The types of people in a raid team

We had a plan for last night. Bladefist on HC then switch to normal and clear up to Ko'ragh. We did actually manage this. Not without some false starts along the way (naturally!)

Thursday is a day when there are a couple of late arrivals, but we manage due to having our Fake Tanks and Pretend Healers. We cleared trash on HC Bladefist while people were arriving. Shouting out bets on who would get killed on the way in by the 30 or so horde waiting outside (do they actually go in and raid???) Fenrir lost 15g on Jolly being killed as he arrived so only bet 10g on Gio being killed, which he lost as well!

While having a relax and run through of groups to allocate those to go up into the arena we had some 'Yo Mama' jokes posted. While quite amusing we also conceeded that to anyone who did not understand WoW in the slightest would think that we had 1- Not understood the concept of Yo Mama jokes and 2- Thought we had gone quite mad.
A couple of favorites are here:
Yo Mama so ugly even Illidan was not prepared
Yo Mama so ugly she is the reason the Titans left
Yo Mama so fat, chain lightning hits her three times
Yo Mama so fat it takes two warlock portals to summon her
Yo Mama so fat a rogue shadowstepped her in Ogrimmar and ended up in Undercity
Yo Mama so fat when she logged into WoW she automatically got 'World Explorer'
Yo Mama so fat, she tripped and caused the Sundering

We got back to raining after announcing 'Everybody ready!?' quite loudly in ts to be heard over the giggles.
Marvv was on pulling duty and ended up putting up a pull timer almost instantly regardless if people were ready or not. It did not go so well. We wiped of course and then settled down to getting organised for an actual pull.

Cereals, a Priest healer for RT1 had mentioned on our forum that if you strip off so that the stat you want is the top stat when you eat feasts, you can avoid needing to make individual food, I had previously configured my equiptment sets to have a set named 'Food' and a set named 'Ready'. 'Food' consisted of my belt and my bow. I was busy eating when the ready check came up, I clicked 'Not Ready' due to the confusion we had last time on Butcher where I said I was ready but I was just about to eat to get my food buff and a pull timer went out instantly.
So this time, I did the right thing. Not ready. A pull timer went out regardless!


"Guys I said I'm NOT READY!"
"Marvv..."
So with Marvv becoming the 'Ninja Puller' while being a tank I had no option but to roll with it.

Raidwiper did all the hard work as I was running around in just a belt and my sexy brown undies. I yelled out that there was no way in hell I could go up so they would have to put someone else in my place. I ran around positioning myself behind the flame pillars to make sure I did not die to those. The healers were having a hard time keeping me up, and it seemed to be at the expense of others!
One can only assume they felt sorry for my awkward situation. After all, it's not everyday you raid with someone whose butt cheeks are hanging out (not on purpose!)


After this false start and declaring Marvv a 'ninja puller' we thought about who else we might have on the team...

- Ant is the 'smoker guy' the one who asks for cigarette breaks quite often.
- Jolly is the 'gold whore'. Wealthy and seems to be able to just keep the gold coming in.
- Gio is 'Mr. Mic' or 'Robot'. You're not quite sure what he just said as it sounded like he was slaughtering R2-D2 in the background.
- Xérath is 'the quiet one' mostly communicates in raid chat and then on the odd occasion that he speaks people get confused and scramble to ts to see who it was.

Arakkoa love

I love the Arakkoa. I want to play them.

Fenrir is convinced that the Arakkoa outcasts are going to turn on us during this expansion.
There's a very rich lore with them that's interesting to read and my time lost figurine is by far my favorite toy. After reading through countless pages on the different characters that were notable I started to piece together what happened and it was quite sad...

Needless to say, this is a work in progress!

I hope that we get the back story on why Ikiss has gone mad as the Arakkoa outcasts already have branded him a lunatic as soon as you step into Spires. My hate of questing has meant that I'd not really paid much attention to them in Outland other than just an initial fascination with how they looked and moved and that they seemed to be desperately clinging onto some misguided hope from the past.
The new and improved Skettis (where are the trees!?) In Draenor and the fact that the Outcasts like you, if by tolerating you means they like you, it meant that you had a glimpse into their troubles before it all went south for them.

I want more Arakkoa!

