Notice how well Kael’thas rhymes with chaos? I’m sure that’s intentional. *grin*

We’ve mastered phase 1, and we’re doing pretty awesome at getting the weapons killed quickly in phase two. It’s just phase three when everything goes to pieces.

We’ll get him, though. It’s just a matter of time.

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.

Ah well, such is life, right? The raid officers are usually able to make the best of an unhappy situation and get a few heroic groups going, and we try again the following week.

Last week, though, we were floored when our raid leader said “Well, as you guys can see, we don’t have the people for Tempest Keep, so… we’re going to Blackwing Lair and see if we can’t kill us a dargon.”

Rewind back a year and a half to January 16th, 2007 – the date that the Burning Crusade went live. That week saw our last full raid into Blackwing Lair, and the last time we saw Nefarian. We tried for the next few weeks to keep the raid going, but I have very vivid, very bitter memories of about 20 of us standing in the entrance hall to Blackwing Lair ready to go, listening to people looking for quest help in Outlands in our raid channel – people who should have been in there killing a dargon with us, damn it. I mean, seriously! We were perhaps two more weeks at most from having him dead.

I digress. The raid just kinda fell apart at that point, reforming when people started getting their characters to 70 and getting back into the raiding groove.

Anyway! Returning to last week (please keep your arms and legs inside the time machine while the vehicle is in motion), our raid leader decides on a whim that we’re going to BWL. Of course, a large percentage of our raiders are on characters that haven’t been attuned, so we do the single fastest UBRS clear I think I’ve ever seen, summoning people up to the orb so they can join us on the raid. About an hour after our normal start time – first pull on Razorgore!

Did you know there’s a bug now on the Razorgore fight that causes the adds to endlessly spawn, even after he’s dead? Neither did we before last week.

We made it to Ebonroc on our first night in there, winding up with perhaps 28 people in the raid by stop time. We actually did really well considering the number of people that hadn’t seen any of these boss fights, and we only had two raid wipes – one on the Broodlord, and one on Ebonroc where a certain nekkid shaman let his earth elemental cause the entire raid to get shadow flamed in the face. Whoopsie!

It was a great run, we all had a blast even if we didn’t make it to Nefarian. Ah well.

Then Sunday comes, and again we’re short a few people for our normally scheduled SSC raid. Thirty minutes later we’re pulling Ebonroc, this time with proper tank tauntings to prevent raid wipes.

Ebonroc. Flamegor. Chromaggus! Before we know it we’re standing in the throne room of Nefarian himself, challenging the ruler of Blackrock Mountain, bringing him the death he escaped a year and a half ago.

The start of phase two killed all but five of us, I think. Shadow flame still really hurts, even at level 70, and the majority of us didn’t have our Onyxia Scale Cloaks. No problem though, since just about everyone in our raid is a packrat. Runecloth from trash is handed over, Onyxia Scales are dug out of long forgotten alt banks, and cloaks are made.

Not long after that, Nefarian died in a flawless attempt.

\m/

*I totally stole these photos from our raid forums.

>.>

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.