No Bunny

Last night in Duranub it was a mixed bag, as is often with the night patches are released.  We pulled together the raid with plenty of time to spare and actually had to turn people away for the first time in awhile.  Our push to recruit, along with some of our less than regular raiders showing up last night forced a quite a few people to be left out.  For the folks riding the bench, it was probably a pretty horrible night, but for the health of the raid as a whole it was a good thing.  The officer doing invites kept track of the players who were ready and willing, but without room, so we will get them worked into a run as soon as possible.

Murphy’s Law of Patch Day

The shortened version of what I am coining, Murphy’s Law  of Patch day states that if a patch is applied to the client or server, Argent Dawn will eventually go down.  In the case of last night, we got a royal flush of horribleness.  The server was up and seemingly stable, but around 8pm server time lag started setting in.  Was there a problem introduced with the patch?  No…  Blackrock was down.

For those of you not familiar with the epic Argent Dawn versus Blackrock battle, the short of it is that the populace of the Blackrock PVP server finds it amazingly fun to try its best to crash our server when theirs is down.  This childish act started shortly after the release of the game and continues today as their version of a “proud tradition”.  While Blackrock is down our cities are flooded with an army of gnomes spamming memorable phrases like “Poop comes from the butt”.  Other piece of information you need to know is that without a doubt, Argent Dawn has the most lazy GMs of any server.

All of this fun aside, we managed to get all our members through the 500 player queue without much effort and prepped to start the Flame Leviathan event.  Clearly things were moving entirely too smoothly for a patch day.  Mere seconds away from us talking to Brann to start up the event, we saw  a dreaded server announcement come across our chat windows.  Yes, Argent Dawn would be restarting in 15 minutes.  So we sat there twiddling our thumbs, waiting for the server to do its business and let us back in to raid.

Thirty minutes later, we finally pushed out way back into the game and started out raid.  Considering we only raid 2 1/2 hours per night, and it took us a bit to get a few healers successfully through the queue we were standing on an hour and 45 minutes left to make some progress.  We pushed through Leviathan like normal and got a few of our members the Heroic: Shutout achievement.  I myself finally managed to finish Heroic: Three Car Garage.  I finally entered the age of modern tanking weapons Monday, when a Stoneguard dropped for us, and I figured that the act of putting Blade Ward on it would surely make the Titanguard finally drop.  Clearly Ulduar saw through my ruse.

Prosthetic Nipple of Doom

We switched up strategies on XT a bit, and after a few attempts managed to down him rather easily.  This allowed us to push on to Kologarn and put in some serious time on him.  Last week we had gotten close, managing to get him to around 10% during one of those slow wipes that happens while learning new content.  Had we around thirty minutes more I think we would haves sealed the deal last Thursday.  However we had to call it and set our sights for him this week.

From out of nowhere, success came back to be our friends.  On our second “true” attempt of the night we managed to pull out a win to the big dumb giant.  Also…  I am convinced that it is not a clasp but a prosthetic nipple, because the lost his real nipple in the war.  It’s an inside joke.

Shoulderpads of the Monolith – Malice – Leggings of the Stoneweaver

 

Dumb and Dumberer

I said earlier that we downed Kolo on our second “true” try of the evening.  One of the attempts featured what was quite possibly the dumbest move I have ever witnessed a player do on a raid.  We were prepping to pull kologarn and over the officer channel I hear one of our mages saying, make sure to click off bunny.  I thought nothing of it, because last I looked down everything was normal.  I tend to play zoomed out at maximum range, and right before pulling Kologarn I ask for the raid to group up on the yellow band at the edge of the room as a sign of readiness.

So I fire my incoming macro, and start running towards the boss only to realize a few seconds later that I in fact was one of the players who had the bunny costume cast on me.  So as I am moving towards the boss with the raid following behind me, I am quickly trying to find the buff and click it off and at the same time screaming a string of expletives over ventrilo at whoever the dumbass it was who thought it was cleaver to apply the buff to the main tank.

For those of you who were not familiar with this effect, the bunny costume is yet another effect that prohibits you from using any abilities while the costume is in place.  So here I stand, the main tank rushing headlong into an almost certain wipe.  We attempt to hold things together, but I am furious beyond words.  Casting this effect in a raid is the single stupidest thing that I have ever seen a player do.  I never in a million years thought that we as a raid would have to put in place a rule to prohibit the use of wands.

To make matters worse, ventrilo was dead silent.  No one was fessing up to doing this or offering any apology.  This is one of those situations where if a player had stepped up to the plate, and offered an apology, it would have faded quickly, but the fact that we had to parse the logs to track down who did it, means that we will be taking punitive actions.  I thought we were adults, but apparently some of our members don’t take progression seriously.

All that said, we managed to still pull out the win and everyone came together in the end.  But that player owes the entire raid a repair bill, and hopefully they think that over carefully the next time they get the grand idea to do something that phenomenally stupid.  As a result we will be adding yet another rule to our stack along side the no trains and dance trinket, put in place only for the sake of mitigating idiocy.

Another joins the fray

Much like Ariedan’s Wordy Warrior inspired this blog, apparently I have in turn inspired one of my guild mates to start his own blog.  Gweninu is a longtime member of the guild, raid, and by no small measure a great hunter.  The blog is titled Out of Ammo and features hunter issues and much like this one, his adventures in WoW.  So far its shaping up to be a great little blog and I highly suggest you guys check it out as well.