Magisters Terrace - the good and the bugged

I don't know about you but I am soooo happy to have a new 5 man to run. Especially when there's the chance to pick up a nifty mount or a vanity pet. Although I have to say I find the raucous screech of the hawkstrider most annoying hehe. Sweet lewts aside I also think MrT is a triumph of in game artwork. It's such a lovely beautifully detailed instance. It's also always a pleasure to run an instance with some greenery as opposed to the dreary 'dungeon/cave' appearance of so many of them.

Friday night a group of us got together to give MrT a drubbing. Our group was composed of a Warrior tank, Demo lock, holy priest, fire mage and yours truly. We did the normal version first to get Emelin and myself keyed and then hit it up in heroic mode. We actually did better in heroic mode - probably because after one run through Emelin and I now knew what to expect. The instance definitely benefits from a group make up possessing multiple CC ability which is what we had with sheep, banish, seduce, fear and my traps. The most exciting moment - the phoenix pet dropped! Woooo! The lucky recipient was Tiffi our mage.

The next day we were all set to run the instance on heroic again for a chance at phat loot and for myself increased rep. I've haven't spent much time looking at the loot from MrT but I'm yet to see a drop that would be a clear upgrade for me. There is a nice chestpiece but since I've just got my hands on the Ranger Generals Chestguard, apparently considered one of the best it's no upgrade. No it's the rep I want as there are several nifty Jewelcrafting designs to pick up.

So a group forms. Three party members had run the instance that morning before the reset. So we head in and clear the trash up to the first boss. Wait... where is the first boss. He was totally AWOL! But the door that opens to the next section once you down him was still shut. Hmmm. Very strange.

We head back outside and I made the stupid mistake of asking in General whether anyone had had any issues with the instance. Yup definite mistake since the responses were all about how I needed to L2P and stop QQing just because you find it too difficult. Ugh. I further explained what had happened and then had people telling me to check my raid ID. That if we dropped group and reformed under a new leader all would be fine and so on. Just to prove ourselves right we did just that. Yep as expected, the boss was still missing although the trash respawned (in this group we had a handy rogue who was able to sneakily investigate). As with any heroic we had all been saved to the instance on the same raid id without needing to kill a boss first. Reforming under a new leader and re-entering did nada. I took great satisfaction in announcing that in General although typically no-one actually listened. Great, we were saved to a borked ID and the instance wouldn't reset until the next day. I'd opened a ticket but with little hope of any quick response we decided to pick up the heroic daily and headed over to lay waste to Steamvaults.

A pleasant suprise was that a Blizz CM contacted me just as were entering StV. It seems this is a known issue and Blizz are working hard at solving it. However there was nothing they could do for us and were sorry for our inconvenience. They did tell me that the issue occured when members of the party left the instance for longer than 30-45 minutes and if this was avoided then there would be no problems. I then pointed out that none of us had left the instance and that there were 3 people who had run the instance before it reset. Therefore what I was in effect being told was the instance had not actually reset. The CM said they would add this additional info to the database.

I had read on the interwebs that raid reset information was displaying incorrectly but I hadn't thought that this applied to heroics and admittedly hadn't read the detail. Considering that heroics have a raid ID I guess I should have realised they came under the same 'jurisdiction'.

Here's hoping Blizz fix the issue soon.

Good times in Tempest Keep

So after the trials and tribulations of the arrival of patch 2.4 as previously moaned about here by yours truly the weekend shaped up pretty nicely indeed. Unfortunately it's ended rather unhappily with Emelin passing on his tummy bug to this poor hunter but let's not go there eh? I'd rather talk about the good times in Tempest Keep.

After our triumph in SSC last weekend the Drunken Badgers raid was ready and raring to go in TK. We were aiming for 3 bosses this week - Solarian, Void Reaver and Alar. Like any good raider I'd done my home work - read up on the fights and watched the youtube strategy vids. I was ready with pots and flasks and food and bandages - all the accoutrement's of a raider heading into unknown territory.

