The Tale of Three Hunters

Not a whole lot behind this story that you can't imagine from the title.

Which would you rather...
>Semi-PUG with 3 Hunters

-or-

>Voluntary eye surgery and knee replacement at the same time


I'm probably more inclined to choose the latter.

Well, actually, I kinda had fun in the end, so that's an extreme position, but I'm going for effect here, people.

I got an invite for Mana Tombs. My Resto Druid friend whispers me saying his guild had a run going in there, and someone had to bail out, so would I be interested in coming in for a few minutes to down the last boss.

Sure, why not. Join the party and see that we've got a 66 druid, 66 warrior, 2x70 hunter, and me. Yeesh. Ok, lets fry the boss. I'm not sure who they had with them that dropped out, but I think it was a result of a wipe and then him choosing to leave. Well, we slam this nexus prince boss. Not sure what level, and maybe we were overpowered, but wham-o, he drops. They were all pretty happy at the firepower, and I was internally proud at providing fully 25% more DPS than the next guy on the list for the one boss encounter. And with 5 minutes of work, I got some nice quest to turn in for 17K XP. w00t.

We decide to make a run from the beginning.

Firstly, Mana Tombs is pretty cool. The visuals are pretty cool, and the music reminds me of something out of ghost busters (not the ray parker jr song, but rather some of the background music as all the demons are coming out and wreaking havoc in manhattan).

Man, 3 hunters who aren't used to working together is a bit of a chore. You've effectively got 8 party members instead of 5. You've got all 3 basically wanting to orient themselves in the same positions during a fight. You've got one hunter assigned officially to be doing crowd control, and the other two who insist on freezing everything else in sight without communicating it. Combine all those, and you've got one heck of a chaotic screen.

Then you've got the issue of level. Our tank was a level 66 warrior. And you've got two 70 hunters with their 70 pets, insisting on using big threat generating abilities, such as leaving high ranking growl on. Tank could barely hold aggro on anything, and as such, wasn't getting hit very much, and could then barely generate rage. Definite starvation going on.

But since the pets that were holding aggro were a little over power for the instance, and our healer is on the ball, we did pretty well. My chain traps were going pretty smooth on my assigned mobs, so I was happy.

We down one of the bosses in the middle, and one of the hunters has to go. We decide to try to 4-man our way through.

Did pretty well, too. By removing one of the hunters, we had a relatively simpler battle field to coordinate, and we got into a groove. Many of the pulls in there were 3 pulls, so i'd chain trap mine, the other hunter would single trap his, and by the time we killed the skull, the other hunter's turkey would just about be ready to thaw so he didnt need to chain them.

A drop of chaos on the 4-pulls we encountered, but nothing too bad, still managed. Until we got to some escort quest that starts in the instance. During that we wiped and the escort guy got killed. All their armor was broken from the wipes in their earlier run so we called it a night.

The funny part was, at one point during the 4-man part, tank throws a nice remark my way about the trapping going pretty well. Then other hunter throws in something along the lines of "your traps last forever, you must be spec'd survival and have improved traps?"

41/20/0, FTW!!!!

I didn't say anything, but standing there with nothing to fight, I popped bestial wrath to show off my big red boar, hoping the subtle hint would illustrate my point, but I doubt it did. Then again, it looks like it only takes 12 points in survival to get clever traps, so maybe I was too subtle.

EDIT: ran another Mana Tombs tuesday night with other hunter who was part of the 4-man attempt, and we did awesome, so shout out to him!