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.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Recap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.