The Gamer Report 3/31/10

I tried playing my main, a level 80 Forsaken priest, on World of Warcraft last night. I had just gotten done running four and a half miles and relaxing at my desk at work with the pleasant post-run glow suffusing my body. I had a few moments until I needed to change the buffer on my Southern Blot, so I thought "Hey, why not dust old baldy off and take him for a spin" since, ever since I stopped raiding consistently about this time last year, Benn hasn't really had much of a chance to go stretch his legs. I initially had a thought to go do some of the quests that are about to explode once the Cataclysm happens, but as per usual, the healer effect happened almost immediately when I turned the game on..."Hey, you want to come heal this heroic?" (Ok, that's not really fair. Pat just asked if anybody wanted to go run a random heroic with him. It did, however, remind me of the old days in BC when occasionally I would just flat out not turn the game on because I didn't want to be bugged to go heal something.) I relented, and we partied up and joined the queue, unsurprisingly getting a group straight away since we were the tank and healer for the group. As the loading screen appeared, however, we let out a collective groan as we saw the reflective ice blue and black concept painting from the Halls of Reflection appear on the screen.

Now, let me be straight about something. Halls of Reflection isn't that bad of an instance. Admittedly, my gear is a touch behind the curve for what it was designed for because of my abandoning raiding a year ago, but it really shouldn't be that tough. You literally just need to hide behind a corner and have semi-well behaved dps to finish the hard part of this dungeon off with a minimum of fuss. Add to that the fact that my tank is geared in ICC equipment, and this should have been a cakewalk (albeit a sort of frantic one.) However, two things that can and will make this instance significantly harder are A) mobs escaping the tank's control (since, as per expectations, the first things they're going to do is turn and gank the healer, aka me the under-geared one) and B) having bad dps who don't kill the trash fast, causing the hard hitting trash mobs to survive longer and putting a greater and greater strain on the healer to keep everyone alive during the pulls, a problem which is compounded since the trash comes in waves and there is no time to stop and drink between them. But still, this should have been cake, right?

Yeah, not so much.

To skip a lot of belaboring of the point, essentially after our first attempt it became apparent that three of our dps were only just reaching the point where they could do this dungeon with the gear scores they had available, as they were pulling down an appalling two thousand dps (a decent target would be at least twice that) and one, a warrior, was throwing out aoe damage on the trash packs as they were coming in, before Pat could actually get hold of them. Remember that list of ways to fail this dungeon? Yeah. So these guys were basically going down and checking them off in turn. Follow that up with another wipe and a belligerent dps who, after the wipe, determined that the problem was with "Fucking fail heals and tank" (I strive to point out that he died three times during the course of the wipes, and trying to keep him alive was nearly causing me to ignore the tank to the point of nearly causing wipes during each pull) and we have a fine "Hey, welcome back to playing your main" from World of Warcraft, causing me to remember all the fun activities I do in my spare time that DON'T involve nerd rage flying at me through the internetz. The whole situation boiled down to the warlock in question and my friend Pat engaging in a chat channel shouting match and playing chicken over who was going to drop group first (if we're so fail, why was he so adamant about staying in the group? I'll never understand fail dps logic,) leading to me, ultimately, dropping group in disgust and going back to work, reflecting that this was definitely one of the things I did not miss about "end-game" WoW.

However, after that I went with the same group of friends to Lake Wintergrasp and dropped the Alliance without breaking a sweat, ultimately pushing them back to their spawning point and killing off even the Alliance NPCs hiding there. Owned. So I guess it wasn't a complete waste of an evening.