Monday 17 March 2008

The Staff of Multiple Violations Remains Unseen...

Soulbound Horde got its first full clear of Karazhan this weekend, and it was a rather eventful run - spanning two days, several hours, wipes in unusual places, and loot and badges aplenty. A full accounting after the break!

We started off slow on the first night as everyone attempted to synchronize their vent apps up. I've been unable to get on any kind of voice chat because my university's server seems to block external servers such as those used for ventrilo, xfire, Team Fortress 2, and so on. It's odd that I can still play WoW using it, but I'm not going to look that particular gift horse in the mouth.

We started the pulls up towards Attumen uneventfully, me main-tanking and feeling very pleased with how my snappy new Darkmoon Card: Vengeance was working out and our holy paladin Askana off-tanking. So we get up to Attumen and... promptly wipe. Quickly! Reshuffle, reorganize! Attumen take 2 sees the horse-lover down with three minutes to spare on respawns, and we quickly rolled up the stairs to Moroes.

We one-shotted the tricksy bastard - but it was messy. Very messy. One of our priests had trouble with his interface and couldn't shackle the mortal-strike warrior whose name I forget... so he basically ran around killing clothies before me and Askana realized that this wasn't just a normal string of resists and ran back to contain the rampaging mob.

With Moroes on 4% and with just one healer left, it was looking touch and go - with the Crowd Controllers dead, I had to tank Moroes and his cronies, Baron Rafe Drueger and Lord Robin Daris. I blew all my cooldowns and the five remaining raiders finished off Moroes just in time for me to buy the farm. Askana jumped in and managed to tank the remaining two long enough to die heroically after Daris went down... and the remaining DPS succeeded in kiting Drueger to his untimely end while the remaining healer struggled at almost 0 mana.

All that, and the stingy bugger didn't even drop my pocket watch. Sigh.

After this, we rolled on up to Maiden, who we summarily one-shotted. Finally things smoothed out, and we steamrolled the Opera event (our fourth time round with Oz). Upper kara went just as well - Nightbane went down with no problems whatsoever, and Curator was almost a joke. At last we got to Shade of Aran, who stymied us for two wipes before we hit the magic number and polished him off. That's where we broke for the evening, with, of course, a great number of paladin plate drops along the way. Seeing as how we only roll with two paladins, the sheer number of plate drops in Karazhan weigh heavily on the minds of our many clothies.

The next day we picked up where we left off and realized we were two raiders short with no explanation. The first day we'd had two extra 70s clamoring to get in that we didn't have room for - and now we were two short. As an aside, one of those 70s (a warrior who I shan't name) /gquit because he couldn't get in the raid group that day. If he'd been patient enough to wait for his chance - and I'd like to note that he'd have been guaranteed a spot in the second Kara group once it got going - he would've been in Karazhan for the second day, on which no less than two items of warrior plate dropped. All of you who've recently joined a guild but haven't managed to get into runs yet: keep this in mind. Please.

In the end we managed to PuG two helpful raiders, a mage and druid (who happened to have an abysmal set of gear, I might add), who stayed with us through the Illhoof and Chess events - during which time two of our guildies, thankfully, materialized to safe us from potential raid death.

And this is where the title becomes relevant. For the third week running, I have been denied my Staff of Multiple Violations.

Give me a moment to regain myself. Tears are awfully bad for the keyboard.

Okay, I'm good now.

So this was where another "zomgwtf" moment appeared - we one-shot Illhoof like the ten champions we are, and clear up to Chess.

Where we...

I can't even say it. It's... too shameful to comprehend. We... we...

No. I can't say it.

So after that farce, we got our two substitutes in and rolled on up to the Prince. Someone must have brought the win sauce that day, because he went down in one attempt as well.

With all going near seamlessly (a few minor upsets, but we weren't having trouble with anything major), we had one boss left to conquer - Netherspite, he of the confusing portal mumbo-jumbo. The last time we'd encountered this particular monstrosity, we just couldn't get the hang of killing him without someone screwing up and not noticing that a void zone had opened underneath their feet and was consuming their very soul, or suddenly realizing that, hey, I've got the green Nether Exhaustion but the green beam is still... oh crap. Yep, that happened. Twice in one attempt. So we'd had to call it off.

But this week was a different story; the void zones might as well have been nonexistent; both tanks danced in and out of the red beam flawlessly (thank yew, thank yew) and Netherspite was dispatched with relative ease on our first attempt. It was all rather epic.

So there we have it; Soulbound Horde's first full clear of Karazhan, with one-shots and strange, strange wipes because of silly mistakes aplenty. In the spirit of Octale and Hordak Versus the World:

My /salute goes out to everyone who's stuck it out for the past couple of months, right from that very first run where we were wiping on Moroes and Maiden but managed to down Aran anyway, to that run where we just couldn't get past Curator no matter how many flasks we burned.

My /spit has to go to everyone who doesn't have the patience, gumption and persistence to achieve their goals and expects their rewards to be handed to them on a silver platter.

The Penguin signs off!


1 comment:

runycat said...

You know, my old guild started farming Kara in February after BC came out. Essentially, I've been farming Kara (then for progression, now for badges) for over a year, and I just saw Illhoof's staff drop for the very first time about two weeks ago. While I was playing my paladin.

It was pretty frustrating then, and while you can obviously pick up things that will replace it (try the staff off Warp Splinter in heroic Botanica), it was such a huge disappointment every week. Good luck!