Sorry about the title, we were talking about alliteration in guild last night.
In case you were ever in doubt, I’m for it.
Todays topic is:
Tell me the one thing you ever did in a raid, ever, that was so boneheaded you still look back on it and think, “I can’t believe I did that. What was I thinking?!?”
I started this raid week down exactly one Sigil of Wisdom from completing that part of Wrathion’s quest chain.
That left me eager to run Heart of Fear to try and get it, before queueing for Terrace to down the Sha of Anger.
Thus began my night of comedy.
I did get my Sigil, but the groups I were with were… sloppy. Felt half awake, going through the motions. Perhaps just hitting that wall.
We downed trash and bosses, but we usually had multiple people die per trash pull, half the group dead by the end of a boss pull, and we flirted with enrage timers and sometimes even went over them.
Elegon… let’s just not talk about Elegon.
My boneheaded, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment came during Will of the Emperor in Mogu’shan Vaults.
You know, the dude what can drop the weapon upgrade for me.
We played as sloppy as I’d come to expect on the trash right in front of the control panel, and over half the raid died before the trash finally went down.
Some folks released to run back, others were waiting for a ressurection, and some moron decided to start the encounter.
Oh, joy.
This has no bearing on my mistake.
I did my best. I know the fight, I have plenty of tools to work on the adds, and all I wanted was to get the fight over with, see if the bow would drop, blow an extra roll when it didn’t, and then move on with my week.
So, I’m running around doing the add killing dance as fast as I’m able, when halfway into the fight most of my buttons go dark.
Like, ‘out of range’ dark. Or, ‘you’ve been stunned/silenced’ dark.
I could still use my Kill Command, Glaives, all that extra cooldown and pet stuff, but I’ve got no shots at all.
What, I ran out of arrows? WTF? I know I got tagged by that one Emperor’s Strength, but that stun only lasts like, what, 3 seconds?
It took me over 30 seconds of trying to figure out what happened to finally get it.
My weapon was broken.
I opened up my equipment list, and sure as hell. All my epics were fine, durability 100 out of 180, or whatever.
The only thing I had broken at 0 durability was my 463 blue Tempestuous Longbow.
Apparently, it’s weaker and more susceptible to breakage than epics? And hey, guess what… I died a lot in that raid.
So… halfway through the last boss fight I intended to do for the evening, I ended up with no weapon, reduced to telling my pet to attack that target, now that target, okay Bestial Wrath and go Kill Command that one. And after that… well, i still had my fists.
Paws. Whatever.
I was reduced to punching the adds.
For over half of the fight, I’m running around punching bad guys and waiting for pet attack cooldowns to wear off.
That’s a long time to feel embarassed.
One of the healers locked out of the raid by the early start began telling us all how much we sucked.
Specifically, how bad us DPS sucked.
In fact, he began talking about the worthless sack of shit Hunter that was so bad he should get out of the raid and kill himself for being so bad.
For over five minutes, and then past when we did finally wipe, he kept up the stream of venom, directed at sucky DPS in general, and the one horribad sack of shit hunter in specific.
I was embarassed because, yes I can’t believe I was in a boss fight with broken equipment, total fail move, but even worse, getting called out for it by someone that really, with that language and hostility, I’d have liked to kick square in the nuts for being an asshole.
Worst part? The feeling that, even though the way he went off was nasty bullshit, I felt he had a point. I was terrible, and I did feel embarassed. I won’t go so far as to say I was ashamed, but yeah, that was pretty fail. There was no good excuse for my not knowing what my durability was going into a boss fight.
The healer’s tirade increased, and he started linking meters to the raid channel, and calling person such and such with blank DPS out, and such and such did blank…
I suddenly realized something even more horrifying.
He wasn’t talking about me.
As bad as I was in that raid, spending most of it with a broken weapon, punching adds and controlling my pet as best I could, little though it was… I still ended that one fight with a little over 22k DPS.
I wasn’t the worst DPS on the fight.
I wasn’t even close.
It turns out I wasn’t the Hunter he was swearing at like a deranged beast. I thought I was, but he’d never called anyone out by name before. I just assumed I had to have been, by far, the worst in the run.
Nope.
The Hunter he was talking about had 12k DPS.
I still feel a little light headed thinking about it.
