Let’s start this off with a song that Kyre sent in this morning. Thanks Kyre!

As soon as she saw the Night Elf Kitties, it brought her back to a song and she just had to share it with us. I think it captures the feel perfectly!

I hereby present to you “I want a purple kitty for my birthday, mom” by Charlotte Diamond, frmo the album “Diamonds and Dragons.”

Thank you again, Kyre, I have to say that certainly put a smile on my face this morning!

Last night, a group of Sidhe Devils went into Naxx, and they had a wonderful time. Some of them got Achievements for The Plague Quarter and the Spider Quarter, showing they triumphed in those areas for the very first time. They went in on time (or thereabouts), and despite a couple teammates needing to leave suddenly in mid-run, including the guy leading the run, they still managed to finish in a respectable 2 hours.

This is not their story.

I was not part of that group. I had intended to sign up, along with Cassie, but Cassie’s niece had a graduation ceremony from High School set for 7 PM.

We thought about educators and their need to thank each other and make sure everyone knows how wonderful they are so nobody cuts their funding, and figured… we wouldn’t be home before 8 :30. There were 9 people in the graduating class.

So we went to the graduation, and didn’t sign up for the raid.

This isn’t the graduation story, either.

This is the story of a Bear in Hunter’s clothing that logged in at about 8:45 server, saw that the Naxxramas crew were going strong, and looked around for something to do.

I’d mined the night before. I’d mined for hours while talking in vent, and had bags full of ore and Eternals that I didn’t need in the first place. Blech.

We had so many people in Naxx, that there weren’t enough folks on to go mess around in a regular or heroic instance. Maybe run a very old instance that someone leveling could use?

And then I saw it. Someone in Dalaran General Chat looking for.. and get this, as I’m on my Hunter… looking for 1 more DPS, preferrably ranged, for heroic Naxx.

When the hell does that ever happen?

I whisper and get an invite.

What the hey, it will be fun just to be seeing the inside of Naxx where I don’t have any other worries on my mind than aim and shoot.

They have already taken down Spider Wing, Patchwerk and stupid injector heroin addict guy. They’re on Gluth, and a good time shall be had by all. They’ve even got vent.

Most of the folks were from a guild on our server called Inquisition, one I really haven’t had much to do with before, but there was a good scattering of other people from guilds I do know about, like Heroes Ledger and Legion of the Valkyrie, good guilds with a reputation for being nice people.

Hmmm. Vent seems pretty reasonable, too. Strange. This couldn’t possibly be a pug with nice people, could it? In heroic Naxx mid-week? That would be too weird.

The raid leader was very good. He was calm, seemed reasonable, had a noted lack of sarcasm in his voice, and never once that I know of ever got pissy with anyone in the run.

That was remarkable.

He knew the fights pretty well, and while he did assume everyone present knew all the basic fundamentals, he made some specific tips during discussions that were pretty smart, tips that, while I have noted the problems in the past, I have never as a raid leader made a point of mentioning to the group as a wanring.

Just as an example that leaps out at me, since I was on my Hunter, when we were standing getting ready to enter the green slime tube to go see the doggie, the raid leader mentioned that all Hunters should dismiss their pets prior to entering the tube, and we should call them once we are actually on the ground.

Well, shoot, I’ve been in here in 10 man mode on my Hunter, and I’d found out the hard way the first time that if my pet was with me in the pipe, when I jumped he’d stay up there on the pipe, unable to be called, and unable to jump down to me, and out of range of Dismiss Pet. I had to wait for the pet to die from the poison dot of the pipe before I could rez him.

Embarrassing.

I’d noted it… but it never occured to me in later runs to mention that to the group. I tend to not give specific advise to players on what to do with their characters, because I don’t want to have people thinking I want to tell them how to play their class. I’ll talk about “DPS should do this” or “The tank should do that”, but generally not class specific stuff. But hey, here were three Hunters in a raid, and he threw out this pointer, and lo and behold, the other two Hunter’s hadn’t known.

Smart. Casually smart. I liked that.

So anyway, we got ready and went in and jumped Gluth.

And we wiped a few times.

We ended up needing to adjust the way kiters handled the zombie chow, take some of the excess uber heal off the tanks and put them on kiters, and also get practised on the kiters keeping the chow as far back as possible, and bunched up, so we could blow them up during Decimate a lot easier.

Learning curves in a pug, but no worries.

I was having a good time with the group. The people leading the run, while not enjoying the best success in the world, really seemed nice. At the very least, they didn’t explode into name calling and blaming and outrage, they didn’t descend into pessimism or a black depression… they just kept an upbeat perspective and kept right on trying.

After a few wipes, we lost a healer. So I asked Lixie, the only healer at 80 not in the guild Naxx run that seemed open to maybe doing something, if she’d like to come in.

She was willing, and away we went.

I believe immediately after she joined us, boom, down goes the doggie.

Loot was handed out, and by an interesting system.

The way it was described, everyone had the opportunity to roll and win one epic or Tier piece for a main spec, and one epic or Tier piece for an off spec for the night. If you win one for both your main spec and your off spec, your other rolls wouldn’t be considered unless everyone else passed on it.

Nobody seemed angsty about this, and the Tier chest piece that Hunters can use dropped. I rolled, and my mighty *4* did not garner me any loot. Lol.