Orcs and Tigers and Fire, Oh my!

We started off on a clean run. We wanted gear and to get back to Imperiator Mar'Gok.
We also started on Heroic.

We killed Bladefist without 99% of us dying this time and went to Twins. We had discussed the whole 'blind spot' for the fire but none of us were any good at finding it and we proceeded to run around like headless chickens, miles away from healers finding all the fire we could.

There is a story to go with our obsession with fire. Gio was on his healer a few days ago and a few of us decided to run lfr to try and get rid of our blues that we had hanging around. We got to twins and I reminded them that I got to 6 stacks before I burned to death. It was a challenge now to get as much as we could.
While at the Twins we tried to find as much fire as we could! Shouting over ts how many stacks we were up to, voices increasing in pitch with every stack that we acquired. I got to 6 stacks and started to wince as the numbers went up
7...
8!
OMG 9!!!
Trying to run through more fire it was soon apparent that we had beaten the fire boss as we never got to 10. "I can't get anymore than 9!" I yelled, clearly over excited about giving my healers a headache.
"I can't either!" Gio replied with equal enthusiasm.
We had discovered that 9 was clearly the most that Blizzard through anyone would pick up before combusting into a fiery death. We strutted around afterwards with our imaginary 'I beat the fire boss!' badges. It was something that we would mention quite often when faced with fire again. Alas, HC fire burns a bit more than lfr fire, which is clearly more like a warm glow compared to what one can only imagine is the Great Fire of London on Mythic difficulty.

Anyway, back to our HC run.

I was approximately 50% 'with it' and while trying to call out things. The other 50% was worried about my own ass getting burned, which lead to people getting hit by charge a couple of times. After a fair few attempts we decided to go back to normal and just get through. Running out to reset meant that most of us, rather annoyingly, ended up back at our garrisons. We took a five minute break as we all set of on our flight paths back to Highmaul.

Once back in, having left the angry Horde behind us, we got into the arena and set up the groups and suchforth. It was noticed that High in the stadium Grommash was stood next to Bladefist.
There was talk about killing Grommash and just winning the game there and then. If we could get to him it would have been quite feasable as the mighty Chief only had a minuscule amount oh health compared to the mighty Bladefist. 

 

The fight itself went quite smoothly, the issue was that we had an overwhelming draw to the tigers.

I managed to fall in not once, but twice. Each time navigating behind the fire pillars to be ready to get Bladefist into the pillar on beserker rush. The first time I fell in it wasn't really noticed. I did indeed have rush on me and the fire pillar went down before I was thrown back out. Many heals came my way.
There was a chain hurl next that ended with a "Oh Marvv" as people jumped down and two of them ended up in a pit.
My second pit navigating failure was to be my last. Squeezing round I got a bit too close and fell in again. This time I was thrown back out into a pillar. My time was up.
I was in a great position to call out other pillars and was in the fortunate position to witness the most spectacular pillar to pit fail.

Blunnerz was busy healing people. He was stood in a nice, currently empty space. That space also contained a little skull thingy.
He was stood on the skull thingy.
The pillar went off and I watched Blunnerz fly gracefully backwards. I held my breath as we really didn't want a healer out of action as we had lost a couple of people already. Blunnerz kept flying backwards and then disappeared out of sight. I didn't say anything, I wasn't sure I'd seen it right. Then Blunnerz appeared again. Almost dead. I watched him run off.
"Erm... Did you...?" I asked tentatively
"No! No I did not!"
"Did what?" Rawls asked
"Nothing! We shall not speak of this!"
I took my finger away from my ptt button and laughed. My own misfortune had enabled me to witness one of the most spectacular fails we had occur in many a boss fight.

It's not just us though. Retelling snippets of what happened in gc I was told of the Tiger problem that occurred on a Mythic run.
"Once we had a tiger eat five people in a row... That was pretty funny"
"Rampaging tigers"
"I seem to remember calling out 'tiger on X, X is dead, Tiger on Y, Y is dead, Tiger on Z... And so on"
"Then there was when out tank got eaten by a tiger which was funny as the tank is a bear. Bear verses tiger...."
"I'm sure she was dead for 30 seconds before people ressed her!"
"Before the boomkins found their buttons..."

Those tigers...

