The Good, the Bad, and the Inconsistent

= The Good =

After playing my priest all day Saturday (now at 33 -- woo!), I decided to take my hunter out for a spin on Sunday. To take full advantage of the huge amount of double experience I'd racked up, my cat and I wandered to the Alterac Ruins to kill elite ogres and finish the last quests in the chain The Crown of Will. My mission was to find and kill Mug'thol inside a building with tight corridors, teeming with ogres. The layout of the building made it a tad challenging, because often you didn't know how many you were pulling until you actually walked in the room and they leapt upon you, but was fun and I was doing fine, even taking on several mobs.

Then, I got a whisper... "You have all the heads?" Heads? What heads? Was I in the LFG for Uldaman, because I'd considered trying to get a pug together for that? No, I wasn't in the LFG channel and there was no Uldaman quest involving heads. Then, a Tauren hunter appeared from around the corner with his cat. Oh! That's right... the quest before this one involved collecting the heads of a few other baddies in the area. I whispered back and said I'd done that one, but that I'd be happy to help him with it, so we partied up and headed upstairs for Mug'thol.

We did pretty well together, killing our way up to the third floor where Mug'thol was. The Tauren drew aggro a few times and he died twice, but seemed to take it well. We cleared the two mobs in front of Mug'thol without drawing him, and then sicced our pets on the big guy. No problem.

The Tauren asked if any of his kills were in this building, and they weren't, but I remembered where the others were, so we marched north, stopping in buildings to collect the heads that he needed. I then agreed to help him go back in and kill Mug'thol so he could complete the quest, too. All in all, a good time, with good banter, and mostly clean pulls. I added him to my friend list, and will look for him again for group quests, I'm sure.

= The Bad =

Of course I had to run into at least one jerkface over the weekend. After turning in Mug'thol's head in Tarren Mill and then the Crown of Will in the Undercity, I added myself to the LFG list for Uldaman. While I was still clearing out my inventory from the last quests, I got an invite to a group. "u want 4 ulda?"

I think I'll spare you the play by play on grouping with this guy. The summary:

1) When we still needed one more for the group, he asked me specifically to advertise this in the trade channel since I was in a city. The trade channel?! I suggested he advertise in LookingForGroup instead. General is one thing, but the trade channel? That is so annoying.

2) He is one of those people that just cannot stay put. While everyone else is sitting, drinking, rebuffing, and waiting for the leader to mark the next pull, he is wandering off way up ahead. He was a rogue, so he was often sneaking around invisible right next to the next set of mobs. He did a few accidental pulls this way when nobody was ready. Again, very annoying.

3) In one part of the instance, rather than clear all the mobs in the area before summoning the boss (as the leader asked us to do), he just walked right up and summoned it. The leader of the group was like, "oh well, I guess we're done here... you just ruined the instance." I thought this was a bit dramatic (though never having done Ulda, I had no idea whether it was true), but the rogue said, "no just pull the boss." Turns out we'd cleared enough that we could just pull the boss, so it did turn out fine. After that, for the next 10 minutes we got to hear from the rogue, "so did i ruin it? huh?" over and over.

4) A strong iron lockbox fell at one point, and we all rolled greed except for the the rogue who rolled last: Need. "Mistake," he said. So, all this and a ninja, too. Brilliant. At about 5 o'clock this morning, when I was lying in bed wondering if I'd remembered to change the time on my alarm clock, I was thinking about this again, and I realized that if you are a loot ninja, particularly a rogue, this is the ideal drop to make your "accidental" need roll, because presumeably, you can just unlock it and whatever is inside will not be bound to you. I know he could unlock these, too, because earlier, when I won the roll on a lockbox, he said to me, "I unlock 4 u." I said no thanks, that I'd take care of it later. Sounds like I made the right decision.

5) At the end of the instance, he was complaining his head off about how much it was going to cost to repair his armor. (I whispered to the leader that maybe whatever was in the lockbox he ninja'd would cover it.)

Anyway, this guy is on Do-Not-Party List now. What an ass.

= The Inconsistent =

So, this would be our entire Ulda party, myself included. I mentioned before that I was nervous about my role as a hunter in instances, and someone putting me in charge of trapping something since I hadn't practiced it much yet. When the leader explained the marks he was going to use and the kill order, he said, "blue square = freeze trap." Hoo boy, I thought. Here we go. When he marked our first big pull and I saw that blue square, I felt a jolt of adrenaline, but I was pretty sure I knew what to do. I laid the trap and selected the mob, and waited for the tank to run in before shooting the square to lure him to me.

