I’ve run into a fairly curious problem—the random daily heroic. I’m eager to get more frosties to upgrade by gear, but for the past few days, I’ve simply been unable to complete one. This is unusual and starting to be quite vexing. I missed out one day due to playing Anyth. (I don’t begrudge this at all—I quite enjoy playing Shooty Aggro Girl.) The problem started the following day with a really bad tank in the Culling of Stratholme.
CoS, being the fairly easy heroic that it is, usually gives me an ‘ok, cool’ vibe. This time, I got The Tank From Hell. Could not maintain aggro and after the second (!) party wipe, he bailed in disgrace claiming “lag”. Free Pro-tip: claiming you have lag when you suck fools no one. Re-queued and hoped for the best. Got the worst heroic: the Halls of Reflection. It makes Oculus look fun.
HoR is hard. No ifs, ands, or buts about it: this dungeon is Blizzard’s way of getting even with us for laughing at the ease of heroics. I’ve tried this dungeon a number of times and EVERY single time either the party wipes multiple times before the first boss or the tank bails as soon as he finishes zoning in. Yeah, it’s that hard.
These are the Lich King’s private chambers and the first encounter is set up thusly: the party and a couple of NPCs enter a circular room with a couple of alcoves and a tunnel heading off from it. In the center of the room is Frostmourne, Arthas’ blade. Arthas’ generals show up and summon wave after wave of five-man teams to beat you down. The teams typically consist of a healer, a rogue, a mage, a fighter, and a hunter. They fight like players and crowd control is required (no polymorphing though—they are undead), as are dispels and spell interruptions. This is a vast difference from PvE gameplay to this point and will kill an inexperienced party quickly. PvPers have a slight advantage, as we’re –used- to fighting with crowd control, interruptions, and the like. By using the alcoves as a physical shield, one can often lure the ranged attackers in for easier pickings. Since the waves come non-stop, mana management becomes key. Oh, if you wipe? the waves reset.
The fifth and tenth waves are the Generals themselves with their own host of nasty abilities, but I digress. My experience: Zone into HoR, tank says “The Hell” and bails. We wait, get another one, wipe 3 times, and quit. I requeue—get HoR AGAIN…and promptly wipe again. The healer bails and the party disbands. Throughout all of this, we make it to the first boss…once. Frustrated, I occupied myself with battlegrounds instead.
Fast forward to last night. I queue up for my daily and get…HoR. Seriously, what is going on here? There’s 15 dungeons to pick from…I have no instances locked, but the PRNG seems to be picking on me. Ok, 1:3375 chance, but still annoying. I’m not playing this game, so I bail. When my timer is up, I re-queue…AGAIN HoR (1:50625). Ok—it wants me to play it, I’ll give it my all. Two wipes later, I’m irritated and spend most of the rest of my evening running daily quests for the Argent Crusade and PvPing.
It’s getting late, so I give the random heroic one more go… Halls of Mother-Farking Reflection AGAIN! (1:759375 chance). This time though, I seemed to have joined a group in progress. Oddly, it didn’t warn me.
They were obviously recovering from a team wipe and I was filling a DPS role that had bailed. Oh, irony. They had dropped the first boss, though—which was farther than I’d ever gotten before and it had reset down to wave 6. I took my place in the alcove and waited for the oncoming onslaught.
My gods, it was a team that knew what they were doing. For the first time, I was hopeful the Curse of HoR would be lifted. The tank maintained aggro, the healzor healzed, and I single targeted the things what needed killing in the right order: priest, rogue, mage, fighter, ranger, and saved my counterspells for the healer. We were relentless and wave after wave fell. My spirits began soaring when we faced down…and killed the second general.
The second ‘part’ of the dungeon works like this… you take the tunnel and beat down Arthas’ personal guard and then you get surprised when doppelgangers of your party leap out of the walls to kill you. At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Six seconds after the tank engaged the guard, the server crashed. We were all frozen, but still able to party chat for about 20 seconds, so we knew this was affecting all of us. We were disconnected and after logging back in twice (the first stuck me on the HoR load screen until I DC’d again), I found myself without a party and back at my hearth point.
I cursed bitterly and called it a night.