The healer, seriously, he could go die in a fire. Whatever moron started that run was the person to blame for our overall failure, not one DPS in the group. There is never any call to rant and rave and swear at someone else. You don’t like how someone else is performing, and if you truly think they are doing it on purpose, then you say what, and why, and who, and ask people to vote kick them. If enough people agree, then fine, you kick them and move on. If not, and you feel that strongly? Leave. Or shut the hell up and soldier on.
The swearing and venom? Shove a cork in your ass, I don’t want to hear it.
I feel okay about saying that now, seeing as how he wasn’t talking specifically about me. 🙂
I am still trying to wrap my head around that. With a minimum iLevel of 460, a Hunter (a Beastmaster hunter at that, same as me) did 12k DPS on a boss fight.
I did almost twice that with a broken weapon, punching the adds. Yes, my pet does reasonable damage on his own so long as I am using all of my Kill Command oand other attack cooldowns, but still. The other person is a Hunter too!
In other words, as bad as I sucked, how could there have been someone even worse?
I feel like I entered in a “who can suck the worst on this fight” contest, and came in second place.
This did not make me feel better about myself. I mean, if you’re gonna lose, at least lose BIG. If you screw up big enough, spectacularly enough, there is a story in that.
Did I wonder what that Hunter was doing? Yes, briefly. Then I moved on. it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
It’s not relevant in any way. What he did is what HE did, not what I did.
I’m the one that fought a boss with a Broken Arrow.
About that Hunter… here’s a hypothetical for you.
You sit down, queue for a raid, and it takes 45 minutes to get one, which is what it took me. You expected 20 minutes, that is what you’re used to, and that’s what your addon told you was the current average wait time, so that worked for you. You’ve got limited time to play before you have to get your kids tucked into bed, but this is workable.
For 25 minutes after that 20 minute ‘average’, the duration kept getting extended by a minute at a time. You thought, ‘okay, what is one more minute”, but that was 25 minutes ago.
Now, 45 minutes in, and the hour and a half you budgeted for the run is half gone before the first pull.
You’re running out of time. There are things you have to do with your family. But you can take it to the wire. Maybe this group will get it done fast and smooth.
But no. The group sucks. Wipes on trash, AFK people, early pulls, all sorts of things that serve to drag this out.
Finally, you get to the last boss, the boss you came for because you’re a Hunter and you need a weapon and he could drop your weapon. You really don’t want to have to do all of this over again later, you don’t have much time during the week to play.
But it’s time to tuck your kids into bed, past time really, so you’re up against it, and when game and famliy go head to head, family wins. Of course.
So, as soon as this trash pull is done, you’re going to tell everyone you need to be afk for a few minutes, so you can at least go tuck your kids into bed.
Then some asshole pulls early, before people have even run all the way back or been rezzed. There are healers locked out of the instance, five people still dead…
Well, that’s an obvious wipe, so you say to hell with it, set your character to auto-attack the boss, sic your pet on it, and go get your children tucked into bed, tell your spouse you’re sorry that the run went so long, and get back to your desk to recover after the wipe.
Sound reasonable? Sound like an outside possibility?
Yeah… I’m not going to judge, and I’m not going to assume anything. It does not matter why someone else had issues, what matters is what I did, what I have control over, and what I can do better next time.
Our second run? Everyone was there, healed, buffed and ready.
We killed the Will of the Emperor easy as could be, and everyone, including that Hunter, did a great job.
After our wipe, I teleported out, repaired, and ran back. I had to, not a single person there would drop a repair bot for me. Fortunately, I got back in time before the pull.
Oh, and the healer that spent all that time swearing and frothing at the mouth?
Didn’t heal a single person the entire fight. Just stood there, metaphorically with arms crossed, watching as everyone around them did their jobs while just afked through the fight.
Isn’t that just special. So apparently, he was so offended at how people didn’t do anything the last run (while he was safely on the other side of the doors, doing nothing), that it gave him the right to do nothing himself to, what? Get back at us? Prove he can intentionally suck worse?
Whatever.
Doesn’t matter. We won without him, easily, so the only thing that got proved was how nobody needed him around in the first place. he was not a value add. 🙂
What matters is, I have furthered the legend of the Huntard.
I haven’t felt so embarassed in a long, long time.
I’m in ur raids, punching ur mobs.
/cry.
So tell me, make me feel better. What is your “I cannot believe I just did that” moment?