Finally a lovely wipe night!

It’s been long since the last time, but finally I got the opportunity to enjoy a raiding night with 20 wipes and not a single boss kill. And I enjoyed every single second of it.

It hasn’t happened since we were fighting Archimond last summer and I feel that I’ve missed it. Surely, conquering Naxx has been lovely in every way – especially for me, since I never saw the original Naxx instance. I can imagine it wasn’t quite as exhilarating for people who already have “been there, done that”. Going to a party in a dress you’ve had for three years never can give the same feeling as wearing a brand new one.

But even if Naxx, with all it’s variation of bosses and not too much of trash mobs to cut your way through, has been fun, something has clearly been missing. We’ve got it to farm status too quickly and we haven’t banged our heads into a wall many times enough to get the real super-cheer on TS when the bosses go down. Sometimes it’s more like a “meh”, “was that all”.

It probably sounds a bit weird to many of you, but I really like encounters that require you to suffer a bit. I also want fights to be varied, neither too short or too long (about 10 minutes is just fine) and not make me to corpse run over half of the continent or wade through a ton of boring trash mobs for every reset (thinking Kel Thuzad or the famous MH waves, sigh).

Malygos
Malygos has got absolutely everything I could wish of a boss fight. The other night I saw him for the first time. This was the first time the guild devoted a whole 25 man raiding night to him, and we had some 20 tries, with the best one at 7 percent, before calling it night.

The first time we made it into phase 3 was the most exciting moment for me. Of course I had watched videos, but they could in no way describe the feeling I got when the floor suddenly disappeared below my feet, I fell in space, just to be picked up by a dragon. I swear - it was like running a rollercoaster in an amusement park. You got the same sensation in the stomach. Not to mention all the psychedelic patterns towards the end which the developers have thrown in, apparently with the intention to make people like me completely disoriented and seasick.

This fight was so fun and so varied from the beginning to the end, that I would have been pretty disappointed if we had killed the dragon him at first sight. I want to make this ride not one, but several times! What if we had gotten him early? That would have left us with three hours of raiding time but nothing more to raid (all other 25 man instances cleared earlier in the week). Of course I wouldn’t have regretted if he had died in our last beautiful 7 percent fight. It would have felt well deserved and put a perfect end to a night, where we learned, tweaked a bit and improved with every try. Still, when we called it, I had a big smile on my face.

The reward

Did I earn anything? Well, apart from increasing my DKP a little – nothing. I didn’t get any loot, just a high repair bill. Does it bother me? Not the slightest. I don’t evaluate the time I spend online in terms of efficiency. I don’t play WoW to gain gold. I play it to have fun. And sometimes the fun consists of wiping.

Now I’ll just practice my flying skills a bit more, doing Aces high. I haven’t yet quite got used to the idea of positioning myself in three dimensions and I think I’m not alone in this. But it probably won’t be long before we nail him. And what’s left then? I guess we’ll put up more dragons on Sartharion, waiting for Ulduar to come out. We are raiders. And raiders need a wipe night every now and then. That’s a part of our nature.

Yes Sir, I Can Boogie!

As you know by now, I’ve had an issue with mr Heigan (with the obscure nickname “the Unclean”, does it refer to dirty thoughts or is they guy actually out of soap?). Or “Heineken” as he was renamed by Fimlys of Twisted Nether in their last show, even though I think beer is the last thing you want to load yourself with if you want to participate in his step show.

Anyway, surviving a dance session with this Heigan guy has been one of my long term goals, one of my resolutions about what to accomplish in the game during 2009. Up until now I had noticed small progress – going from one run over the floor to one and a half, making one turn alright. But to be honest succeeding felt pretty distant.

Do you notice the grammar? It’s all written in a historical tempus. Because my Heigan Issue is no more! Larísa has danced with Heigan until he gave up! I don’t know if it was because his feet hurt or if he had any other problem, but he sure didn’t look healthy as he was laying on the floor.

Friday night raid
It all happened last Friday at an off-night 10-man Naxx guild run. It was an awesome raid in every way you can think of: relaxed and fun with a “Friday at midnight atmosphere” – all of you who have tried raiding at that peculiar time of the week know what I mean. It was also very successful – we cleared the whole place in a few hours. Most of our drops could be used by someone and the big winner of the night was a fellow mage who dinged 80 pretty recently and got loads of upgrades in her first Naxx run. I got a head myself, Cowl of Sheet Lightning, with the meta socket I’ve been longing for such a long time, so I was very glad too.

But what made me most happy in this raid was that I didn’t suffer from the terrible lag that keeps driving me nuts in the 25 man raids. I don’t know if it was because it was just 10 man or if it helped that I had just downloaded a new drive routine for my graphic card and tweaked a couple of settings, but this run I could actually move my character, if not always lag free, at least sufficiently well to be able to go where I wanted to go.

And suddenly the Heigan dance wasn’t half as hard at it had been before. It was doable and even pretty fun. I was almost disappointed we only had two rounds of him. It was a very special feeling to not watch the dancing from the floor position, but to be one in the running crowd.

