February 9th, 2009

Mixed Emotions

Either I'm in a real funk lately, or I'm beginning to burn out on WoW. After spending over 8 hours in 25-man Naxx on Saturday (more below), I couldn't bring myself to log back into the server on Sunday. I didn't go completely without playing WoW -- I created and leveled a horde druid on another server. Some times I just enjoy the serene simplicity of lower level playing with a non-guilded toon. I got him to lvl 10 then called it quits and joined my husband in front of the TV. Yesterday I played the druid again until lvl 13. I logged into my bank alt on my main server...saw that some of my guildies were on...and had no desire to interact with them.

I've gone through this type of phase a couple times before. Everyone probably does. Time to step away for a bit of a break. We'll see if becomes more drastic than that.

Naxxramus (Heroic)
As I mentioned above, I spent nearly all of Saturday running 25-man Naxx. It was a guild #3 PuG, so I knew the core group was pretty good. But, they only made up about 10 of the spots. The rest were picked up, just like me. It made for a very long run.

First, it took over an hour to assemble 25 people. Then, throughout the run people dropped out, causing us to wait while we found replacements. Collectively, that waiting must have taken up more than an hour and a half extra time.

Second, because it was a PuG, many people did not know the fights. So, we wiped on almost all of them on the first try (except Loatheb, which we one-shotted!). Several repair runs and consumables consumed really put a dent in my pocket book. I guess that's the price of raiding 25-man PuGs.

One noteworthy thing is that I finally did the Heigan safety-dance successfully. I can't explain why, other than the fact that I just focused on moving, no healing at all during the dance. I was proud of myself.

I was having serious lag, freezing and disconnection issues at the beginning. So, I turned my video settings all the way down, which included minimizing the visible effects of spells. It helped tremendously, though I think it hurt me on the Grobbulus fight. On 10-man with Guild #2, the fight is fairly straight-forward for me now. On 25-man, I couldn't avoid gas clouds. I'm not sure if it's because of the added complexity of the 25-man version, or if it was that I couldn't see the clouds clearly enough because of the change in my video settings. This, I have to admit, contributed heavily to my decision not to return with them on Sunday night. We were going to pick up at Grobbulus. And I had no desire to spend another few hours, repair bills and consumables on a fight we appeared to be destined to fail at. Defeatist attitude? You betcha.

I saw the Military Quarter for the first time that day. We didn't get past the Instructor Razuvious encounter. I'll take part of the blame because I hadn't read up on the fight beforehand. But, the rest of the blame is shared by pretty much everyone. We had three priests, so we tried a rotation between us three of Mind Controlling the students, or whatever they're called. It wasn't pretty.

First wipe = someone stepped too close and aggroed everything in the room.
Second wipe = who knows why...total chaos
Third wipe = we had a basic idea what we were doing, but execution was impossible.

Interesting thing about this fight -- they're asking priests to act like tanks, with taunting, etc. For me, that alone made it difficult. It's not how I'm used to playing. Additionally, none of us priests were on voice chat or vent, so there was no communication between the three of us.

I'm actually intimidated by this encounter, more so than by the Heigan Dance. At least with the dance, it's just about running to the right spot. In this encounter, the expectation is that I use skills I'm not accustomed to using.

Hopefully, it will go better on 10-man when I do it with guild #2.

Speaking of which...I think I'll go back on my regular server tonight so I can join guild #2 in a fresh run of Naxx.