On my happily school-free weekend, Ann and I got a smidge bored. We've been missing out on our regular raid schedule recently and it was just time to show some internet enemies what-for.
So we hopped a pug to Ulduar with Mord.
A pug in which, it turned out, only Ann, Mord, and I had ever been to Ulduar. Everyone else was there because they'd never been and thought it would be fun.
Fun. Right.
I went on Aioka as a "tank healer". As a Discipline priest "tank healing" is a concept that boggles the brain a bit. Don't get me wrong, having only one target to Penance and Flash Heal makes life much simpler. But Flash Heal goes faster in the 8-10 seconds after a Bubble. And if the tank can't have a bubble then someone else is getting it and by the end of the fight everyone in the raid has bubbles regardless of whether I'm technically healing the tank or technically healing the raid. I also Frisbee the tank but since it can go just about anywhere, I count is as a raid healing spell.
Getting up to Flame Leviathan was fairly painless. I went as a gunner, which is what I'm used to doing on Mara. Our little raid went right up to Flame Leviathan and proceeded to pull everything despite frequent commands in the raid channel to definitely not pull.
None of the towers had been taken out and no one really had any idea what was going on and in general it was just bad.
After the wipe, Ann offered Memento's Vent for the raid's use. After some testy words on my part that if we weren't going to use Vent then people at least needed to pay attention to their raid chat.
The raid organizer's (at this point Mord was leading, because this organizer was pretty fail) response to this was "I don't have vent, lol."
We got everyone else into the proper vent channel and got a couple towers down. Went back to the Flame Leviathan and sucked much less. Mord gave very comprehensive instructions for fighting FL. On vent. Which meant our failadin (did I mention the raid's organizer was paladin with all 71 points in protection?) didn't hear any of it.
But a decent number of people, Aioka included, got Orbital Devastation for it.
XT was pretty basic. The tanks took their assignments well. I kept them and the raid alive. I did more overall healing than my shaman healing partner; which was hard to understand. We absolutely did not attempt Razorscale or Ignis.
Clearing the trash up to Kologarn was probably more complex than it needed to be, but we succeeded. Mord handed out assignments and instructions for the fight. We had a rather decent warrior tank who had recently dinged 80 and was very eager to show his stuff.
So eager in fact that when the fight started, he ran right up to Kologarn and off the edge of the cliff into the abyss and died.
The other tanks were not prepared to jump into his spot and, even if they were, I was way too busy laughing to heal them. And it was funny because it was just such a noob thing - on our poor warrior's part for not stopping before running off the edge of a cliff and on our part for not mentioning that there's a huge cliff there and Kologarn has a huge hitbox so don't get any more up close and personal with him than you have to.
This is what we would like noobraid to be about: introducing new players to raiding (while hopefully not getting them killed in silly ways) and helping them to get experience they might not get elsewhere. Especially people like that warrior who are going to be totally awesome and all they need is experience and gear.
I have a feeling we may be seeing more of these this semester since our raid schedule is going to be split. We haven't worked out all the particulars but we are currently planning on running raids 3-4 nights a week. Everyone is free on Wednesdays, so I suggested that for our progression night. Mord will probably run something or other on Monday or Tuesday evenings and I volunteered to lead Thursday evenings. Because I'm crazy like that.
Last night we took our whole 4 guild members who were online into another guild's ICC-25. I'm not really a fan of healing 25-mans but they essentially told me they'd carry me through it and it really didn't matter if I healed or not. I got another "tank healing" spot with two other tank healers. And my overall healing was miserably sad for the whole night. I got a cloak upgrade out of it though.
To be perfectly honest, it was kind of a miserable adventure. One of their members was on one of the Shadowmourne quests. When they died, they asked for a battle-res on a trash pull. I think it was a Culture Shock thing. If you're in one of our ICC runs and you die on trash in the lower spire, you will run back in. Because certainly none of our healers will resurrect you.
The Upper Spire is a different story, sometimes.
And this guild like to talk about random things instead of ... you know ... doing stuff. We were getting ready to face Saurfang and instead of starting the fight some of the people on vent starting debating the 'Agility is for Frost DKs' issue. Which has already been done to death in our own guild, so I was really not interested. I thought about going and starting the fight myself. They could have had most of the conversation while waiting for Saurfang's attention.
It was string of these minor irritations that made the run less than enjoyable overall. Some of the members were whiny and 3 or 4 people throughout the night dropped raid for reasons I just didn't understand.
Here's to crossing my fingers and hoping that everything will settle down again soon.
Huzzah Noobraid. I hope we can have some more fun with it in the future :).
ReplyDeleteAlso, I made a macro for it. We have to get awesome people in there. And by awesome, I mean people who are awesome, even though their gear might not be, since that's what makes Noobraid fun.
Ok, here's the trick for Kologarn. You all gather outside his room. Then you tell someone who has never been there before that a treasure chest will appear if a first timer goes across the room to the chasm. Then you watch as they get scared when Kologarn pops up, and hopefully you're in vent so you can hear them scream.
ReplyDeleteGood luck on your noobraid. That's a good way to sometimes find new guild members.
You're absolutely right about getting new guildies from noobraid. Our available raider base is growing both in terms of guild members and noobraiders.
ReplyDeleteHaha! Unfortunately, I have not had the please of hearing someone scream in shock/fear/etc. over vent. Maybe someday? :)