Tuesday (3 May) - Grab Bag

Tuesday (3 May) - Grab Bag

The Wild family had to do the great heirloom shuffle on Tuesday. It's been awhile since that many family members saw action on the same day. As already mentioned, JB and EZ got game time. Add Philly, Shevils, Bean, Mery, and Java to the list as well.

Hunter Fortress was in full force Tuesday night, so of course we had trouble with the random battlegroup system. Not sure what changes were made as part of the 4.1 patch, but ever since that went live getting a BG going got much, much harder. In a nutshell, when the invite to a BG appears on the screen it immediately starts playing hide and seek. The pop up window will display for a second and then go away, and it would do that multiple times. No matter how fast you try to click on it, you never seem to get it just right, and after a few seconds either nothing will happen or we get a message that we "have left the battleground." A battleground we never got into. BG queues are long enough as it is, and now it's twice the trouble. They've tried to get a fix in place each week, but whatever they've tried is obviously not working.

Despite all that, the team did get into a Warsong Gulch battle after more than a 45 minute wait. We knew we were in trouble from the start. The Fortress entered a new bracket, for level 20-24. All four of us were level 20, which meant that at least 40% of the Horde team were at the lowest level allowed for this bracket. The Alliance team was full of hunters as well, and they were mostly level 24. The Fortress acquitted ourselves well. We lost (a foregone conclusion, really) but the team did finish with the top four horde scores in damage despite being at the bottom rung of the bracket. Speak even came in second overall, including the Alliance team.

It was already bedtime for See and Bean, but we all decided to hang on a bit longer to see if we got lucky. After close to 20 minutes of further inactivity, See called it a night. Bean waited a few more minutes, and then decided she would call it, as well. Before she could log off, though, we again got the flickering BG invite, this time for Arathi Basin. And we got in! Of course, Speak's first thought was, "See was jinxing us!" :P

We did well in AB. We tried to stay together but that rarely works for long, and we all ended up in different places. The battle went back and forth, with a lot of bases changing hands - more than usual. We won the match, so we'll be going into the May break on a winning streak. :-)

Hunter Fortress retired for the evening. Daeth (level 55 mage) and Mery (level 57 hunter) hooked up for some random dungeons and/or battlegroups. We ran into the same kinds of trouble with the flickering invite popups, but eventually was able to get into Arathi Basin. Daeth and Mery got separated early, and Mery found herself having to defend the Blacksmiths, which remained mostly in Horde hands. A very persistent alliance cat druid attacked Mery over and over. I think we killed each other about the same number of times in those one on ones. Mery's strafing buttons weren't working and that made staying away from that cat darn near impossible. When killed, Mery was always back in the druid's face before he could flip the base, so I think he only managed to turn it over to the alliance once in something like six attempts.

[Aside: All my toons have been having UI/keyboard settings problems that are likely the result of the patch and the corresponding upgrades to the addons that make those settings possible. I didn't realize how bad it was until I started playing some of those lesser used toons. Fixing all of that is likely going to have to wait until we get back from vacation, unfortunately.]

We then switched teams again, going to Kire and Java. Java's user interface, which was set to display the correct spells depending on his spec, had stopped working and would only show Java his healing spells, which wasn't what Java wanted. It took several minutes to manually readjust things.

Once Java was ready, we decided not to go to the random dungeon, but request a specific dungeon - Sunken Temple. We have not been back to ST since Cata (at least Java hadn't) and Java wanted to see it. It went much more quickly than the pre-Cata run, but it was a lot of fun. We then went the random route, but it was not a surprise that we got BRD, that endless place of the dozen plus bosses. At our level, BRD is one of the few places we'd be sent to.

We had a rather goofy group. Two players charged off, leaving Kire (our tank) and Java behind. The fifth player wandered about and then left the group. The dungeon was already partially done, which meant that one of us at least had started but not finished an earlier BRD. Java was pretty confused from the get-go, to say the least. Which might be why Java managed to get himself separated from Kire, and why Java got to fight a number of mob groups single-handedly in places he shouldn't have been blundering into. Eventually that got him killed, and Kire came and rescued him.

It seemed to take a long time, but we eventually had four players all in the same place at the same time. We never got another fifth. That didn't slow us down, though, and we completed the rest of the dungeon.

A week from today our real life Family will be on the road. Wild still has three raids to attend this week, but that will likely wrap up most of the activity before we go. Wish Wild luck that we'll down those pesky Djinn in Throne of the Four Winds Wednesday night!