Raiding - A Flexible NORMAL raid (of sorts) and Uq the doorman
Flex, normal blah. I can't say normal without people saying "Do you mean old flex?" So I am going to stick to saying NORMAL from now. And I mean the easiest flex that is available. Normal. NORMAL.
Everyone wanted to bring alts. I couldn't ask our usual tanks to tank. So I went and did the unthinkable, which I had done now for twice in the last few days and I hadn't done it for more than a year. I went and specced guardian.
Now my gear is not quite right for guardian. I am wearing my feral clothes for one (and feral tier), and I am wearing a DPS cloak. The only thing going for me is that I have good gear, thanks to all the leftovers from raid that I pick up.
So I was tanking and I wondered who was going to tank with me. And guess who I had? It was Aza on his warrior. He would have had more experience than me with tanking since had tanked Challenge Modes. The most I ever do is dungeons.
Obviously one advantage is that there are much fewer abilities to worry about now. It makes tanking a lot easier, a lot more... Vanilla. Now I wish I had three specs so I could continue doing kitty as I was just getting used to the whole thing.
Our usual tanks, Aimei and Exray, were on the crappiest alts ever. And I had to rely on them to tell me what to do. I had Aimei on Skype and I think Aza had Exray on Skype so we were pretty much hand held the whole way. Exray even did the marking and the pull timers so I didn't have to do much.
Tanking is very different to healing, I must say. The most running I had to do was for Iron Juggernaut as I frantically searched for the bombs to click on and jump on them when there were a billion bodies in my way. I didn't get all of them as the DPS were often helping out.
I tanked all the way up to Garrosh and I admit it, I had fun. I may have taunted at weird times, and I often stood in bad things (but this time they don't kill me!) but it was rather relaxing.
There was one standout moment that I shall immortalise in a Faily Frostwolf Comic at a later stage because to me it has gone down in Frostwolves history as one of those memorable moments. A memorable Frostwolf moment is usually a totally hilarious face palming stuff (or stuff up) of some sort. Like Faithless and elevators (yes, would you believe she died in the lift after Nazgrim - Faithy style!). Or Asys always forgetting to repair and breaking all his gear mid fight. Or any of the times we forgot to kill the engineers (always blame the ranged!). Even Sev's bad luck with getting cloaks on bonus rolls in SoO! Or me and Thok.. to name a few.
So Uq/Eq was afk, and so we started Spoils without him. It was going well. We were doing great, and I was happy that I was getting the hang of this opening boxes thing and not having to worry about facing mobs with my water spray as a healer. We were on the second side, and the other half of the raid had finished their half and pulled the lever, they were waiting on us. We were just killing the last mob, the lever turned all shiny and someone was running over to pull it....
... and suddenly we jumped to the cinematic of running over to Siegecrafter Blackfuse trash. That was weird. Is that something new that happens after you complete the spoils encounter?
There were screams and yells of WTF and Nooooo! I hit escape and sure enough we were standing at Blackfuse trash. What happened?
"OMG!" exclaimed Exray. "I think someone opened the door to Blackfuse..."
"Uq did it! He came back from AFK!"
"Wait did that reset Spoils?"
We all rushed back. Sure enough, Spoils was reset. Uq was sheepishly apologetic but I was laughing my ass off. Some of the others weren't amused, but I thought it was funny. Not my fault they don't have a sense of humour. So we did the fight again and I am pleased to say that I learned something. Now if anyone goes AFK they are NOT to touch any doors. NO TOUCH!
We finished a bit past 11 and I thought that it went so easily with all those alts that perhaps we should do heroic SoO next week on Saturday. But we would need some time to clear beforehand! Maybe do some preclearing? Or maybe use someone's save? Either way, I think it would be a good thing and I'm looking forward to giving it a try. Maybe I should start at 8 so we can get some stuff cleared? Just a thought!
Everyone wanted to bring alts. I couldn't ask our usual tanks to tank. So I went and did the unthinkable, which I had done now for twice in the last few days and I hadn't done it for more than a year. I went and specced guardian.
Now my gear is not quite right for guardian. I am wearing my feral clothes for one (and feral tier), and I am wearing a DPS cloak. The only thing going for me is that I have good gear, thanks to all the leftovers from raid that I pick up.
