Flyin' High

Does anybody else who blogs always think that the first word of the blog should be "so". I find myself leading into each post, mentally with the word "so" coming off my finger tips. SO, I usually then just drop the word "so" and continue on, and the sentence more or less flows. Funny. Ok, stop brain dumping.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, Thursday night was my first visit to the Slave Pens. My plan for the night was to decide between joining forces with Aldor or Scryer, and then following my nose along any quests that my newly chosen faction gave me. I chose Aldor, for the easy access to Nagrand. Shortly after that decision, I got distracted by a shiny object, and became upset that after all the time I've spent in Zangarmarsh, I had no flight path there. Quick check on thottbot and I see that if I take that silly elevator up into the giant mushrooms, there's a flight path. Cool. And when I got up there, I found 5 or 6 quests that are good for my level. Happy me, because I do like Zangarmarsh, and I had thought I was done with all the quests there.

Seconds after getting the flight path, Drake, my favorite resto druid, says his guild is running Slave Pens and do I want in.

Can I get a "hell yeah"?!!!!

I get invited, we swim down to the coilfang reservoir...yadda yadda yadda...I'm pretty tired today at work.

Did you just "yadda yadda yadda" a sweet instance run?

Yep.

I'll save you most of the details, but here's some highlights that made it an awesome group:

Maturity Level and Positive Attitude
I don't care about loot, spec, class (well, i do like being the only hunter, but that's because i'm a diva), or many of the other details of the game. I do care about those things, but no where near as much as a group of mature players who have a good attitude. We wiped maybe 6 or 7 times, with a bunch of additional single player deaths. Through it all, the normal reaction during the corpse run was "lets get back in there and give them hell!! here's what we should do differntly this time..." No blaming or finger pointing, just positive constructive attitudes. Sweet.

Team Strategy
With only 2 lines of text chat at the beginning, we all knew our roles. It was helpful that we had warrior, rogue, shaman (dps build), hunter (me), and resto druid, so there wasn't too much overlap that could cause confusion. But the key was that we all wanted to do our jobs. Chain Trapping was a big part of our strategy. Cool, I love the challenge of trying to effectively remove a mob from the fight until we're ready to deal with her, meantime delivering lead on target to help the team burn down the main baddie. More on this in another post, but I think that somebody broke my trap maybe once the entire night. And that was on a chaotic pull where we misjudged a patrol, so none of the mobs were marked, and I just pulled the guy to the side and froze him. We adjusted and worked them down nicely. And she apologized for breaking the trap afterwards. No prob. She was observant enough to know what she did, and owned up to it. I'll group with her anytime.

Focus Fire
Something that stood out to me was that everyone did a great job of following our kill order for mobs. We were only doing it via icons, and no offical Main Assist, but everyone seemed to show discipline on sticking to the order, with no buck-a-roos trying to show how cool they could take a mob solo. Nice, efficient burn order, lead to only scrambling when necessary.

Generosity
Everyone was sharing consumables and such. The lobster (second boss) fires shots out at more than just the first person on his threat table, so we were all taking pretty big damage, more than bandages could handle. Healer said he couldn't keep up with the main tank plus all of us, so people started sharing healing potions with us DPS'ers before we tried the boss for the second time. We one shotted the last boss. Before the fight, everyone was offering to share buff foods, and someone gave me a stack of adamantite shells, for a whopping increase in my DPS. Just nice, unsolicited generosity (after the instance, I tried to find him a replacement stack on the AH, but there was none, so I sent him a tip that I hope covers the price plus a bit). Now I know that for you hardcores, its important to show up for a raid prepared with all your consumables and such. But this was a bit more informal, and I really appreciated the attitude.

Looting
Ok, perhaps this one was a bit slanted in favor of working out easily, because of our group composition and the drops in Slave Pens. Warrior got two sweet drops (sweet tanking cloak, and a nice piece of armor), shammy got something nice also. Even on the plate items, where the MT was the only plate wearer, he was polite and asked about rolling need. And when he won the second piece, he thanked people and said he felt a drop bad, but not too bad :-), about getting two phat drops. When the mail armor dropped, I was pretty quick to let the shammy know that it looked way better for her than me so I pass. And in the spirit of good karma, I did get a greenie gun drop that was a small upgrade for me. In general, good attitudes about looting led to no tension among the group.

Damage Meters
3 of us were running damage meters. We talked about the data twice during the evening. The rogue in the group was pretty much blowing away the other 2 DPS (me and the shammy). Well, he was awesome. Best Rogue I've ever worked with, just really nice. Makes me feel bad for usually hating rogues, but that's because I must usually run into RoBlows (the rogue equivalent of huntards, maybe???). This guy knew his stuff, and delivered the damage. Also, he was lvl 66, and the other two of us were 64, so some lead in the damage was to be expected. But most of it was due to his skill. The reason I mention the damage meters was that we all used it as a constructive tool to check that we were doing our jobs, with nobody doing stupid things like pulling aggro in an effort to be #1.

All in all, stayed up past my bed time by almost 2 hours, but worth every second of the fatigue and lack of productivity I'm suffering today.