If it's not one thing, it's another. The problems with my computer have been an ongoing issue for weeks. So far the latest fix has been working. So the computer gods had to come up with something new.
On Thursday Wild created a new toon, an alliance gnome named BruiserBabe (BB for short). BB is a death knight, and was born on the pvp server Boulderfist. Both the DER and Sis families of Silvermoon have relatives on Boulderfist, so, not to be left behind, the Wild family had to sow some seeds there as well.
Raising a death knight is a bit different than other races, as they begin life at level 55. There is a special starter zone for all death knights in the skies above the Plaguelands, and they must undergo rigorous and bloody tutoring before being allowed into the world at large. BB had just begun her training when strange things began happening around her. The world tilted and ...
My internet connection went down. I did the usual shut down, reboot, and reset process with computer, modem, and router, and about fifteen minutes later the connection came back up. Most probably it was some hitch with my Internet service. I got distracted by other things away from the computer and didn't get back until raid time Thursday night.
Our BoT raid leader has been on vacation, but he was back this week and, we thought, ready to rock again. But he abandoned us on Thursday night because he had - a date. Imagine, leaving his team for a woman! Couldn't he schedule a date on a non-raid night? Where are his priorities? What right ... oh, hello, Mrs Wild, what am I grumbling about? Uh, nothing dear.
Of course, the raid leader had given plenty of notice that he would be away Thursday night, and the backup raid leader had no problem getting our raid filled. We did have an interesting conundrum for a bit, though. We had too many healers. Five of the guildies invited into the raid had healers as their mains. It's a very unusual situation, but as readers have probably noticed, we are always scrambling to find DPSers to join the raid. It's just weird. So several guildies had to switch to alts in order to get a good grouping of players. There was also a player, Kg, that Wild and the cabal ran with way back in days of Karazahn who had recently come back to the game. Formerly a druid, he was now a paladin, and was on the healing team for the BWD 25 man earlier in the week, but otherwise had just been doing Heroics. With our raid leader out (who was also our main tank), we needed a second tank, and Kg was pressed into service.
So, we had healers who went to alts to play DPSers and we were substituting our out on a date main tank with a tank who has not only not seen the inside of BoT yet, but had not done any raid tanking at all. Just our usual, competent team of professionals. :)
I have to give Kg a great deal of credit. He jumped in and played his heart out while still learning how to tank with a paladin and learning the strats in a raid he's never seen before. The other tank, a druid, is a great tank but would admit he is not the best at explaining things. Directions and guidance to Kg left a lot of room for interpretation, and that resulted in some pretty outlandish situations that had us all laughing in amazement.
We made our first trash pulls without incident, but when pulling the side groups Kg didn't kite them over to where our DPS and healers were, not being told or not remembering to do that. Wild went chasing after Kg when his health started accelerating toward zero, but all that did was make Wild the next target when the tank died. We survived the pull (even Wild), but we were already giggling at the "unorthodox" approach.
Then there was the gauntlet. The gauntlet had bugged on us last week, but that was nothing compared to this week. Our druid tank is very good, but he seemed a bit distracted on this night, maybe because he was trying so hard to help out Kg. The druid tank got himself killed not once, but twice, during the gauntlet by miss-positioning himself and getting knocked off the stairs to certain death. Every raider knows NOT to get themselves into that position. Things went very crazy for a bit, but we finally completed the gauntlet and moved forward to the next set of mobs.
Another event occurred in between the two deaths by the druid tank. Wild's internet connection went down again. Wild was also deposited at the beginning of the instance when I got back in game and I had to run all the way back to the group as they waited for Wild to get there and see what they were all standing there looking at.
What we saw caused our jaws to drop. Between us and the doorway that leads to the next encounter was the usual 3-5 mobs. But to the left AND the right of them were groups of additional mobs, all packed together. They were so close to each other there seemed no way to pull one group without pulling all of them.
But that wasn't the worst. Standing in the doorway behind that small army of mobs was - I kid you not - Cho'gal. Yes, Cho'gal, the final boss in BoT. Faced with that, what could we do? We attacked, of course. We wiped twice. After the first wipe Cho'gal did not reappear, but it took another wipe before we had killed enough mobs to finish the remainder off.
See - I wasn't lying about Cho'gal.
We went on to the Twins. The druid, perhaps a little unnerved by his problems with the gauntlet, put Kg into a trial by fire by making him the tank for the Twins. It was a very rough fight and there were a lot of mistakes, not only by our learning tank. Wild got caught in the fire from the sky and died by running in the wrong direction. Not Wild's most shining moment. Three others lay dead as well when the dragons fell. Credit the kill to the rest of the raid, improving gear, and maybe another nerf? Not sure, but given all our mistakes I couldn't believe we actually took the Twins down.
We mowed down the two mobs to get to the room full of elemental mobs that are so challenging for the two tanks. Kg was about to get another trial by fire. Wild didn't get to see it, though. My internet went down again. And this time I could not get it back. Neither could my internet service, who said it was not a problem at their end. Of course. After a lot of checking this and that, I had to make an appointment for them to come out and figure out what was wrong. That won't happen until Saturday. Sigh.
By the way, right before the my internet connection died again, our on a date raid leader came back in game. Looks like Wild's replacement had arrived right on time. And just my luck - I bet they get to Cho'gal this week. And Wild won't be there.
PS - So how is it that I posted this? The internet came up on its own this morning. I still have an appointment with the techs, which I was able to move up to this afternoon, so we'll see how things go. It's been up for about an hour now.
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