So I was tanking and I wondered who was going to tank with me. And guess who I had? It was Aza on his warrior. He would have had more experience than me with tanking since had tanked Challenge Modes. The most I ever do is dungeons.
Obviously one advantage is that there are much fewer abilities to worry about now. It makes tanking a lot easier, a lot more... Vanilla. Now I wish I had three specs so I could continue doing kitty as I was just getting used to the whole thing.
Our usual tanks, Aimei and Exray, were on the crappiest alts ever. And I had to rely on them to tell me what to do. I had Aimei on Skype and I think Aza had Exray on Skype so we were pretty much hand held the whole way. Exray even did the marking and the pull timers so I didn't have to do much.
Tanking is very different to healing, I must say. The most running I had to do was for Iron Juggernaut as I frantically searched for the bombs to click on and jump on them when there were a billion bodies in my way. I didn't get all of them as the DPS were often helping out.
I tanked all the way up to Garrosh and I admit it, I had fun. I may have taunted at weird times, and I often stood in bad things (but this time they don't kill me!) but it was rather relaxing.
There was one standout moment that I shall immortalise in a Faily Frostwolf Comic at a later stage because to me it has gone down in Frostwolves history as one of those memorable moments. A memorable Frostwolf moment is usually a totally hilarious face palming stuff (or stuff up) of some sort. Like Faithless and elevators (yes, would you believe she died in the lift after Nazgrim - Faithy style!). Or Asys always forgetting to repair and breaking all his gear mid fight. Or any of the times we forgot to kill the engineers (always blame the ranged!). Even Sev's bad luck with getting cloaks on bonus rolls in SoO! Or me and Thok.. to name a few.
So Uq/Eq was afk, and so we started Spoils without him. It was going well. We were doing great, and I was happy that I was getting the hang of this opening boxes thing and not having to worry about facing mobs with my water spray as a healer. We were on the second side, and the other half of the raid had finished their half and pulled the lever, they were waiting on us. We were just killing the last mob, the lever turned all shiny and someone was running over to pull it....
... and suddenly we jumped to the cinematic of running over to Siegecrafter Blackfuse trash. That was weird. Is that something new that happens after you complete the spoils encounter?
There were screams and yells of WTF and Nooooo! I hit escape and sure enough we were standing at Blackfuse trash. What happened?
"OMG!" exclaimed Exray. "I think someone opened the door to Blackfuse..."
"Uq did it! He came back from AFK!"
"Wait did that reset Spoils?"
We all rushed back. Sure enough, Spoils was reset. Uq was sheepishly apologetic but I was laughing my ass off. Some of the others weren't amused, but I thought it was funny. Not my fault they don't have a sense of humour. So we did the fight again and I am pleased to say that I learned something. Now if anyone goes AFK they are NOT to touch any doors. NO TOUCH!
We finished a bit past 11 and I thought that it went so easily with all those alts that perhaps we should do heroic SoO next week on Saturday. But we would need some time to clear beforehand! Maybe do some preclearing? Or maybe use someone's save? Either way, I think it would be a good thing and I'm looking forward to giving it a try. Maybe I should start at 8 so we can get some stuff cleared? Just a thought!
We did our first raid after the patch yesterday as well (too many ppl missing on Wed, and too many bugs!). Things die insanely fast now, don't they?
ReplyDeleteWe did a bunch of alts as well, and I was trying to get used to my hunter again. We have a lot of alt tanks though, fortunately:)
We did it on the heroic difficulty, and cleared it all in a few hours (which included afk times, dc due to world server down and other issues). So if your guildies want to do it from scratch for alt gear, I think you're safe to do it. Easily done in one raid night. And you guys are much better than us :)
I want to see frostwolves comics! Go go go!!
Saga you are very difficult to locate online, do you know that :D
DeleteThat's good to hear about the heroic difficulty - I did one the other day with some friends on another server who are 14/14H and it was still a bit messy but it was easier. Itdid take almost 3 hours though, and Normal on Saturday did take 2 hours and we had done the first 4 bosses already.
I am working on that comic! But WoW model viewer doesn't work anymore coz of the new character models :(