Thursday, February 7, 2008

The Back Door

Logged in tuesday night around 11:30pm.

We recently restructured our Kara team concept by appointing team leaders who are then responsible for recruiting from inside the guild when possible, or when there's a specialty (such as priests for a specific skill like shackle, or a more general specialty like "healer") that's absent from the guild in sufficient quantity, recruit from outside the guild.

I knew that we had many of the slots of the team I volunteered for filled, but we had not yet arranged any schedule.

Log in tuesday and see a bunch of folks in Kara, many of whom I knew to be part of the team I was on.

And as luck would have it, I had an awesome night prior to that, so I didn't skip a beat. Many other nights, I'd have become a spiteful little brat at seeing that, as I am trying to encourage planning, even if it is only a day in advance. But not tuesday. I was actually happy that they found a full complement of players to run with.

I start doing some daily quests, and get a whisper from the raid leader saying they just took down Attumen in a two shot attempt, and somebody's got to go, so do I want in.

Hells yeah!!

Grab my consumables from the bank, get summoned over to the stone, head in and buff up.

And here's where I learn about the back door up to Moroes. Instead of the giant awful staircase that begins right at the opening of the zone, where I'm totally scared to use my pet as there's rumor of all kinds of pathing issues, we head up the back stairs from the repair guy who lives near where Attumen spawns. Ah, I love going in the back door.

Fun patch of trash, especially with two priests shackling as necessary. Lets me focus on pew pew rather than cee cee. Although I did leave traps at my healer's feet, which caught a few loose mobs (mostly some dogs that must get summoned because they weren't there at the beginning of the fight).

One of the trash non-elite guests who come in giant packs dropped me an epic mail belt. Compared to my blue belt, its a big armor upgrade, but big agi drop and tiny attack power drop, so I don't plan on wearing it, but funny to see epics drop off of non-elite trash.

We then took on Moroes. Tried a few times. Didn't take the boss down, but we made it much further into the battle than in previous attempts. Definitely some additional DPS as a few players had made spec changes, and some folks (like me) are slowly getting our first epics to increase our output.

There was another hunter with us who I never ran with before. I was really happy with his trapping on Moroes guest, plus he had a bunch of consumables with him.

I still need to run the WWS report for the portion of the night that I was there, but in general, I think the following things made a difference over the last time in:
1) Different off tank, who did a better job holding second place on Moroes threat table, thus allowing the fight to continue longer than in the past.
2) Better overall DPS (needs confirmation from WWS), leading to quicker burning of the trash, although we never made it through all of them.
3) An additional priest for shackles was very nice.

On the down side we had two pallies last time, and I love me some kings and might. This time, none.

And the nicest change was the restructuring of team members left us with a nice core of team players and good attitudes. Seems that by allowing guildies to volunteer for the team that they want to be in, our team has attracted players who are in tune with team spirit. And on top of that, the Raid Leader was much more confident and assertive in his role, in a good way. And since the leader was more confident, us worker bees were able to shut up and listen and follow, offering advice only on limited basis. All in all, a nice time in there.

We left off with a plan to come back in and beat on Moroes on wednesday night, so lets all cross our fingers and hope I can report back with another Badge of Justice or two.

1 comment:

Mosshoof said...

I'm amused that you like the back door better; we've had more luck going up through the ballroom & just pulling the roaming elites one at a time, and a few of the non-elite dancers halfway down the stairs.

I was unaware that there were pet pathing problems going in that direction.

Even having to wait for the elites to walk around the room, it seems to be a pretty fast way to go.

I had a lucky trash-mob drop the other night, myself: Zierhut's Lost Treads. I'll be able to use them for my tank set after I regem to make up the defense I'll lose by switching out of the Heavy Clefthoof Boots. In the meantime, they are a nice addition to my DPS set.