Raiding rules

Our number one raid rule is that we have fun.
If it stops being fun then it becomes a chore.
If it's a chore then you don't want to do it.
If you don't want to do it then you don't want to be there.
If you don't want to be there then the whole raid suffers.

We may not be the fastest, but we make up for that with enthusiasm to poke things, our determination and our ability to make a joke out of things. Yesterday was no exception.

It all started with me logging in only two minutes late!


As I hadn't checked my phone, I had no idea of the mutiny going on.

We were at Brakenspore and waiting for Ant to get over here. I had recently created my Swapblaster. Possibly the only reason I switched to engineering. So I had some fun with it, swapping with random people. Narlos was my first target. He was sat on his mount, minding his own buisness and BLAM! he was halfway across the room. A "what the hell?" was muttered over ts as I skipped off like nothing had happened.
I swapped a few more people but as most were just standing waiting it wasn't as amusing. Unfortunately this meant that Narlos got the short straw as my victim.
"someone needs to pick up the other Flamethrower" Rawls said.
I had Narlos still in my sights and did one last swap before we got down the buisness.
"What the fuck! I was just about to get the Flamethrower! I hate you Ella!"
I couldnt help but laugh uncontrollably. I was suddenly engulfed in flames and had Narlos running around me.
"Grrrrr! I'm gonna burn you to death!"
As a Good dps, I knew when it was time to stop with the people who were actually at their keyboards and swapped myself with Jolly, so that he was stood at the front of the group and I was on the stairs.
Later on in the night, I found this photo had been shared on chat.



When this boss was down we went to Ko'ragh. We had the pleasure of Vinz joining us and were thinking that we were some sort of science experiment. Alas, we were not guinea pigs but the RT1 raid had been cancelled so Vinz offered to help us instead which was great as Jurojin had been unable to make it.
As we stood on the stairs, markers went up everywhere.
"What is this?" Blunnerz whispered
"It's pretty..." was the only reply I had to give.
Obviously *cough* it was so we could keep tabs on where we were moving to.

We did get this killed as well. Along with Vinz. I don't know what we were more surprised at, killing Vinz or killing the boss. We kinda kept quite about both.

After a brief decision about what we were doing, we carried in to boss number seven.

As we went through the portal there were many terrified screams of "DON'T RUN FORWARD!" "DON'T RUN!"
It turns out that the portal takes you to a new wing and places you right in front of some trash.
"Cc them please" Blunnerz said as we regained our cool.
The one I was stood in front of was hexed so I shuffled along trying to get to one to freeze. The main trash mob was pulled along with the last one.
"I can't cc that now" I said as I started attacking it.
"What? I thought you could in combat"
"I can't" I said. My responses getting shorter as I was trying to negotiate my key binds and my push to talk button
"Has it changed?" Rawls asked
"No. But I can't cc that one now"
"Why?"
"It won't last with the aoe going on"
I trapped it anyway and it broke almost instantly.
"Oooh. That's my bad" Jolly said.

We took them out one by one and somewhere along the lines Fenrir died.
As we carried on, it didn't register for ages that he was still dead.
"Is this trash?" Someone asked
"Yeah" Rawls replied
"Fenrir! Res your lazy ass!" I laughed, realising that he had been dead for a while and could have run in.
"Urgh... Ok. Oh! I ressed right here!"
Everyone started laughing as he moved two steps forward and started hiring the trash again.
"Lol you're such knob"

We went further in and faced a trash mob who had a proper name, so we knew he was important. Unfortunately he started killing the raid team.


We kept running back to it though and got it down.
The inner room we were faced with the hideous mages who kept blinking and were immune to cc's.
We just hit them all. And ran away. We were everywhere. After what seemed like an eternity we got them down and were just left with the boss himself.
Serous talk started.
"Has anyone actually watched the video?"
"Nope"
"No"
"No"
"To be fair, I didn't think we would get this far" Jolly said finally.
"So we have no clue what we're doing?"
"Let's check if Nullflow is going to be ok" Blunnerz said as we started typing messages to him.
"He's probably the only one of us who actually knows what to do!" I added


