Calmer, less frustrated, and a lot less dead.

Last night I was asked to kite the striders for the Vashj fight. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the fight, during one part you have to handle mobs that Vashj will call to her. One of the mobs can’t be tanked and must be kited around the fight area. It has a fear aura, and its melee attacks hit (on me, at least) for about 12,000. Anyone who has a slowing effect is supposed to be using it, as well as several items that can temporarily immobilize it. It needs to die quickly.

The end result of all this is you have an angry strider moving anywhere from 70-50% of it’s original speed, stopping and starting unpredictably from snares. Because the range on my shocks is only 20 yards, I have to stay between 10-20 yards so I can shock it without getting feared/smacked/pwned.

It’s challenging, to say the least, and I was getting very frustrated last night. It didn’t help when they swapped me with another elemental shaman who was able to kite it a bit better. I logged off less than happy.

I think what upset me more than anything was that I had set before me a task that my class is capable of handling, and I wasn’t able to follow through – and now I’m faced with a choice. I can be angry at myself for not knowing how to play my class and bitter that another shaman was able to follow through where I couldn’t, or I can look at what I was doing wrong and try to fix it.

I have to confess, the first choice was winning there for a few hours. Well, not so much the bitter as the angry. But making a mistake is understandable; refusing to learn from it is not. That said…

• I need to go somewhere and practice kiting without being hit, and ideally in a situation where I’m not going to cause 24 other people to have to repair if I can’t pull it off.
• I’m going to pick up the S1 PvP gloves – they’ll extend my shock range by 5 yards.
• I’m gonna smack myself on the back of the head for allowing myself to get so upset and flustered over something that’s just a game.

Any other ideas?

We still haven’t made it to phase three.

Four hours, and all we learned is that I fail as a kiter.

I’m at the bottom of the DPS list, and I don’t think I managed to ever kite one strider successfully without getting caught in it’s melee attack. Stupid 20 yard shock range.

>.>

Also, I would like to point out that not having played a DPS class before the release of the expansion, I’ve gotten spoiled by paladins – running Karazhan without Blessing of Salvation is kinda fun, if by fun you include eating the floor a lot. *grin*

By the time we got to Aran, we had to use a repair bot. We’re awesome! \m/

Note: This is not to say anything about the quality of our tanks and healers. I think we had perhaps one full wipe. The DPS just needs to learn to control their threat a teeny bit better.

1. The recipes that grant skillpoints are hugely expensive in materials required.

2. It’s a lot of ore, and farming ore without epic flight sucks. Even if you find it on the radar, people will swoop in and nab it before you get there.

The second reason is mainly the one that’s been causing problems. I’ve just been making the occasional repair bot here and there (guaranteed skillpoint, yay), but really not making any progress. I mean, the only real reason to hit 375 was the epic flying machine, and I was nowhere near the amount of gold needed for epic flight.

Then the other day my girlfriend just dropped the gold in my lap for epic flight. Isn’t she awesome?

Of course, the first thing I did with epic flight was the Blade’s Edge Cave Run. I mean, that’s pretty much the test drive for an epic mount. *grin*

Second thing I did on the list was go farm for ore.

Holy. Crap.

I kid you not, in just a few hours I farmed up an insane amount of ore. Adamantite, Fel Iron, even a Khorium vein or two! I gleefully scurried off to the forge to smelt my ore, then took a good look at my engineering plans to see what I could use to skill up.

Hmmm. Adamantite Rifle looks pretty good! Not many materials, and it’s yellow.

Made one. No skill point. Nekkid cow frowns.
Made two. No skill point. Nekkid cow swears.

Clearly that brilliant plan wasn’t going to work, so I went for plan b – Repair Bots! A bit of Khorium from the auction house, the theft of a few primal fire from my druid…

Tada! 375 engineering, and it only took eight repair bots.

My raid will never be unrepaired again!