Archive for the “Serpentshrine Cavern” Category

Tuesday night’s raid, we were all over the place. Attempts were taken at Al’ar and while we did great on Phase 1, Phase 2 was… well… not so great. After 2 hours at it, with everyone getting more and more frustrated, we pulled out and went to go kick Void Reaver’s butt nicely before we called it an evening.

Last night, we waterwalked over to the Leo trash in SSC, skipping Hydross and Lurker. Once we got to Leo, we had the same thing happen there that had happened at Al’ar: messy, all over the place, and once we got Phase 1 over with, complete chaos. But that last attempt at him, something happened to the raid. You could feel it. Everyone was ticked, since the previous week they had one shot him. He was mocking the raid. This was WAR. Everyone snapped into focus, and we had a great kill with just seconds left on the enrage timer.

For loot, this guild runs something I had not come into contact with before running with them: Loot Council. To me, it’s not better or worse than other distribution methods. It’s just a different method. Every method has the chance to be abused, so you just shrug and go with it as long as it’s being handled fairly. Last night, for the first time since I started raiding with them, I saw something I wanted. There were 3 others there who wanted it and I figured they’d get it before me, but I tossed my name in and linked my gear it would replace as requested. I think I just about fell over when I got it.

So now, Siana’s the proud owner of Rift Stalker Gauntlets. I’ve already regemmed to bring my hitcap back down to max instead of way over max, and gained quite a bit doing so. I just have to get them enchanted tonight before raid and I’ll be all set.

Here’s hoping I get everything done tonight before raid that I want to. ::crosses fingers::

I got an invite to SSC fun last night with the guild that The Boyfriend and I had run TK with Wednesday night. They were up to Leo, which they haven’t managed to get down as of yet. Sadly, last night they weren’t able to get him down last night either, even with some insanely close calls. The last attempt was with him at 3k health left. That one just made everyone cry. After we were done, the other hunter in the group and I hung out for a while talking hunter macros. I showed her what I had and I think she has some plots now for some of her own.

A couple of days previously, I’d talked to some of my friends in WoW and asked if I could use their shadowcloth cooldowns. They were gracious enough to say sure, and I sent off the mats. My mage is still frost spec (and happily so), and in desperate need of the Frozen Shadowweave set. After I got their shadowweave back, I found I had enough cloth to make the last piece of the set: the robe. So as of last night (or early this morning, I kinda lost track), my mage is now decked out in all her Frozen Shadowweave goodness. /cheer

(Now if I can just get her a better weapon, get rid of the green pants, and get some new shiny trinkets…)

Today? Here’s hoping that I can get into some Heroic Ramparts or Heroic BLood Furnace runs on Sia. I need Exalted on her with Honor Hold and had some volunteers to help get it for her. ::grin:: The rest of the weekend? Who knows.

Listen, I know I didn’t see you on our usual day last week. I know I canceled on you on pretty short notice. However, I really was ill and under the Nyquil fog. I told you I wasn’t coming in good faith.

So meeting up with you last night, I foolishly expected things to be okay. I mean, I communicated. However, all I got from you for the first 30 minutes were rejections, snippy comebacks, early trap breaking, trap resistances, and just plain weird behavior. That’s not like you. I know you’re better than that. Granted, I will give you points for finally acting like your usual self towards the end of our evening. But really, was that prior 30 minute span of snit-fits the best way to handle things? The most mature way?

::sigh:: It really pains me to say this, but I think I might have to start seeing other bosses in other instances. I’ve talked to Void Reaver a couple of times and he’s quite the charmer. I mean, he drops T5! And those Greaves of his. Oh man. It’s enough to really turn this Hunter girl’s head.

Bottom line is this: unless you put more into this relationship than you did last night, I’m going to have to call off this relationship, because I don’t really see this going anywhere. I would like to say though, thank you for the shards. They were lovely and look great hanging in the guild bank.

Love,
Nightravyn

Class Lead: ok I want to make sure Pally Tank has aggro on Leo during elf phase.
Class Lead: no more dying!
Me: I’ll try!
Class Lead:
Class Lead: well if you die, I have to molest your corpse
Hunter #3: well dang, that’s what I’ve been doing wrong!
Me: you realize you’ve just given me reason to die, right?

oh yeah, we have issues… >.>

The past two nights of raids have been… frustrating. We’re working on SSC this week, and everyone showed up Tuesday night ready to kick butt. Tanks were assigned, healers were put in order, Hunters got their misdirects. You could feel the eagerness in the raid. We were there to kill. Three bosses in two hours? You are SO on.