Still, I certainly did not go on the run for loot. I went ’cause I wanted to shoot stuffs, and so far I’d had a lot of fun shooting stuffs.

Next up, Thaddius.

We destroyed the trash quite readily, and lined up for the first go.

We had problems on our first attempt, with one tank not taunting on his target after a tank throw, and Fuegan NO KIDDING took off, ran all the way down his ramp, across and ran up the OTHER ramp to start going to town on the other tank.

Of course, while that was going on the Tesla Coil link was broken, and the lightning was chaining all up one side of the raid and down the other. Ouchies!

So, a wipe.

After that, despite Inquisition being really great… the raid just fell apart.

First off, my computer chose this particular moment to crash. And I’m not talking about the computer itself… just WoW. Spectacularly.

It crashed logging back into Naxx. It crashed when reloading the game and trying to get on my Hunter. It crashed again after rebooting my entire computer and trying to log back into my Hunter. It crashed, and crashed, and crashed.

All the while, as minutes fly by, I’ve got 24 people waiting on me. And waiting. And waiting.

Amazingly, and this astounded me, the raid leader finally uttered a patient sigh, and said in vent “We’ll leave Windstar in group, but we need to get moving. Let’s go ahead and do it with 24.”

Someone commented, quite helpfully, that maybe if I tried to log onto another character it would break my Hunter free of whatever the &^)&^ was going on.

No, let me rephrase that the way my guildies saw it in Guild Chat last night.

Maybe if I tried logging into another character, it would break my fucking Hunter free of whatever the fuck was going on while an entire fucking raid was waiting on my ass, and I would calm down and no longer want to put my fist through my screen.

Not that I have anger issues, or anything.

My most massive hot button is letting other people down after I make a commitment. I was freaking torqued WAY over max stress ratings by my computer crashing WoW continuously.

Anyway, the advice worked. I logged into my Druid, and it chugged for a long time before doing so. Then I tried logging into my Hunter again, and for the rest of the night it was fine.

I got back into my Hunter only to spend the next five minutes rooting for them, as they tried to down Thaddius, but eventually they went down to a few bad Polarity shifts.

Now, understandably I think, there were some comments made about how, if you’re going to volunteer for a raid, you really need to be running Deadly Boss Mods or similar. They didn’t hammer on the point, but they did say that there is no excuse for someone that volunteers for a raid to not be running Deadly Boss Mods, and I for one agree. You get 25 people dancing, and each person HAS to be able to see what they’re own polarity is after a shift, nobody can be watching all those players and telling them.

Anyway, so they wiped and went back in.

Here is where I started feeling pretty bad for these guys.

They were, in my opinion, doing everything right. They were being nice, were patient, explained the fights and their expectations of people very well, and had good strategy for each attempt. When something would happen, they’d look at what happened and come up with a solid plan for how to prevent it happening again, such as shifting focus to chow control on Gluth.

But someone didn’t release after the Thaddius wipe, the raid all got put into ‘+combat’ mode, and nobody could get out of combat mode either. We couldn’t leave the place after jumping off the pipe. We had no Warlocks to do summons to speed things up. We had two people leave the raid.

We ended up having to either portal or hearth out of there to clear the chamber to get out of combat, and then come all the way back in. We had to find replacements for the people that left.

I asked, and Melpo and Shadewynn agreed to come on in… and then we all had to run without healing support through Frogger since everyone was already at Thaddius… and Melpo died on Frogger and we had to wait some more while he came back and tried again.

Oh, and Frogger seemed to be out of sync, where the people that died didn’t line up with where the graphics showed the little slimes to be. Helpful, that.

Everything being said, we finally got in our next attempt on Thaddius at about 11:15… and wiped once again to Polarity shifts.

At this point, and without pissiness, some folks said that it was just too late for them to go on and they left, and Inquisition had to call the raid.

We had been in there for about 2 and a half hours, and had downed Gluth.

The raid leader actually had the class to thank everyone for coming and for being patient, and apologized for the troubles in taking down Thaddius.

All in all, it was a pretty interesting night.

We didn’t accomplish much, but I had fun, because I enjoyed shooting stuff… and I enjoyed seeing that there are folks that are out there running pugs, and being responsible and considerate of others. They just want to get their raid on, clearly don’t have a big enough guild to do it entirely from within, try and pug it, and see no reason why they shouldn’t.

Would I have liked the chance at more loot?

Sure, who wouldn’t?

But what I liked more was the attitude of the entire pugged raid, that the problems were just that… problems to be overcome, no more, no less, and no reason to freak out on people.

Hopefully, the next time Inquisition wants to do a pug, they’re able to get 100% Deadly Boss Mods equipped folks.

And I can certainly say that, even if I knew I were going to spend another 2 and a half hours of wiping just to down one boss, if they were to invite me, I’d go again.

Fun times, fun times.

My only true regret, was that I invited Shadewynn, Melpo, and Lixie into the raid, and now all three of them are locked into a heroic Naxx instance that has bosses dead, even though two of them never even got to see one single boss die.

But next week will be a new week, with new opportunities. Right?

Thanks again for coming in with me, my friends. Despite the lateness of the night… it was fun. 🙂