Thursday (11 Mar) - Who's Screwing With My Raid?

Thursday (11 Mar) - Who's Screwing With My Raid?

Wild was in game Thursday night getting a little crafting done and watching the trade channel for anything interesting that might be going on. There was no MM group ICC ten man, and Wild misses it - he even misses waiting around and shooting the breeze with MM friends even when no raid developed. In Trade chat there were a couple of players advertising for more players for ICC10 PUGs, and one of them caught Wild's attention. The raid was being formed by an MM guildie. I didn't know that raider, but I wondered if it might be one of their regular raids that just needed a couple extra players? Wild checked his Friends list, but there was no one I knew from MM in game. I have a pretty large list of MM guildies that Wild has run with, so it was likely a PUG run and not an MM guild raid, so that lessened Wild's interest. A call for raiders for a VoA25 run came up at the same time, and since it was already close to 10pm, I decided to grab the shorter VoA run instead of committing what could be several hours to an ICC10 run.

Wild asked for an invite to the VoA25 run, and got a quick reply given that Wild was a healer. The raid started filling pretty quickly, but raiders were scattered about and as with most PUGs, it took awhile to get everyone assembled. While we all milled around, a trio of alliance players made the wait a lot more fun and interesting. The three parked themselves just outside the entrance to the main hall in Wintergrasp where the portal into VoA is. They were on their riding mounts, rising out of range when they needed to, and then swooping down to engage raiders that weren't paying attention. There were a LOT of horde players in the main hall, so those three allies died every time they attacked. But they managed to take out 1-2 (and sometimes 3) horde players each time they tried, likely because they were in full pvp gear and the horde players they were attacking were likely geared for the VoA run (and weren't wearing pvp gear).

But it was a fun distraction, particularly when knots of horde players switched into pvp gear and ambushed them, knocking them off their mounts and then eviscerating them.

Raiders started to file into VoA, but got a rude welcome. "You are about to enter an instance that is already in progress (1 of 4 bosses down). Do you wish to continue? You will be locked to this instance." When Wild saw that I immediately left the instance. Someone in the raid had already killed a boss in VoA this week, and that boss was 99% likely to have been Toravon, the one boss we wanted to kill ourselves. The raid leader started asking in raid chat who was already locked to the instance. When there was no reply he asked again, telling the raid to check their raid calendar, which displays any and all dungeons that the player is locked to. When still no one responded . . . well. Guess who it was? The raid leader, who had somehow forgotten he'd already killed Toravon earlier in the week.

The raid leader had to switch to an alt and then we all had to leave the raid and get re-invited. It's a good thing the raid leader had shown himself to be a pretty good guy, apologized for his screwup, and we only had to replace a couple of raiders who quit the raid.

The VoA run itself went mostly as expected. We wiped on our first attempt at Toravon, but we'd gotten him to 1% and if any one of three shaman in the raid had bothered to use Bloodlust we'd have killed him. He went down easily on our second attempt. No druid loot dropped. The raid slipped to 20 raiders as folks left, but that was plenty to take on Koralon, and we killed him, too. Two leather pieces dropped, an ilevel 245 DPS shoulder and an ilevel 251 pair of pvp caster gloves. Since no one else was interested, Wild took them both. That's now two pieces of pvp gear for Wild, and who knows? Maybe Wild will go kitty DPS some day.

JB had some fun, too, as she wrangled herself a spot in the weekly frost raid on Flame Leviathon. JB's gear is sprinkled liberally with pvp gear, and that would likely keep her out of most of the weeklies. But for Levi experience with the fight is a lot more important than gear, and JB got her invite. It was a quick rout, too, getting JB 5 frost and 5 triumph emblems. And she also won an upgrade off Levi, beating another raider in the roll, 97 to 83. JB now has a new chestpiece, [Firestrider Chestguard].

Philly didn't get her full run in yesterday, but what she was able to do got her 8% of the way to level 78.

I also looked at that website you mentioned, erik. I like it! Some excellent discussions, including the one about heirloom gear and the forthcoming changes to pvp BGs in the next patch. By the way, pre-patch downloads started with the maintenance this past Tuesday, so Patch 3.3.3 has gotten a step closer.