End result? Two bosses and a lot of “…whut?” People’s timing was just ever so slightly off. It never went “OMG! DOOM!” wrong, but it wasn’t one of our better efforts. There was a lot of honest confusion as to what was causing the weirdness. So last night, once more into the breach we go… and had the same thing happen. This time though, it took us most of the two hours to get up and running, then we finally downed Tidewalker. Multiple wipes, multiple times, including one where The Boyfriend died within the first 7 seconds. As he was the Main Tank, it was a Bad Thing.

I hate those nights where things just won’t work out. You don’t know why it’s being such a pain, but things are just messed up all over the place. It wasn’t like quicksand, where not matter how hard you struggle, you just sink faster and deeper. This was just totally random. One boss fight would go 8 minutes, the next 30 seconds. It just ends up being a frustrating experience for everyone, knowing that you can down this guy, but something in the fates is giggling at your guild flinging themselves into battle.

Tonight’s ZA and I hope, I really hope, that whatever’s plagued us the past couple of days goes away and we can get back on track for Saturday. Otherwise, this is just going to be a painful 4 hours tonight. :;sigh::

The weekend was not what I had planned. Well okay, about half of it was what I had planned, the other half wasn’t. Friday night we went and threw bees in Leo’s face in SSC. I think we all just about died laughing on a 1% wipe as the last standing person, a rogue, was frantically stabbing him, trying to get that last little bit down right before he got slammed into the wall. Did I mention the enrage timer had kicked in by then too? Oh yeah, fun times.

We did get Leo down, and took our first look at Karathress. I managed to almost wipe the group… or rather my in-game cat and one of the real life cats conspired to try and wipe the raid. We’re standing around listening to the healers discuss how they’re going to handle the groups. This will be our first attempt at this boss, and we’re all pretty sure that we’re gonna be doing our usual “pull-fightfightwhoops-splat”. Hey, it’s tradition! But the healers still want to make sure everyone’s covered. Tanks are ready, hunters are ready with misdirect assignments, and everyone’s still clumped up in one spot so we can reapply any buffs needed before the pull. I have my MD-assigned tank’s mob targeted and we’re starting to wrap the healer talk up.

That’s when my real-life cat hopped up onto the desk, put herself between the monitor and the keyboard, flopped down, and rolled onto the keys.

As I’m trying to get her off the keyboard, I hear the “fwoosh” of Dash kick in and see Mirya racing off towards my MD tank’s mob. At the same time, I hear The Boyfriend calmly say “Pet.” Then slightly more concerned “Pettt.” Then pretty frantic “PET!” right as the Raid Leader yelps “PET!” What they didn’t see was me flinging one surprised cat onto a nearby bed and pounding the passive pet keys to get the other pet to return. At least Mirya didn’t actually trigger the mobs to attack. I managed to hit the keys fast enough to pull her back. Talk about waking your raid up! We didn’t actually get Karathress down, but we have a better idea of where we’re going from here on.

Sunday, Uber Pally took The Boyfriend and I through Sunken Temple on our level 50s so we could get those quests in there done. They’re done now, thank god, and I can move on to other things with her. Then Aerye had connection issues ::wishing evil things to her ISP and that she’s online again soon:: so I took her spot in Kara. It wasn’t the most ideal group that walked in, and we had to skip Illhoof and Nightbane, but everything else in there died nicely.

So wasn’t what I was expecting for a weekend, but was okay overall. Tonight? Time off. Mmm time off.

Yey for Real Life crap. :;sigh::

Yesterday was a bit of a weird thing. Bad news, then dealing with bad news, then napping from exhaustion from dealing with bad news, led to me being semi out of it when raid rolled around. Not badly out of it, jsut slightly off-kilter. We have a bunch of new people in the guild and they’re still learning the way we do things. After sitting around a while getting set up, we were off and running. The goal? 3 SSC bosses in 2 hours. Hydross was first, and I noticed that one of our two resist tanks (the other being The Boyfriend) wasn’t talking. Turns out, Tank 2 was sick and only there to do the Hydross fight. After that, he promptly logged. The Boyfriend also was not feeling well (nothing like having the raid leader comment “Damn, dude, you sound rough!”) and most of his instructions were coming via raid chat instead of Vent. Lead Hunter was also not well, I was having back pain, one of the other raid leaders was not 100%, and people were getting irritable all over. Not one of our better nights for real life raid health.