First stop Solarian. We cleared the trash and learned that rushing along at our usual headlong pace should probably wait until we've got the pulls down pat hehe. The Solarian fight was really pretty straight forward. We got her on the 4th try and as you might expect it was only Wrath that caused us any problems. Once people learned to 'run away little girl' we were sweet. Of the loot dropped was the Vambraces of Ending which suprisingly (at least to me) no one wanted. That meant they went to open roll and myself and the other hunters were up for it. I was the lucky winner - which means I've scored in both SSC and TK in our first visits there. Yay!

Next stop - Loot Reaver. We were aware of the news that Mr. Pinata had changed a little with 2.4 and orbs were no longer announced and were sometimes rising out of the floor or coming in multiples. First shot many of us got splatted by them but we learned quickly and downed him second try. Huzzah. Two of the T5 tokens for hunters, mages and warlocks dropped and there were some very happy people.

Now it was time to take on Alar. I found myself thinking that perhaps we should take on the harder bosses earlier in our raiding day as by now I was starting to feel quite tired and my ability to focus was slipping. Alar really is quite a challenging fight - but in this case mostly for the tanks. I was grateful that my main job was to unleash MQoSDPS. We gave it a few shots but were unsuccessful in downing her. We did get to phase 2 and got some good practice in for the tanks as regards positioning and reacting to quills and were pleased with that. I'm quite confident that we'll get her on our next visit.

I'm really proud of the progression our raid has made in the last two weeks and I do so enjoy learning new fights.

The huntard unleashed

I've really been looking forward to getting into the new patch 2.4 content. So many lovely new things to see and experience and my first opportunity to participate in a server wide effort to open new content since the gates to AQ were long opened on my server by the time I started playing.

I thought last night was the night but no. I'd just got in the door after work when the phone rang with our weeknight Kara raid MT asking whether the spousal unit and I would be logging on for the raid as everyone was ready to go. Righto then. Log in without taking the time to update my mods and head straight into Kara. We did almost a full clear only skipping Netherspite and by then it was laaaate and I logged pretty much directly after we downed Prince. As an aside it was a great run - probably our best yet with the Aussie group. Most probably since we had a larger than usual balance of over geared players and the other guys are getting well geared now too. DPS was totally off the wall although no one had a working damage metre to confirm it heh.

I did have one spectacular huntard moment though which the title of this post refers to. There are many excuses I could give like being tired, feeling rushed and so on but I take full responsibility for one of the worst f**k ups I can think of in my WoW career to date. We were clearing the trash before Moroes and as usual I had the MT set as my focus and smacked my assist focus macro key to focus fire on whatever mob he was wailing against. Normally I pay attention and make sure that the mob has a sunder or similiar on it so I know it's the right one (not to mention the appropriate charm mark). Not this time, no sirree, I sent the pet off to attack then realised my error, called him back and brought 2 mob packs back with him including the elite pack of dancers. Can you spell wipe? I was soooo embarrassed hehe.

So Kara done and tonight's the night I'm thinking but it seems it's not to be as not only was Curse running slow as molasses with log ins disabled - it's now completely down 'for maintenance' as per the picture. In my opinion having a 'click here to try again' link is madness as you can guarantee that people will just click spam and that ain't going to help the poor old server. So mod updating is not going smoothly. I could just log in right? Wrong. Feathermoon is down and has been for at least 30 mins as I write this although according to the log in news all servers are having rolling restarts applied to correct the apellation of server names in name plates for BGs. Seems things aren't running smoothly for the Blizz peeps.

Working in the IT industry as I do I can empathise with the pain of problems with deployment. There's nothing quite as stressful as a live roll out going wrong and with Warcraft that's some massive scale we're talking.

Fingers crossed that both Curse and Feathermoon come back online soon and I can get in some gaming. Otherwise I guess I'll... um.... I'll...

/blink

make an animated avatar about how I survived a WoW outage?

look at some lolcats?

get a life?

EEK! Elune forbid!

/wink

Guess I can go drool over some of the awesome new hunter badge loot. I like the looks of the Crossbow of Relentless Strikes yes I do precioussss. It's got a hefty 150 badge price tag but I'm pretty much almost sitting on that amount currently and there are definitely many more badge gathering opportunities in my near future. If I can log in that is.

/sad panda

Hope the rest of you are having a smoother patch 2.4 experience.