One of the dancers
The Heigan Dance experience made my thoughts wander back in time, 30 years ago, when the song Yes Sir I Can Boogie (which this post title refers to – younger readers who have no idea of what I’m referring to can listen to it here) had its all time high. Whenever it was played at a school party, I used to watch the other kids as they were dancing, me sticking to the walls, pretending I didn’t want to dance. But Heigan was different. This magical night I wasn’t a watcher anymore. I was a dancer.

I heard my fellow mage complaining – she died pretty early in the fight. “I was moving, I can swear!” Oh, how familiar wasn’t it? I could completely understand as her frustration and I’m quite likely to go back to seeing the fight from a dead perspective next time I do it in a 25 man raid – I have no big hope that the fps improvement was for real.

But still, after this experience I won’t be as depressed about it at I was before.

Now I know I can boogie!

The extra boss in the DK wing

The tanks in our guild has established the nice habit to write posts in our guild forum after every raid, evaluating the encounters from a tank’s point of view, discussing lessons learned and things to think about for the next raid.

Normally this is pretty serious business, however there was a few lines in a recent posting about our first 25 man raid in Naxx which made me giggle:

We moved onto to the secret final boss of the DK wing - the 4 horsemen chest. Simple tactic, just hard to execute. Basically, everyone has to loot their badges and gtfo before the raid leader enrages. I think we finished just within the enrage timer.

How true isn’t this? Normally we don’t use many curses in the Pink Pigtail Inn (this is a non-combat zone, mind you), but honestly, I don’t get the idea about those bloody chests. Everyone opening them to loot badges at Chess in Karazhan was time consuming and annoying as it was. And that’s nothing compared to doing the same thing in a 25 man raid.

As we were looting it you could hear the frustration and annoyance grow on TS. And this was only our FIRST time opening that chest. I can imagine how we’ll feel about it once we get to the stadium that we try to make Naxx into a one-night-clear-event.

“I’m sure they’re going to fix this in an upcoming patch”, someone said, hopefully.

Well, you can always hope. But the patch notes for 3.08 doesn’t say anything about it, as far as I’ve read them.

The humiliation of a noob jumper

I was never any star when we had athletics at school. On the contrary. Whenever the teacher announced that we were going to the sport stadium to run, jump or throw things, I shrank. I knew that meant that I’d spend hours being humiliated. Getting hurt by the high jump bar falling down at the lowest of heights, to the amusement of others. Reaching the goal on the running track in twice the amount of time as anyone else. Throwing the ball such a short distance that it wasn’t worth taking measures. Not to speak of long jump, which in my case rather should be called short jump.

I came to think about this when I was humiliated again, doing my first Naxxramas 10 man raid last week. Our guild had already cleared two wings earlier during the week and now it was time for the Construct Quarter. It turned out that there were a couple of greenish floods which you had to cross, preferably jumping, since they hurt a lot. One of them was doable, even for me. Not the first time, but since we had a couple of wipes on Grobbulus and Gluth, I got the opportunity to practice. The second flow though, was a mystery to me. Not one single time did I get over without being drained on mana as well as health. Is it doable to jump it without touching the water? I don’t know. Not to me as it seems.

Jumping platforms
But this wasn’t the Big Humiliation during this evening; the flood was only the appetizer. The horror which made me think about athletics at school was the last boss of the wing, Thaddius. Entering the second phase in the fight, you’re supposed to make a huge jump from one platform to another. Everyone else succeeded but me. And as if that wasn’t enough – I failed three times more. Everytime I jumped and fell into the water I had to make a quite long run to get to the jumpspot again. When the raid finally wiped on this first try on him, I still haven’t reached it! I felt absolutely useless.

Admitting this to a friend in the group he asked: “have you tried slow fall?” And that made me feel even sillier. Of course I should have thought about it myself. When it was time to make the huge jump I slowfalled my way over without any problem whatsoever. Sometimes it’s great to be a mage!

Still the whole incidence stayed in my mind, disturbing me. This wasn’t the first time I had been into trouble while jumping and I definitely want to improve my performance. There is no reason why I should be as bad at jumping in game as I am in real life. In real life I can blame my physical weaknesses, being pretty short by nature. In game I’m even shorter, but as far as I can tell a gnome should be able to jump as far as a long legged nightelf.

Training arena
So now I’m scratching my head, wondering what to do. I’d like to see a training ground in the game. The introduction of the dummies in IF, where you can try spellrotations and such, was brilliant. I want more though. What I’d like to see is a whole arena where I could practice for instance precision jumping without the risk to take damage and get high repair bills.

Of course it’s possible that would attract some spectators, eager for blood, willing to mock and belittle anyone who’s a bit different. But so what? Being a grown up I can deal with the fact that we all have different sorts of talents. I may not be a gifted long jumper, but that shouldn’t deter me from jumping at all. On the contrary I should jump more in order to improve. The only thing I ask for is to be spared the humiliation of practicing jumping in the raid. When going to raid I want to be on top, trained and prepared for heroic deeds, including jumping, if that’s what it takes.

Now I don’t seriously believe Blizzard will create a special arena for practicing different sorts of moves, just because Larísa is asking for it. Probably there are good places for this already, all over the game. Rivers which could be jumped over, cliffs you could jump between, what do I know. If you come to think of any place like this, please let me know!

I’d really like to keep my feet dry next time we’re doing Naxx.