Wednesday (18 Aug) - Rakta my World

Wednesday (18 Aug) - Rakta my World

After what seemed like an endless time out for the Wild family, Wild at least found some action with the G2 ICC10 raid group on Wednesday night. The group had two straight weeks of steadily growing progress and we were starting to murmur about the possibilities of our group. Could the G2 overtake the G1 group? After a slow start, G2's successes in the past two weeks put G2 just one boss behind the more experienced G1. We were even starting to see a glimmer of hope at reaching the final boss, the Lich King.

Wednesday night was a bit of a setback, however. We had an intact regular group, the same group we'd had the last two weeks. But, where last week we always seemed to get past trouble, riding the positive edge of success, on this night we slipped back, unable to deliver that extra effort. It's not that we did badly. We downed five boss encounters. We failed to kill our target for the sixth boss, Rotface, who we had beaten two weeks in a row, but Rotface is not on farm yet. But we are setting higher standards for ourselves now, and this did not live up to those new expectations.

So, what went wrong?

The first two battles, against Marrowgar and Deathwhisper, went mostly according to plan. In fact, we were encouraged in the DW fight when we overcame some trouble with the weekly quest involving DW and not only beat her but got the quest done as well. We didn't have a true third tank to kite the mob involved in the quest, but one of our DPS specced death knights did an excellent job of handling that role. We rode the edge of success to victory - this time.

We then badly bungled the easiest fight in ICC - the Gunship. We wiped on our first attempt, which was very embarrassing. It's hard to figure out how we managed to do that, but lack of DPS on the enemy ship forced the tank to stay onboard way too long, costing him his life despite Wild's best effort to keep him standing. The tank's job on the enemy ship is to tank the Commander of the enemy ship. The Commander can't be killed, and deals ferocious damage. The longer that fight goes, the more likely the tank will be overwhelmed. We then made a bad decision not to send our #2 tank to the enemy ship; instead, we pressed our death knight into that role. Wild knew mere seconds into that battle that our DK could not withstand barrage of attacks from the enemy Commander. After a few seconds of combat with Wild pouring on all the healing I could muster, the enemy Commander hammered the DK with back to back crits and our DK went down. So now it was two tanks dead, and our other tank had more than enough trouble on our own ship that he could not be sent over to the enemy ship. It was a stalemate we would lose. We did beat the encounter on our second attempt, but some of the wind had been taken out of our sails.

Festergut also took two tries to kill, a boss we should not have any trouble with by now. DPS was down from last week, so the battles were running longer, but we didn't know why.

In addition to the time taken because of the extra attempts, we again had trouble getting raiders ready and there were delays and delays and delays. It is getting more and more worrisome, particularly since Wild's healing partners seem to be the most put out by it. Both of the priest healers in the raid have started openly questioning the lack of organization. In a way the growing unrest is a result of our success. When we started, we had no idea how far we would get, and we were happy with whatever we were able to accomplish. I don't think anyone was seriously thinking about downing the Lich King. But now that goal is at least on the horizon, and we know that we have a chance to get there. The problem is that I don't think it will get better. There are things we can't change, such as this group has raiders with real life issues that will affect us during raids. They're good people and we make allowances for those times. But there are also raiders who can't or won't adjust to additional rigor in the raid. During early trash pulls, for example, the raid leader and the tank asked a raider repeatedly to stand behind a wall so that the tank could "line of sight" (or LOS) a group of mobs to avoid having the mobs plow into the rest of the raid. The raider simply refused to comply. The tank pulled anyway, and of course the disobedient raider was targeted and attacked. It was stupid and unnecessary, but little was done about it. Via unspoken agreement among the healers, he got no heals and died. There were jokes made about that, trying to tease him into listening, but that behavior won't likely change.

The one thing that I think we must change, is just to get raiders to get in position and ready for the next battle quickly. Even if they then have to go afk for a moment, at least we are all in one place. I think that would save at least thirty minutes of wasted time, enough to get in 2-3 extra battles. We only had time for three tries against Rotface, and got him to 6% on our third try. We might have killed him had there been time for one more attempt. I'm going to talk to Lady Hunter about that for tonight's (Thursday) run.

Little Rakta had her own embarrassing moment on Wednesday. Rakta is a level 11 hunter that lives in Booty Bay. She is a go between the horde and alliance in transferring stuff through the neutral auction house. She happened to be on when a group cleared ZG (Zul'Gurub), a 20 player raid for level 60s. The victory imparted a buff to all players in the area, greatly increasing player stats for the next two hours. Booty Bay is in the same zone as ZG and Rakta got the buff. She was excited and eager to get out of Booty Bay for a bit to take advantage of the buff. As a level 11 she needed to get where she could both get experience and survive the encounter. She chose to catch the boat at Booty Bay to Ratchet, a neutral town in the Barrens. There is a stretch of land bordering a river that divides the Barrens from Durotar that is well stocked with level 13-16 mobs.

Rakta wasn't sure how she and her combat owl pet, Dargh, would do against mobs 2-5 levels higher than they were, but with the buff those mobs died relatively quickly. Rakta was a skinner, but the mobs were too high level for her level of skinning. As she worked northward, she got an idea. She would kill mobs she couldn't skin until she reached level 12. Then she would take the bridge across the river to Durotar, where lower level mobs could be slaughtered to raise her skinning level. She could then work her way to the main city of Orgrimmar to see the trainer there.

There was just one tiny detail Rakta forgot. Rakta made level 12 as she came into sight of the bridge. She was happy to be out of Booty Bay for awhile and was having a great time with Dargh. Rakta approached the bridge - and was suddenly surrounded by yelling orcs who rushed in and attacked her. What was going on? Rakta thought as she made a panicked attempt to escape. Dargh picked off a couple of the attackers, but they were all at least ten levels higher and no buff was going to save her or Dargh. As a level 12 she had very few "save me" spells. Rakta died.

Really, it wasn't Rakta's fault. The "tiny detail"? The Barrens and Durotar are Horde territory. The bridge is manned by Horde troops. Rakta is Alliance, mortal enemy of the Horde. I'd totally forgotten that Rakta was Alliance, and I'd gotten her killed.

The death also removed Rakta's buff, so her two hours of freedom was curtailed and after rezzing she had to make her way back to Booty Bay and her day job. Rakta wished she'd gotten more time, but was philosophical about it, and still happy for the time she did get.