes we do, and yes the team did, and everyone backed off politely from the pat so the paladin could regain mana.

And then it all went pie-shaped, as the patrol apparently got within aggro range of SOMEONE, I have no idea who or how, and went apeshit on the casters.

Now, I was actually at that moment talking to my wife in my office, and as I looked away from her to glance at my screen (which should have displayed an idyllic view of casters happily eating, drinking and possibly /dancing away) instead I see carnage erupting.

I move into action trying to grab aggro on anything that’s on top of a caster. By the time the situation stabilized, in a heartbeat the hunter, the rogue and the balance druid were dead, it was just me and the paladin, and there were still two mobs alive and at full health.

I settle in spreading my Lacerates around, swiping, keeping the second mob on me but mostly focusing all of my Mangles and Mauls on one target to land all my pain on him. I personally had no real hope of only two of us lasting long enough against two heroic elites to survive. But we were a far way in, and the only resurrection caster was still alive… and I refused to give up. (grin)

Someone in party chat said “Damn, a wipe”… but pretty soon the comments switched to “dammmmnnnnn…”, as I kept pounding on the two bastards and the paladin kept me alive.

I used everything I had, loving every second my Badge of Ferocity gave me of increased Dodge, holding my Frenzied Regeneration and Bash in reserve… and just before the first mob was dead, the paladin ran out of mana totally.

Someone said “Good try” in chat… and I triggered Frenzied Regen, holding on and pounding that bastard with everything I had. When he finally died, I hit Bash on mob #2, flipped to caster, popped an Innervate on the paladin, a Lifebloom and Rejuve on myself, and flipped back into Bear in time to pop Enrage and get back on top of him before the mob ever had a chance to move.

After that it was all over. The paladin had enough mana coming in to keep me going, I only had one pounding on me, and with Mangle and Maul going, pretty soon it was victory for us over SP trash… and my blood was pumping like crazy. The paladin came through alive and rezzed the rest of the party, and off we went.

You know, it was one of those kinds of moments for which I play this game. We had the potential for disaster, it looked real bad, but instead of giving up, we gave it our best shot and triumphed. We used our skills properly, thought ahead and anticipated the moment when our abilites would make a difference, and we kicked their ass.

And the fact that I had some spectators saying “That was damn beautiful” made it all the sweeter.

I spend many a time watching other players pull off sweet moves, and I congratulate them and tell them how awesome what they did was. I see a lot of skilled players, and I always take the time to let them know how much I admire what they do.

I get told I’m a great tank pretty often… or I’ll hear “Wow, we tried this with such-and-such as tank and we failed miserably… with you as tank this is easy”… but I usually take those kind of comments as not meaning much. If someone happened to have a BAD tank, or one with starter gear, or underleveled for the instance, or having the wrong spec for the task, and then I’m running with ‘em and it’s good, that doesn’t mean I’m good. It just means I’m better than the one bad tank they ran with.

But this was a lot different for me, because for a change I did something that I knew at the time was a good job. And it gave me a feeling of warm fuzzies to be told that the others agreed.

What a nice start to the weekend!

I apologise in advance for this post…. I woke up this morning and my allergies have exploded. I can barely breathe, and my eyes are tearing so bad the screen is a blur. /whineoff(time=5minutes).

As you can see from the post subject, last night our own beloved Jayboi took upon his own shoulders the role of Raid Leader, and announced that perhaps this loose assortment of mental misfits should work on teamwork… by taking on the critters in the Servants’ Quarters.

We cleared the trash spiders, bats and hounds. The spiders presented some serious challenges for me at first.

The spider pulls consist of groups of two mobs, Coldmist Widows and Coldmist Stalkers.

The Stalkers are stealthed, so at first glance you only see the Widows. A little Hunter flare action and boom, there they are.

The Coldmist Widows, on the other hands, are fun little beasties. They poison, they slow, and they often drop all aggro and wander a distance, to emit a ranged poison blast to multiple targets… and then dart off in search of ranged clothies to pummel.

I was having a heck of a time with them, because we’d have two Coldmist Widows, two Coldmist Stalkers, and I’d try to grab a Widow and the two Stalkers, leaving the other Widow for our excellent off tank Warrior… and time after time I’d have Stalkers run off, I’d have the Widow slow me, run off, ranged attack a bunch of people, then charge in on the clothies while I was moving slower than a turtle… and they did it so often that half the time my Feral Charge was still on cooldown so I couldn’t get to ‘em fast enough to reestablish aggro before a clothie… usually the poor Warlock… went down.

And yet… it seemed like these things were super easy trash.. so why the hell were we having such a hard time?

And then… as I constantly manuevered to watch the action around the ranged, and kept an eye on the Threatmeters, it occured to me….

The Warlock, the Retribution specced Paladin, and one Mage were blasting away with complete disregard for threat gain… and no one was using cooridnated focused fire at all.

So the casters and ranged DPS were squaring off on whichever mob they felt like toasting, and pulling stuff every which way.

Jayboi did a marvelous job of setting up what our plans were… the problem was that he was using normal run-speak. “Skull is MT, X is off-tank, Star is trap”, all well and good, but the stealthed Stalkers were not getting marked… and this seemed to cause some people some confusion… as in, “Jeez, he don’t got no mark.. maybe I better blast him.”

I asked if we could have people concentrate all their fire on the same Coldmist Widow first, oh say the one with the ‘X’, and then move on to the one with the Skull, so we could burn them down fast, before attacking the Stalkers at all. Because I was having problems holding aggro, of course. That was the reason. Honest.

Lo and behold, wonder of wonders, we stopped having people die every pull.

I swear… I wish you could form a cross-server guild with all the people that run these blogs I love, so I could be in one group just once where everyone knew what the heck they were doing… just to see what it’s like…

We did have some great coordination and idea exchanging going on between SOME of the players. Experiments were made as to what hounds could be charmed, or banished, or whatever Warlocks do. People did talk to each other about “What if we tried this”… it was very nice. I enjoyed being a part of a group that is sparking some ideas with each other.

It’s just that only half the party was like that… and the other half (or okay, third) was saying, “Is anyone watching the NFL game? Damn I wish I was watching the game. Anyone know the score? Wrestling is awesome. Can we speed this up? What are we waiting for? Come on, let’s pull. What’s taking you so long? Oh lol I forgot to buy more Symbol of Kings.”

/cry

One last thing of note… we downed Hyakiss the Lurker, got a nice Void Crystal… (anyone ever look at the loot list for the three summoned critter bosses? Pure crap), and it was easy. Then someone wanted to get more easy rep and explore, so we wandered up a side passage… and found ourself at the head of the corridor that leads directly to the Maiden of Pain. A shortcut! A shortcut that every experienced player knew was there… which did not include any of us playing!

We all just looked down the corridor, said “Well crap… tomorrow we’ll just take this shortcut to get to Maiden, lol.”

I REALLY need to study all the guides, comments, strategies and maps for Karazhan. I never really expected to, or wanted to, devote so much time to Kara runs. It’s cutting into my time with my family too much. But if I’m going to go on these things, I need to actually prepare myself to know what’s up ahead.

God, my head hurts… I need to take some more medicine…

I’ll make a plea to you, my friends… does anyone have a favored website or place they go to, to check strats out?

I already use Wowwiki for lots, and I know someone posted a massive map of Karazhan there, so I’ll be starting there for research… I just wanted to see if any of you awesome folks had some suggestions too.

Take care… I apologise again for the boring drab post… god, my head hurts.