But after the nice Hydross kill, we were down one person from Tank 2 logging. No one else was around, so we shrugged and said “Let’s keep going and see how far we get.” End result? We 24-manned Lurker and Tidewalker, and one-shot them both. Think everyone was just so ready for everything to be over so they could go deal with whatever was causing them issues, everything was getting annihilated.

The plan for tonight is to see if we can one-shot Leo and go take a poke at Karathress. Tomorrow night is ZA, and Friday we go convince Void Reaver to lay down arms and surrender peacefully… or we kick his ass. Either’s good. Nevermind, it’s TK tonight and back to SSC on Friday.

Edit: Leafshine is taking a stand on PvE Tree nerfs. Personally, I’m sick and tired of having the PvE game “broken” because of Arena/PvP. I know WoW was made to be a PvP or PvE game. I get that. It’s lovely. I choose to not PvP in any form cos I’m a huge carebear. But i didn’t join WoW cos it had an uber dueling system in place where I could have a team that could go up against other players. I joined WoW cos of the lore, quests, and ability to go into instances and see big bad ugly things die after they try to eat me and 4/9/19/24/39 of my closest friends. Balance for arena is not the same as balance for endgame. (My opinion, deal.). Please quit trying to “balance” all the classes to compete in Arena and forgetting that we have some @%$#@$ bosses in instances to kill and not everyone in the world wants to PvP. /snark off

Going off my usual “once we can kill the boss twice in a row, we’ve got it” basis, I can now say that yes, Leo is now marked off on the list of bosses for my guild. So now we’re 4/6 on SSC, and deciding what to do next. Personally, I’m hoping we get to go to Tempest Keep next and take a few shots at the Void Reaver and start working on those bosses. I know that Vashj is going to be rough and we have some new people to the guild that still need a bit of gearing. Not to mention, I think we’d like to take more shots at Mags and see about getting him down. We’ve just not had the right people to do him. :;sigh::

Last night was a great night for the guild. We went into SSC, downed Hydross in one shot, two-shotted Lurker (a bad “whoops” moment early on), and then went charging for Tidewalker. Considering that the guild only does two hours of raid on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, 3 bosses in that amount of time is great. First time we’ve done that and everyone was happy.

At least I think they were. Right in the last 10% of Tidewalker, my internet connection, which had been a little flaky all night, suddenly went boom. I checked to see if it was the router, but nope, it was the actual connection. I kept my fingers crossed that it would come up fast, but 5 minutes later, it was still out and I figured that Tidewalker was down and the loot was being divided up. Some shoulders dropped that I can’t remember if I needed (I have a list at home), but ah well.

Tonight is Leo and hopefully downing him in less than 3 tries. After that, it’s off to Fathom Lord Karathress for the start of learning on him. Eep.

So the past couple of days I’ve been off taking more time off than I thought I was going to. I actually wandered back into WoW on Tuesday night for the first of our raid nights in SSC. It was an odd night, little slips here and there, but we got the job done. 2 bosses down (Lurker and Hydross), and hit a stopping point for the night. Last night, instead of heading for Tidewalker first, the raid leaders decided to hit Leo. I quietly cheered since I’m going to be out of town on business and would have missed being in on a guild first kill. Wipe 1, wipe 2, wipe 3…. then he’s out!

So the guild now has 2 members with T5 gear (no not me, but two other highly deserving guildies). Woot go team!

The biggest pain in the butt for me that fight is reconfiguring my action bars for easy access in the inner demon fight. Wing Clip, Serpent Sting, Snake Trap - they all get moved into one of the first 6 slots for easy access. Since the demons are vulnerable to Nature damage and you have to kill it within 30 seconds, I wanted to make sure I could get as much damage out there as I could. Add in having to get the killing shot instead of your pet and things get, erm, interesting.

Just in time for me coming back to blogging, I get to leave town tomorrow. Be back Monday!