Okay, before I get to the main topic, one thing needs to be said:
Me and my big mouth.
I'd written yesterday about how I only tank in emergencies when LFD spewed me into Violet Hold. (What, you were expecting that I'd be watching Lost? Nah, that's my wife's addiction, but it did allow me some play time.) Well, it was a strange grouping, to say the least. Two mages, a Tree, a DK tank, and Quint. The first three looked like new 80's judging by their gear, while the tank and I were a bit more on the purple side. The first bunch of pulls went okay if slow; I had to really dial back on my hits to keep from pulling aggro, and the mages didn't have a lot of firepower. We got the Void Demon boss, and about 4-5 minutes later we knocked him out.
Then, a couple of pulls into the next phase, the DK tank stops moving. "I'll BRB; have to go move clothes to the laundry room," he says. "Pally, you tank."
While I was trying to formulate a response, the next portal opened.
"Use Righteous Fury," was his parting shot.
I know that, I thought. I just want people to keep me upright.
Luckily, the trash mob was just a Portal Guardian, so that wasn't so bad. I could see my health bouncing around like a ping-pong ball, and at one point I dumped Lay on Hands on myself, but I survived.
Then DBM announced "Boss Incoming."
Oh.
Crap.
About the only good thing I could say then was that it was the Water Elemental boss. "Tank?" one of the mages called. "You back?"
No reply.
"Joy," I said, and pulled aggro. I almost immediately dropped to 1K, and had to do something to preserve myself. Lay on Hands was on cooldown, so I had no choice but to bubble and then chase after the boss before she turned the Tree into so much splintered wood.
Finally, the tank returned from doing his laundry and pulled aggro. Everything returned to normal, sort of. "Hey, you did fine," he said.
"Dude, if you look up 'tank' in the dictionary, you won't find my name there."
That's what I get for displeasing the WoW gods.
Now, on to other business. I was perusing the Battlegroups listings yesterday when I noticed that the roleplaying realms were grouped in with the PvE and PvP realms. Since both the Arenas and the LFG tools use those listings, I wondered why the RP servers were set up that way. You'd think that the RP servers would be grouped together, so that there's not a lot of metagame talk going on, but I guess that's not the case.
For those of you who play on RP realms, do you simply suspend your RP for the duration of those instance and BG runs? From the perspective of a long time PnP roleplayer, it would be very hard to remain in character while everybody else is talking about other stuff. (Yes, I know, that assumes people are talking at all, but still...) What do you do? Do you try to remain in character? Do you even bother? Should the RP realms be grouped into their own separate Battlegroup to preserve their identity?
One last item (I swear) and then I'm done for the day. The last couple of runs through Halls of Stone, I've noticed a couple of interesting things: DBM no longer provides a countdown in the Protect Bran encounter, and there's an AoE that happens after the archive voice says that things are fine. For the former, it's an add-on, so I'm not surprised too much about that. As for the latter, at first I thought it was a debuff that someone had not paid any attention to, but during yesterday's run the healer exclaimed "WTH is that?!" and he immediately died.
"Did anyone see anything?" he demanded. "I was at full health, the encounter was over, and then BAM!"
"I didn't," I replied while I rezzed him.
"I wasn't even close to the beam, either," he added.
Interesting.
I'm not exactly sure what happened during your HoS encounter, but this is what I have noticed from my runs through it (and I am a healer, so I have the luxury of sitting back, watching everything go down!). The whole time you are fighting adds, Bran is working on hacking the computer. When he finally succeeds, the computer welcomes Bran and procedes to turn the 3 tribunal faces against the remaining adds, causing a lightning like explosion. I have never noticed any party members being hit by this. I just know that while the encounter seems to end as soon as the computer starts to talk nice, people will continue to take damage from the adds and faces until the lightning storm kills them all. Hope this helps some!
ReplyDeleteThere might have been something about that lightning storm, because it was the Healer who got hit. The next time I go through HoS, I'm going to keep closer watch on the very end of that encounter and see what happens. (Usually I'm thwacking the last trash stragglers.)
ReplyDeleteI know it wasn't the main beam, because I was the idiot running through that half the time trying to close on the Iron Dwarves blowing past the Tank. The Tank had... issues... holding aggro in that encounter the entire time, and not because of one of us. He just never seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and to a Warrior tank that can be problematic.
Try updating your mod and see if that helps.
ReplyDeleteThat was what I thought the first time, but when I did it didn't fix things. What's strange is that is the only event timer that I don't see; all the others in the other instances are there.
ReplyDeleteI'm a casual RPer on Wyrmrest Accord, and I tend to just suspend RP when doing dungeons. After all, how do you RP using the LFD? There's a magic portal that randomly will send me to a dungeon to battle some baddies with random strangers? Too complicated. Me sitting there RPing about "Whoa. Where am I?" while the others are just trying to get the dungeon done is silly. If I want to RP in a dungeon, I find a group of friends to go with.
ReplyDeleteSometimes I do throw in a little silly character reaction during dungeons though, mostly to try to start a convo with the other players.
I always enjoy dungeons more when people start talking. I, for one, would be thoroughly amused if someone actually role played in the dungeon I was running. I'd be more likely than not to play along.
ReplyDelete"Why has though taken the Tyrannical Beheader... it doesn't look as if the weapon wouldst do though any good, nor your pet turtle. Silly hunter"
Or something...
The closest I came to role playing in a dungeon would be at the bottom of this post:
http://parallelcontext.blogspot.com/2010/04/putting-points-in-irl-subtlety-tree.html
@loveandwarinazeroth:
ReplyDeleteYeah, I can see your point. You could theoretically RP the instance as if you were all joining up together to fight, but the way that Blizz threw the RP servers into Battlegroups with non-RP servers kind of defeats the purpose of RP-ing in a LFD instance.
A shame, really, because some of those bosses are just begging to be taunted.
@Soul:
I enjoy the instances more when people are talking and enjoying themselves, throwing in a little RP wouldn't hurt so much either. It wasn't RP, but on Sunday night a Halls of Stone run consisted mainly of jokes about Lost. Because everyone was typing so much, the run took twice as long as normal, but it was hilarious. (Except for the part where I made a crack about Lost ending like the "Who Shot Bobby?" episode on Dallas, and somebody said "What's Dallas?" Then, I felt old.)