Spent most of the day unconscious recovering from a cold, but got a little daytime play in to pad the bank account. Leveling enchanting is absolutely nightmarish. Getting to 325 has cost about 1k gold and from what I’ve been reading on the boards, it’s about to take a major jump up. Based on current auction prices, the next 15 points will cost me 25-40 gold each. To get to 450 will take a Madoff-scheme.
After researching, I hit a couple of places to farm rhinos and mammoths then a cave for fire elementals. The meats, skins, and materials gathered netted me about 400 gold for an hour’s work. That will probably improve as I get better at it, but it was enough to keep me fluid.
Ran my daily and one other heroic besides, allowing me to upgrade a ring and finally top 5k GS (yes, yes—I’m dead to Brian), but the Big Thing was getting ready for the night—where I’d be participating in My First Guild Raid. We would be storming Ulduar to complete the weekly challenge, which was beat the snot out of Razorscale, a horrific dragon. My raid experience thus far was a single pug in the Vaults, whereas my guild, Fidelis, is actually organized, requiring members to Have Their Shit Together. I already have a deep-seated neurosis about not pulling my weight on any task (seriously—when running with Rogerses and doing 80% of the damage, I still fret about not doing –enough-.) and this would be a trial by fire. Knowing one idiot can wipe an entire raid group (LEEEEEROY!), I was nervous.
I read up on the encounter beforehand and had a basic idea of what the dragon was capable of doing and was very grateful we’d be running a 10-man easy mode version of the dungeon. I installed teamspeak 3, picked up a couple of flasks, some potions, a few other things and flapped over to the instance door to chill out for a bit. In retrospect, I should’ve read up on the rest of the dungeon too.
All total, we had enough people sign up for the raid that I thought we might do two quick runs. Boy, was I wrong.
The group decided to run the dungeon as a 25-man group… in Heroic mode… with only 18 people.
I zoned in to find myself…not in a dungeon, but in an outdoor instance in a ruined city. People were running around jumping in siege engines, motorcycles, and “destroyers” (another type of vehicle). With no idea what to do, I jumped in a siege engine someone else was driving and found myself as a ‘gunner’. One person steers, the other fires. We were on some sort of staging area and while we waited for everyone to get situated, I practiced with the weapons (one ground, one airborne, one option to load myself into the catapult to be used as ammo (WTF?!!?). Just as I was comfortable with the operations, the raid leader announced we had too many siege engines and we needed a couple more destroyers. My driver hopped out to oblige. Damn it!
I dashed (read:blinked) over to the destroyer he had picked up to continue my gunning and found a completely different set of controls. Ground and aerial was reversed, I had some options for firing a hook to grab crates, and dumping nitrous into the engines for a speed boost. Oh, gods. I practiced the weapons a few seconds, then we started rolling out into the city proper. We were assailed immediately and constantly from the ground and air by an army of dwarves with tanks and golems. The raid leader told destroyer gunners to grab as many crates as we could for our drivers, so I did as I blazed a path of carnage around us. Giant stone pillars crumbled and after a few moments, we battered down the gates to the inner city of Ulduar. Apparently we earned an achievement for clearing the area without having to repair any vehicles. So far, so good. We jumped out of the tanks and headed into the ‘inner’ bits, where there were three distinct paths. We headed east, which was Razorscale’s roost and where I actually knew what was going on.
The encounter works pretty much like this: dragon is untouchable and assaults from above until we get 4 harpoons repaired and can drag her to the ground. Meanwhile, armies of dwarves erupt from the ground in moleman-style tunneling vehicles. Once the dragon is down, we get a short time to DPS her down until she breaks free and flaps back up and the cycle repeats until we get her under 50% health and she can no longer fly. It’s timed, so 12 minutes or so after we start, we effectively lose, as her damage, which is already 14k+ per hit, will increase by 900%. (Good luck with that.)
Ok. Razorscale’s stats: 17M health, drops patches of fire from above that does 7k damage a second—burns on the ground for nearly half a minute, has a 35-yard wing buffet that’ll do about 5k from falling damage when you get blown back, a nasty breath attack that does about 15-16k damage, and the aforementioned ‘standard’ attack.
I have nearly 19k health unbuffed, so any single attack I can take on the chin but, like everyone, I have to be VERY careful with fire patches.
It plays out exactly like a LARP field battle should. Everyone was flanking, dodging, and attacking for a common purpose.
We failed. Horribly.
We weren’t quite outputting enough damage and by the third time she flew back to the sky, she was around 70% and we had five minutes left on the clock. To make matters worse, our primary tank and healer were dead and raiders started dropping like flies. I was probably 5th from the last to go, but it was a TPK.
We regrouped and picked up another healer who had just logged on and returned to the fray. As the dragon lazily circled overhead, we quickly decided what went wrong and how to fix it. Namely, we had fired the harpoons too early, so DPS was still working on dwarves instead of being able to focus on the boss. We engaged again.
This time the difference was noticeable, but would it be enough? Instead of whittling her down by 8% on the first landing, we carved off 16%. The third time she landed, she wasn’t able to take off again and we hammered down hard. It was an utterly exhilarating experience and it ended with the fell beast slain!
Although I won no loot in the rolls, I happily returned to Dalaran to collect my reward and call it a night. Can’t wait to see next week’s!
No comments:
Post a Comment