Once he confirmed he did know what he was doing. We just decided to have a quick debrief and then poke it.
Markers went up. Ranged stacked at orange and the boss was pulled.
We manage to take a huge amount of damage.
"Ranged... Please move out of the bombs" Blunnerz sighed.
"Oh, did you set one off?" Rawls asked.
"We set all of them off"

On the next go we avoided one but Ant stood in the second one.
"Oh Ant!" Rawls laughed.
The big wave thing came at us for the second time. I jumped over it and started running. Being pushed back I just couldn't get moving forward and ended up dead.
"Why was I still being pushed back while I was running?" I asked.
"You have to run at it before it gets to you"
"Hmmm"
As I watched everyone else die. Jolly was the last one alive and doubled in size. I had no idea why and was slightly worried about what mechanic it would turn out to be.
"This is going to sound bad but... why did Jolly get big?"

Cue the sound of many filthy minds working out what the 'bad' version was.
Jolly composed himself and explained what it was.
"Ooh. Ok that's good. Last time I saw that it was in Siege and mind controls!"

Heroic Bladefist

We killed this! WE KILLED THIS!

I remember reading somewhere 'even if one person is left alive, a kill is still a kill' and we had everyone left alive. Not.

Apparently the mechanics are the same, he just hits harder. Well, they were kinda the same. Apart from the horrendous bug we encountered where Bladefist would switch targets mid beserker rush and half the raid would get eaten.
I've always been a fan of standing near the pillars so I'm prepared for the rush but the boss moved quite quickly so our usual tactic of just looking up and seeing where a pillar was did not quite cut the mustard. We used world markers on them to call out where the pillars were and melee would have to move to an opposing colour to make sure they were out of the way.
It wasn't clean by any means. It took five wipes to get it down but each time we were getting closer.

The only thing of real importance I said all night (apart from calling out mechanics) was to "make sure your nappy is strapped on guys!" Holy crap by the end of it we needed it!

The last pull things were going ok. A few people had died but we were burning him down as best we could. Group one went up when they should do, they killed who they needed to. It then all unraveled slightly at the end.

Blunnerz was the only healer with both tanks and the smattering of dps left alive.
Blunnerz died
Dps 1 died
Tank went down
Dps 2 went down
Tank 2 went down
Boss had 300 health left
Nullflows health bar went down to a glowing red line
Boss had 65 health
Squealing/weeping/hysteria/praying over ts
Boss goes down
FUCKING EAR BLOWING SCREAMING OVER TS
Everyone is dead

Purgatory. Saved. Our. Asses.
Nullflow is a demi-god for the rest of the night.

It didn't go unnoticed that we only had one player left alive at the time of the kill. Although, it may have been forgotten when Blunnerz noticed that is ring had dropped from the boss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtRj2FoJzfg

We went to the Butcher after we stopped screaming.
We had a pull issue. The Butcher seemed to be very very angry about something. Fenrir, who was on his pally, managed to pull him by just standing there.
Cue a mad panic and everyone running around. As we tried to regain control we inevitably got slaughtered.
Running back in I paused to eat, a ready check went up and with only ten seconds to go until I got my food buff I clicked yes but did warn I was still eating.
"Why did you click ready if you're still eating?" Blunnerz joked.
"There isn't a pull timer yet!"
Up went the pull timer.
"Omg don't go! DON'T GO!"
Many messages appeared in raid chat of 'don't go' right at the end of the rather short pull timer but to no avail. We went.
We did manage to scramble into position. And start the hokey-cokey phase.
With the first bounding cleave we got scattered and also half the raid went down.
I, somehow, managed to land on top of a pillar. I stayed there as my feign death had somehow been removed and was on cool down. I just hoped that the boss would think there was no one left and ignore me if I just didn't hit him.
As the last man standing I half breathed a sigh of relief as the boss was miles away just standing there.
Then like a scene from Hellraiser, a hooked chain came flying out and dragged me towards the boss where he promptly smashed me with his mace and I dropped to the floor, quite dead.
[LOL] Xérath typed into raid chat. [He was all like "don't think I've forgotten about you!"]

Danue was having an issue with her boss mods when we settled back in by the stairs. We sorted her out and someone asked how a pull timer was activated. We had already stated we were ready and Jolly put one up for five seconds. He charged at the boss and I shot it as Blunnerz and Rawls were both shouting not to go.
"Oh Ella!"
"What! Jolly charged!?"

