Thursday, April 2, 2009

Larísa fixates her eyes on Sartharion

Let’s put it straight.
Larísa is currently completely out of balance.
She’s not moderate.
She doesn’t keep a healthy distance.
She doesn’t laugh the defeats away, shrugging her shoulders, thinking “so what, it’s just a game”.
She is obsessed. Or should I rather say possessed.

The wrong moment
This hardly seems the appropriate moment to talk about it. You see, right now the WoW Blogosphere is all shaken up by the loss of BRK. His farewell letter has touched our hearts; the 944 comments (so far) speak for themselves. As a matter of fact I haven’t been able to come up with a proper commenting hommage post; I seriously can’t think of anything to add that hasn’t already been said.

I think many of us are looking ourselves in the mirror, wondering if we like BRK are on a road heading right into a wall that suddenly will appear in front of us. Maybe we too will come to the crossroads where we’ll have to choose. An easy choice – some people may say – since “real life comes first”. But for many of us it’s not just an easy, but also a painful choice. Yeah, it’s a game, but we’ve invested our hearts in it - we’ve got friends in Azeroth, friends in the Blogosphere, and to separate from friends hurts, no matter how good the reasons are.

We’re all in a bit of a shock and if you’re supposed to blog about anything these days it seems more natural to talk about how to manage the delicate WoW-RL balance, or possibly about how to fight the lethargy and boredom while you’re waiting for Ulduar.

One single thought
This is hardly the right time to talk about passion, obsession, not to say possession.

And yet I will do it. So troll me, shoot me, throw rotten tomatoes at me, call me a freak if you want. But I tell you: right now – when it comes to WoW related thoughts (I DO spend some time thinking about my job and my family:)) there is currently only room for one thought, one goal and one desire. And that is to kill Sartharion and his three helper dragons in a single fight.

Tuesday night was the last time I was there. We did some 20 + tries on him, and actually did real progress, if you compare it to our previous wipe nights (there have been several, I’ve honestly lost count.) Our best try lasted 17 minutes and got down all adds and Sartharion himself to 3 percent before it was a wipe due to the fact that there were too few players alive to properly deal with the enrage mechanism.

It’s doable. It’s within our reach. And yet we haven’t done it. When we finally called it night, it was reluctantly. I don’t think I was the only one who wished that you could turn back the watch and give us another couple of hours. It was 11.30 pm and I was mentally exhausted after spending 3 hours completely focused and on my toes, with only a five minutes break. To go to sleep in that state of mind was still impossible and I tried to cool down a bit, doing a quest on my rogue. But all I could see in front of me was fire walls and void zones.

Insane? Yes, definitely. But currently it feels as if I’m not going to enjoy anything else in the game at its full potential until I’ve got this done.

A personal vendetta
A couple of months ago, Bre of Gun Lovin’ Dwarf Chick asked us about our “unicorns”, pieces of loot that we had hunted for a long time, but had kept evading us. Sartharion + 3 dragons isn’t a unicorn in that sense – even though I’d really appreciate the mount, it’s not about the loot. This is rather a personal vendetta, as if I was chasing Alien, Jaws or Moby Dick.

Luckily enough I’m not the only one. We’ve been told that there won’t be any farm runs in Naxx or anywhere else until we’ve done this. It’s a decision I fully support.

When I log in tonight Larísa is already parked right outside the gates of OS, ready to spend another night and 150 g on repairs. But maybe it will be different this time. We could make it into a one-hour session, ending in a beautiful, triumphant screenshot.

My eyes are fixated on you, Big Bad Dragon! Run away little girl! Your days are counted and we will make this happen.

12 comments:

krizzlybear said...

I have my popcorn ready. I wish you luck, for I will be living vicariously through your experiences. Try your best! Represent the gnomish mages!

For the alliance!

Klepsacovic said...

You can do it.

Zupa said...

Larisa!

A hard-earned first kill with your guild or raiding party would have to be the most thrilling, exciting and enjoyable things in wow.

Keep your passion! Maintain your obsession! It will be worth it for sure, and be the stuff memories are made of.

- Zupa

Dwism said...