The leader wanted the moon sheeped, the star sapped, and the square trapped. The kill order was skull, x, star, square, and then moon. Charge! *insert Benny Hill music* I shot the square, but someone (I'll just assume it was our rogue friend) drew him away and he was diverted. The tank was getting a huge beatdown from the skull, the x, and the star. I sent my pet into assist the tank and resumed trying to draw the square. Then I saw the moon chasing the mage, and they ran right at me and into my trap. Wow... it was a complete and total mess. We managed to kill everything and stay alive, but this did not bode well...

The second pull, same general theme. We seemed to be completely failing at crowd control, as the sheep and square kept getting hit before or while they were trapped. I whispered an apology to the leader, and mentioned the problem of folks breaking the trap, and he reminded the whole group that they should be wary of what they were hitting, and to be careful not to break the cc traps and spells. The following pull went much better, but then the one after was as bad as the first. As we got deeper into the instance, we were terribly inconsistent and did not seem to improve from pull to pull. There was just no telling what was going to happen. We wiped at least three times before getting to the final rooms.

I did get some successful trapping done in there, but I admit a few bonehead maneuvers where I accidently broke my own trap. By the end, I was pretty comfortable with what I was supposed to do, but had to improvise many times when the trap got broken or resisted. In one terrible pull, both the trap and the polymorph spell were resisted, and everybody died except me and the rogue. (I thought for sure we were going to die, too, because the rogue kept messing around in stealth mode near our next set of mobs while the others were still running back from the graveyard. Argh.) As we approached the final boss, it was pretty clear we were not going to be able to complete the instance. Two wipes in a row in the room after the one where the stone statues come alive one by one, and we decided to call it a wash. Our crowd control skills weren't strong enough, our DPS wasn't high enough, our healer (a non-holy specced paladin) couldn't keep everybody healed because we were all taking too much damage, and our tank wasn't holding aggro. Alas. I did level in there though... that was nice. (45!)

It was fun to try a new instance, and one where the pulls were quite challenging. I'm frustrated that we didn't seem to improve over the course of the instance though, like as a group, we weren't learning anything about how to do these pulls better as we went along. In the cases where things did go better after a wipe, it was only because there were fewer mobs, since we managed to knock off a few in the previous battle. I look forward to trying Uldaman again if I can get a group together, hopefully with a more consistent performance from myself as a trapper and the group as a whole.

Oi, Ninja!

I was quite familiar with ninja behavior long before I learned the term for it. My first encounter with it was during questing. I was in Thousand Needles collecting plants in a water elemental infested area, and there was another guy in the area working through the very same quest. Twice, I cleared the elementals from around a plant, and he ran over and grabbed it as I was finishing the killing. Grr... I relocated to another part of the lake to get away from him, but he was back in my view before long. I remembered there were a few plants on shore, and I only needed a couple more, so I headed toward them. As I collected one, I saw him swimming toward the other, so I ran over and grabbed it before he had a chance. Take that!

Last night our paladin/shaman duo was collecting boxes from around the docks in Eversong Woods, and there were enough people doing the quest at the same time that the competition for them was pretty fierce. We were getting tired of looking for them, and were tempted at one point when we saw a guy fighting right next to a box... "Should we ninja this guy?" "Nah..." We didn't. This guy didn't hesitate to take boxes near where we were killing though. Oh well... We did finally collect them all and turn them in, and then a subsequent quest asked to kill a dude at the top of a building. We'd seen him when we were up there looking for boxes, it looked easy, so we started running up there. The box ninja, who'd just gotten the same quest, was running right behind us...

What ensued was a game of leapfrog. You think we'd just party up and help each other, but somehow, it just wasn't happening here. We'd run and kill stuff and he'd pass us. Then, we'd pass him on the way up the ramp as he was stuck killing something. Boing, boing, boing, all the way up the top. He did beat us up there by a few seconds, and there was already a dude standing up there, too. At first I thought he was waiting for the respawn, so we'd have to wait in line a bit, but when our box ninja friend drew a mob, the waiting guy jumped over the edge. Well, ok.

I wasn't paying much attention to what the box ninja was fighting, whether it was the quest target or not -- I just decided to help him with the kill to speed things up. I dropped a judgement on his head, and the next thing I knew, I was being attacked by the dude we'd been sent up to kill. Ooops... so, my husband and I went ahead and killed him. To my surprise, his head dropped for us and not the box ninja, so I guess we ended up beating him to the punch. I guess we were the ninjas that time.

Anyway, the whole thing kind of sucked. I guess any time an area is crowded, and you're competing for quest items like that, this kind of thing is bound to happen. I think we're going to move to the Barrens soon.

We've both hit 11 now, and I'll have my paladin quest to do soon. I need to read up a bit on the mechanics of playing a paladin correctly. Right now, we're wildly overpowering the enemy in almost every battle, so if I'm not laying down the smartest series of moves, it really doesn't matter. I don't want to get into bad habits though.