At this point we decided to just switch to normal and take a five minute break.
Needing to exit the arena to reset we tentatively walked outside. There were a couple of hordies waiting for their raid team to arrive. For which Marvv decided was an ideal time to kill things.
A little bit of pvp went down...
I was just standing by the portal being targeted by hordies who were about to die. For the life of me I couldn't see where they were before they disappeared.
We then realised after Rawls had a nosey at what we were up to, that we had been ganking raiders from Exploding Lab Rats. Upon learning this we started pleading for people to get out of the raid so we could swap it to normal and get back in before the rest of the Lab Rats team showed up and handed our asses to us.
"Dead people get our of the instance!"
"Can we get in now?!"
"There are hordies here!"
"Omg let me in!!!"

Once we were almost all back in we got the trash down while the last few got back.
We were a little bit slack in the actual boss. With Marvv and Nullflow managing to jump down from the stands in to a tiger pit.
Gio also had a 'hope no one saw that' moment.
"Pillar at Blue"
"Beserker rush in two"
"Gio"
I was positioned in between the blue and orange pillar and watched Gio run in front of me towards Blue. Beserker rush was ended and I paned my camera around slightly as I noticed Gio was almost dead. Gio was also nowhere to be seen.
I thought about it for a moment and figured that he had just run away quite fast.
My brain however wouldn't let the matter rest.
"Did you fall in a tiger pit?"
"Nooooo..."
I fell silent.
The boss went down. Gear disenchanted (LOL)

Later on, I still wasn't convinced...

AH-HA!

Playing with the twins...

Tuesday was our last lockout day before we made the decision to clear again or to extend. We were on twins.

We made our way over and the usual conversation started on ts.
"Is there Horde there?"
"Yes"
"Yeah there's a million of them"
"Run in like a boss"

I'd landed at the flight path right after Danue and started following her in. There were a lot of Horde that's for sure. As I take so long to load up, I'd been attacked on my way over by a mob that I couldn't see, crossing everything that the scenery would load properly before I got to the entrance I arrived at the steps on my invisible mount with only the dots on my mini maps as clues as to how many Horde were there. Running up, I still couldn't see any players, but I charged forward and slammed myself into an invisible wall where the portal should have been. Obviously I got targeted. An Alliance player flailing against a wall was too good of an opportunity to pass up. Just when I thought I had met my doom and would have been the first casualty of the night, the big glowing circle appeared around me and my loading screen popped up. Take that suckers!

There was a little congregation of people on the top step before the hallway trash for the twins. Someone threw a zeppelin at me and as I was mounted, I managed to confuse it by running around it in a circle until it disappeared (I did at some point completely miss another one being thrown at me and only realised when I opened my bags some time later) we waited for the rest of our merry bunch to make it through the gauntlet of Horde, some decided to pass the time shapeshifting with toys and playing with robots.





Watching them fight it out in their tiny death match it reminded me of a program I used to love.
"It's like watching Robot Wars..." I mused.

All of a sudden I had two of Blunnerz stood in front of me. I didn't really pay much attention until Danue changed appearance... And looked like me. Gio arrived and he looked like me. And then Blunnerz... What the hell was going on?






Wait a moment. I look like Marvv...
There was a whole lot of changes going on and no one was saying anything about who was doing it.
I was quite impressed with the Goren. It was quite cute rolling around. While wandering around to see everyone I got turned into and and was rolling my way through people's legs. Awww yisss.

Everyone had arrived and whatever state we were in we started.
To be honest, I don't think we were paying much attention to the mobs and were just concerned with what we looked like. I got turned into Rawls (who had stepped out of his Princess dress and put on his ninja costume)
"OI!" He said. "You're no ninja"
"I'm a tank!" I gleefully replied. As Jolly charged-rolled up the corridor to meet the big add as a goren.

Distracting as it was, we did manage to get all the mobs in the boss room down and started to gather at the back of the room. Going through tactics and setting out our markers we and a final run through in raid chat.
Tanks at Blue,
Ranged at Green,
Whirlwind to Red,
It seemed simple enough.
"Rawls red is the cross" Blunnerz added on ts.
"I know that..." Rawls quipped.
"Haha, yes please don't take whirlwind to green" I laughed.
"Kill all of the Ranged..." Fenrir added a little too enthusiastically.

