Immortal Failure
Achievement far out of reach
Death on second boss
A week or so ago, I wrote about the anticipation and excitement of our first deliberate attempt at Immortal achievement, clearing Naxx-25 without any deaths on boss fights.
Had two players D/C on the second boss, and one player run into the fire (invisible on her video settings), thus disqualifying the achievement about 20 minutes into the raid. Ok, put your feet up for the next 2.5 hours, the pressure is off.
Fast forward a week, and we're back at it, fresh raid ID, fresh expectations of becoming Highlanders. So how'd it go?
Death on second boss
Mind you, a different second boss than last week. This time we had somebody on the dead side of Gothick bite the bullet. Supposedly the DPS on that side were getting too close to whirlwinding mobs being tanked in the corner, leading the healer to need to blast away with larger than normal heals, leading to the healer generating lots of threat, leading to dead healer. I dunno, dude.
So, again, 20 minutes into the night, disqualified from the win.
From there on, it was all slop, all the time.
The highlight being a Gluth wipe that involved a continuous stream of zombie chow just running a train straight to the boss. Kiting was at the biggest all time level of failure. My favorite moment was when I "magically" had wings appear over my toon and I was unable to fire at any mobs for a little while. Did the f'ing pally cast f'ing BoP or f'ing whatever on me? Really? Are you f'ing kidding me? Makes it kinda hard to pull the f'ing chow chows off of the f'ing healers and f'ing boss.
Whatever.
I was able to control the nerd rage a little bit, and had enough composure to only throw soft non-breakable things around the room.
I'd be lying if I said it the experience wasn't upsetting, but then again, us drama queens thrive on getting upset, so in the end, a good evening of entertainment. There's no person to blame, there's no one single specific thing to change, its just that so many variables have to align perfectly, and I fear that we started too late to have enough chances before the upcoming patch that will make the whole point moot.
It Just Doesn't Matter
Like Bill Murray in Meatballs, I'm chanting "it just doesn't matter."
In a week or two, the hopes will pass and I won't be thinking about the fast flying mount that's out of reach.
And a week or two after that, Ulduar will release and we'll all be happily distracted for a while.
It just doesn't matter.
The Silver Lining
All was not sour for the evening.
A big feather in our cap on the Four Horsemen. We took a very slow, calculated approach to the fight to ensure no chain lightning nailed the team. We had good communication from the officers ensuring everybody knew their job, and the team showed good discipline during the execution. That was reassuring to see, although we did lose a player to god knows what in a phase of the fight that really should not have any death.
We also Safety Danced again, which is nice to know we can do that little beauty semi-reliably.
Kick me in the jimmy!
And the real kick in the nuts was when one of the players keyed his mic and we all hear a brief moment of cheering in the background.
Seems that his roommate or friend or neighbor at the LAN center or something just dinged Immortal.
In the immortal words (f'ing pun f'ing intended) of Buzzcut of Beavis and Butthead fame...
Kick me in the jimmy!
3 comments:
Of course its the pressure of the thing that leads people to stuff up. How many times have you seen someone die on Gothik? I can only think of 1 time on either 10 or 25 since we started Naxx 5 months ago.
As for us we like to get that stuff out of the way early - Safety Dance? we have 1 or 2 people dc every second fight. My personal favourite is the person who can't figure out right from left on Thaddius and runs right into 6 people with the opposite charge.
I am interested as to what strategy you are using with 4 horseman that would make the chaining a problem though.
We just have a bear tank or warrior tank actually tank Zeliek and leave our melee dps'ers over on the other one - the holy bolt only chains over a 10 yard range so as long as you only have ranged dps + 1 or 2 tanks on him it shouldn't be an issue. Of course it might take about 15 seconds longer but that isn't an issue if your looking for immortal.
The reason to use a warrior or bear is for their charge (the switch over is the only time that you might get a chain). Just have your melee pull back out to let their stacks wear off rather than swap over. Besides, it almost guarantees they will be lower on the damage meters....
Silk
Ya man, last week was a real disappointment. The worst part is that it's starting to feel completely beyond our individual control to get this achievement.
I think of it this way: it seems like there is a roughly 1 out of 3 chance that someone will die during any given encounter. And when those odds are spread out over 17 encounters, they all but guarantee that someone will be dead at some point during a fight, keeping us from getting the title.
Having said that, I still get pumped up every time we go in Naxx. I always have the feeling that this might be the time that it all comes together and we get it right. I don't think that anything will ever remove that hope from me, but I find myself increasingly thinking of it as something that is beyond my personal control.
Let me put it another way. I used to think of getting the Immortal like I thought of getting into college. While there are no guarantees that any one school will accept you, if you put in the work then at some point you will probably get in somewhere. Similarly, there is no guarantee that any one Naxx raid will lead to getting an Immortal title, but I thought that if we put the proper work in, it was bound to work out for us eventually. Now, however, I think of it like I think of winning the lottery. Ya, you can catch lightning in a bottle, but it's not the kind of thing that you should count on.
I hate to be so down on this, and as always I'll do my part every week to helping us get the achievement, but the combination of two straights weeks of epic fail on the 2nd boss in the instance, combined with the salt-in-the-wound cheering that we heard over vent from someone else getting the achievement, has sapped a lot of the optimism from me. :\
See you tomorrow.
"Once more unto the breech, dear friends..."
Make no doubt about it, I'll be there every week we're farming, with jar in hand ready to catch that lightning should the opportunity arise. However its the butterflies that are gone. The anticipation. The anxiety. The hope. Mostly gone. I still want to get the drake because faster flight is pure win, but my jury is out on whether I'd don the title or not. Too anticlimactic at this point.
So they'll release Ulduar and all the T7 stuff will be less meaningful, so we can get butterflies over the T8 equivalent XD
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