/going technical
-Are your dps able to kill of the first drake in a reasonable time?
-Is your dps able to not stand in blue-stuff, and move from waves?
(there is a counter that your RL can get that after a wipe counts who failed this.. that really helps)
-Whelp tanks, are they letting whelps eat the healers?
Sounds like your healers are able to keep tanks alive, and your Sarpharion (there is no "th" in Sarpharion ;) -i did that for a long time too) tank is able to manage his cooldowns too. So it seems that its the addstanks and your dps that is lacking that extra Oomph for you to do this.
/going technical off

I wish I had those kills to look forward to. ATM my time is spend leveling alts and gearing alts, and its getting kindda boring. So be truly happy that you have this :) And remember real kills always comes on the night before patches! (hopefullly sooner for you guys /cheer)

Larísa said...

@Krizzybear: oh I throw in my heart and jump after. The question is if it's enough. But yes! For the alliance and for the honour of the Gnomes!

@Klepsacovic: we so can!

@Zupa: back from the dead, yay!!!!
Yes, this has definitly got the epic feeling. I've never ever had such a sweet night as when we killed Archimonde after countless wipe nights like the ones we've had now.

@Dw-redux: I don't know why you've decided to rename the dragon... :)
http://www.wowwiki.com/Sartharion

About the technical stuff: to be honest I'm not the right person to analize the reasons for our failure. I think we had some progress last raid when fire mages and locks started to put some dots on the adds (still focusing on the dragons). It helped to have them under control and get them down faster later.

There still are too many early deaths in void zones and fire walls. We've definitely improved, but it still happens and ofc it affects healing as well as dps.

I think we got down the first dragon reasonably fast. It varied a bit depending on where the waves came from. My impression was that he went down quicker when the waves mostly came from a direction so that the ranged dps could stay on spot, nuking. At least I did quite much better at those times than when I had to move constantly....

And yes, I'm really glad to have this carrot to strive for. It's so much more fun than farm raids.

Cassini said...

Go go Larisa! It's wipe nights like these that make getting the boss down that much sweeter. :)

M said...

Woot. Keep your eyes on the prize.

Dwism said...

Bah I should not post before i have coffe in me :) Sorry bout that. :D
guess the right way is that there is no 'sp' and its 'th'... did google it to be sure, so im not the only one :D

About the adds, we usually have at least one lock and one rogue/hunter only on adds. First one to kill and the other to take care of enraged blazes. its been a long time since i last did it in 25 manned, so my reference is 10 manned. The point is. kill whelps fast, so tanks can focus on picking up blazes that eats all those pretty pretty healers.
You may want to try suggesting that one of your healing paladins use Righteous Fury so that your tanks know where the adds are going to go (eat that pally).

Chris said...

For add handling, have all healers stand together in the middle, adds are literally a non-issue.

Do you have a wws? I am really surprised you managed to wipe with Sarth on 3%, in our 2 drake attempts, even with < 11 people standing he went down like a lead balloon once Vesperon dies, our major issue is all the dps wiping themselves on the twilight torment when it pops (honestly god knows how, since they top out at 4k dps so 1kdps to themselves :P).

AVJoe said...

Ill just say...GO GET EM!!! Man I dream of the day our little guild can be part of something that epic. Only 3 guilds on our server have done it.

Anonymous said...

"Let’s put it straight.
Larísa is currently completely out of balance.
She’s not moderate.
She doesn’t keep a healthy distance.
She doesn’t laugh the defeats away, shrugging her shoulders, thinking “so what, it’s just a game”.
She is obsessed. Or should I rather say possessed."

I think that is the most charming and enchanting introduction to a blog post I have ever read. Does the saying, "you had me at 'hello'" work in Swedish; I don't know. But you had me at hello.

And I'm sorry, who is BRK? No clue. It's Phaelia that I miss.

Larísa said...

@Cassini: thanks! And as you see on my next post it helped…


@2ndNin: Actually when we wiped that night I think we had way too many dps down. There were some 10 people or so up, but the enrage at 10 percent became too much to handle. Anyway… it’s history now.

@Delius: I’m not sure how it is on my server. I would guess maybe 10 guilds? However, doing it on 10 man is supposed to be much, much harder. So it’s not really just a size thing.

@DeftyJames: thank you!