Naturally, we cocked up somewhere along the lines and it all went a little wrong. A tank died. And then another one. And then whirlwind went to green...

Dusting ourselves off we ran back. Ate, rebuffed and checked flasks etc all in record time. It was as though if we were quick enough 'resetting' then it didn't count.
It was at that point that someone got creative with one person who happened to be in wolf form.

And it resulted in this.

Still with the majority of us completely in the dark about how this was happening. We suddenly went from 'raid mode' to 'PUPPIES!' in about two seconds. It was magical, little doggies running around, sniffing, having a scratch.
"What is doing this?"
"How are we turning into Wolves?"
"LOOK AT ALL THE DOGGIES!"

Turns out, jewelcrafting can provide something much much better *cough* than gems (who needs those anyway!) The delight that is Reflecting Prism And as you can see were not the only ones to have dabbled in the art of 'Raiding with Wolves'




Once everyone was a wolf there was only one thing left to do. Line up and dance!


Cute as it looked, there was something missing...


Moon Moon!
In my haste to get screenshots I'd manage to accidentally open a ton of tabs and activate Aspect of the Fox... It could have been a lot worse, it could have been Hero I set off (not that I've ever done that before *cough cough*)



With all of us dancing away and silently watching our majestic group. Raiding had certainly been forgotten about four a while.


That was until Narlos got over excited and one can only assume tried to hump the bosses leg.
Our dance was abandoned as the wolf pack tried to run for the door.


"Run doggies! RUN!"
"Omg the doors shut!"
"Weapon!"


It was carnage. We were running around everywhere. I forgot I could still attack... It was only when I got a heal that I remembered.


It's safe to say that the Wolves never made it. Although we did get the stupid boss down after that, for the rest of the raid we didn't change into Wolves again...

Ko'ragh
Truly living up to the huntard name, for some reason I could not work out the mechanics for this boss. The shield in particular. I resorted to whispering Blunnerz many times to clarify what I should be doing and when. Looking back, I thought that you couldn't go into the circle in the middle until the boss ran into it... derp.

We kinda had a plan for this. We were going to run right every time we had the big shit circle on the floor. Considering how many issues we had with left and right last time on Tectus I was skeptical this was going to work.
First plan was to eat a lot of food.

After Xérath was convinced I wasn't dead as I did eventually click ready we all agreed to poke the boss and see what happened.
Poke we did and death happened.

When we decided that stacking loosely wasn't working we spread out. Insta-death to a tank and wipe number two was in the bag.
Setting up again on this try we got a shit circle to land half in and half out of the central bit. It was quite handy for the adds and still left the soaker enough room to stand. When we wiped on that attempt we had a brain wave.
"Can we force one of them there and then spread out?"
"We can stack on the first fire and then use a cd?"
Two seconds later we were dead.
"Ok that didn't work"

Spreading out again we had another crack. But something was telling us that tonight wasn't going to be our night. We just all seemed to be out of sync. We couldn't get a grip on the adds, one minute the tanks had them in a shit circle and the next, they were running around eating people.

I was still all very confused about the whole orb thing. I couldnt for the life of me work out what was my cue to go in and as Blunnerz have the call out prompt for the next one to get ready to run, I lost my head.
"Who? WHO IS GOING IN!"
"me, I'm in" Narlos announced. Cool as a cucumber.
In my flapping around for some reason my brain told my fingers to make my char stand on the green swirly shit.
Boom. Dead.
"Oh for fucks sake..."
I couldn't help it. I just laughed.

While we were having a mini meltdown about why the fuck this thing WASN'T DYING on our ressing from the last wipe, Blunnerz decided enough was enough and I agreed, so did everyone else. We still for some unknown reason, ran back to the boss room and took up our positions. Fenrir decided to leave us with a little momento and pulled the boss.
Lightning bubbled and hearthed while the rest of us stood their trying to get out alive.
"Did lightning just bubble - hearth?"
"Yes, yes he did"
"Haha jammy!"
*Boss goes mad and obliterates us*
"Aw, I was two seconds away from portaling out!"
"run in!"