I, Locktard

(h/t to I Deathtard for the title). One of the things that I've noticed about raiding is how incredibly squishy I am. My life, and frequently the lives of those around me, tend to hang in the balance just waiting for someone to make a mitake. So here, in no particular order are Megeara's list of Things Not To Do In Ulduar:

• Do not stand too close to XT-002's boombots whilst you are AOE'ing. Unsurprisingly they go boom.
• Do not stand too far away from Ignis's guardians. When they charge, it hurts.
• Wait until a tank has aggro'd (aggroed?) a Dark Rune Guardian before pew pew'ing it.
• Do not AOE Freya's Detonating Lashers. The hint is in the name.
• Do not fall into Kologarn's hole. Oerr, missus.

I am sure there will be more.

Performance problems

It's a funny thing, performance. Last time we were there, the first two bosses in Trial of the Crusaders went down (fairly) easily. We were trashed by Varian Wrynn's hand-picked heroes, it's true, but the Beasts of Northrend and Lord Jaraxxus died helpfully beneath my flaming blasts of chaos. Pew pew! And we got Emblems of Triumph.

Tonight was different. We wiped repeatedly on the Jormungar, until with practice, we managed to wipe repeatedly on the previous boss, Gormok the Impala instead. We just sucked. Mind you, we had a different raid composition and were down one warlock (only two warlocks in a 10-man group, tut, tut). We couldn't do a thing right. The tanks died repeatedly. The healers died in pairs. One time I had the poison debuff on me, and ran to what I thought was someone with the fire buff on, which turned out to be someone in exceptionally glowy armour. So we both died. It was carnage. Our skeletons were piled high, and I'm sure that Varian Wrynn was laughing behind his hand at us. No Emblems, no phat lewt, no Triumph.

And I loved every minute of it.

Be careful what you wish for

So, we went back to Ulduar last night. We went into the Antechamber and I died a lot. I never realised just how squishy I was until I started raiding.

I spent most of the fight with Aurayia dead, but still managed to get the worlds silliest shoulders. They look like a pair of steaming hams on my bony undead shoulders. They are Just Ridiculous, but a significant upgrade for Megeara. They're sufficiently absurd that one of the other warlocks kept wanting them for RP purposes (yes we have 3 warlocks in a 10-man raid. So what. You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many warlocks).

Where we came unstuck was Freya. Not only did we not really know the strategy, but our DPS wasn't up to killing the waves of mobs before the next wave hit. And we didn't down the glowy trees fast enough, and the adds kept resurrecting and we kept wiping. It was all a bit depressing, so just to finish off, we went back and killed Ignis with no problems. It's always nice to end on a high note.

Back to business

It's all been a bit quiet for the past few weeks, but now the summer break is over, the kids are back at school, and everyone's hunkered down in front of their screens waiting for global warming/climate change to freeze them in. And that means that it's time to go raiding again! My raid group now has Naxx pretty much on farm status, so we've progressed a bit. Last night we hit Trial of the Crusader (a first for most people) and Ulduar (a first for me).

Trial of the Crusader

I'm the first to admit that the rationale for TotC is pretty silly. As Tamarind pointed out, why would you want all your best fighters killing each other, rather than killing the scourge. Still, when all's said and done I'm not much of a lore geek, and it drops some phat lewt. When I say it drops good loot, I mean for other people, obviously, since I'm still in tatty looking ilevel 200 stuff whilst everyone and his dog who have been pugging heroics are in shiny new ilevel 245 gear. Not that I mind really except when the Leet Warlock shows off his steaming new shoulders to me, and tops me in the DPS meters.

That all sounds a little grumpy, but I'm not really. What I really like is experiencing new content and the gear is really just a means to an end. This was particularly apparent in the Trial of the Crusader.

We downed the Beasts of Northrend, after wiping a couple of times on the Jormungar. The consensus was that we needed to down Acidmaw first and stay close enough for the healers to get to everyone. After that it wasn't too tricky.

Lord Jaraxxus went down in a couple of tries, after our off-tanks understood just how fickle the Mistresses of Pain were. There was lots of high level discussion about taunting and healing as well, which, as a simple DPS, I largely ignored. I just wanted to be able to summon him myself! We got the usual plate healing gear for disenchanting and I lost a roll for a l337 ring.

This was all well and good, so we were feeling pretty cocky when we met the faction champions. Where we were unceremoniously handed our asses on a plate. I've never been a terribly good PvP'er, and this had very much the feel of being ganked in Stranglethorn by a gang of higher level characters. I haven't PvP'd in a while, and all my buttons were in the wrong places. I was stunlocked by the rogue and with a resilience of 0, swiftly had my forsaken face pushed into the dirt. As Heidegger would have said, this finite determination of undeath achieved its own definition. If he played WoW.

And to top it all off, Varian Wrynn called us scrubs! Frankly I'm surprised that he didn't come down to /spit and teabag us.

Ulduar

On to Ulduar. I've never been there before, but you can see that a fair amount of love has been lavished on the place. I'm not an enormous fan of vehicle quests in general, but watching iron dwarf minions being crushed beneath the tracks of my lumbering great tank was a lot of fun. We didn't do any of the hard modes or anything and the Flame Leviathan went down, even though I briefly disconnected in the middle. Hmm. Perhaps I wasn't entirely crucial to the whole affair...

Anyway on XT-002 I was assigned to AoEing the adds, plus my usual nuking. They all blew up in a very satisfying manner, and gave my cold dead heart a little lift. Why does a big metal monster sound like a little girl though? What with his heart popping in and out I found it all rather surreal. It went down though. No! No! No! No! No!

It was getting late by then, so after we wiped a couple of times on Ignis, we called it a night. I'm pleased that we've made the move to Ulduar, since it means that I might actually get my hands on a decent wand and get my Epic achievement.