Just One of Those Days

The other night I had one of those runs that you'd prefer to forget.

A day or two before, this had happened:

Okay, so I'm a bit of a minimalist,
add-on wise.

so I was kind of itching to finally get access to the Crystal Water that L60 Mages can create. Sure, you can use that skill to make a bit of money in-game*, but I'm not one to monetize something that ought to be freely given to people who need it.

Now, I'd not been in Dire Maul North at level before --and not inside it at all since Cata dropped and reworked Dire Maul to a much lower level instance-- but I knew that after it was over the Crystal Water walkthroughs all pointed to getting to the Shen'dralar area for the quest. I did read up on DM-North, just to make certain what I was getting into after a near disastrous run of DM-West on Az, and I kept thinking that a bunch of Ogres should not be that hard to deal with. Unlike the various mobs that gang up on you in DM-West, the variety of mobs in DM-North are pretty vanilla. So when an opportunity opened up for a DM-North run I jumped at the chance.

To make matters even better --from my perspective-- Cardwyn had run with the healer before in an absurdly long Maraudon run and a very well done Blackrock Depths run, so I was confident in how things were going to go. This was primarily a guild group --except for Card-- but in general the guild group runs I've been in have worked out fairly well. When guild group runs talk among themselves in Discord that can be an issue as I don't use Discord***, but I figured that wouldn't be a problem here.

We wiped on the first trash pull.

Well, there were additional issues there. Just as the tank told me to sheep the moon, another mob came at us from behind so right after casting all hell broke loose.

Oh well, just like my first run in DM-W, I thought. No worries.

We proceeded to get ourselves clear of the first area, crept over to the second, and eventually made it through the door. The main concern I had was that we were performing sheep pulls, and before I could get close enough to sheep the ogre in question I'd aggro the rest of the mob. Therefore, I'd cast and haul my butt back to the rest of the group with ogres right on my heels. Since this wasn't working so well, we switched to the tank pulling and I'd sheep before the mob would arrive. We cleared a mob or two, then on another pull we were in the middle of a fight when another mob from over in the corner aggroed on us too.

We wiped there.

We cleared another mob, but I died when the ogre I'd sheeped suddenly popped back up and blasted me before I could sheep it again. I grumbled at myself a bit, but I got a battle rez from the healer and we kept going.

Hugging the wall, we went around the bend toward the next trash mob in the far corner, but before we could get even close the mob across the hall aggroed on me and two hits later I was gone.

With the Druid healer's battle rez on cooldown, I had to run back. By this time I was starting to wonder when I was going to see the "gear in danger of breaking" figure on screen.

The group said they were going to wait for me, which was a good thing as I had to wait while a wandering ogre first blocked my way at the entrance and then he blocked my way at the raised platform. After I finally made it through that, I joined the group while they were in the middle of another pull. I got up there and tried to sheep the caster, but he resisted. I sheeped him again and this time it stuck, but right after I turned to help the rest another group aggroed and that was that.

On the runback I noticed in the group chat "sheep the caster" from the healer. "I did sheep him, but he resisted, so I did it again," I replied.

"I know, I just panicked," the healer replied.

We eventually got all the way up to the top floor and another door, but we didn't have the key. We had to go get the key from a boss outside, so down we went. Somewhere in the middle of that running around the DPS Warrior aggroed a mob on the floor below us --which we were able to dispatch-- but it made me feel a little better that the ogres didn't explicitly have it out for old Cardwyn.

We ran through the second area, but I thought when they said they needed the key from the boss outside I thought they meant here, so I hung back with the Hunter as the boss was moving back right to where we were.

You can kind of guess what happened.

On my runback I was kicking myself for not just following the tank like I usually do.

Well, we took care of the first boss who had the key, but I was following the group back when a mob aggroed on the Hunter and me. He feigned death, and I died. It was only after I died when I noticed "stop" in chat.

"That was my fault," the healer said. "I was saying 'stop' in Discord, forgetting you weren't in there."

"No worries," I replied.

After this, well, the rest of the instance was pretty anti-climactic. Killed mobs, killed the boss, got into the Shen'dralar area, and got the quest for the Crystal Water.

But after it was over, I apologized to the group for my poor showing, as it was easily the worst job I've done in ages.

"Don't worry about it," the healer replied. "There was plenty of blame to go around."

Still, I felt badly about doing such a terrible job. I know those things happen, but I don't want to be known as "that guy" who can't be trusted to do well in group setting.

But I did learn one important thing: those ogres have an obscenely wide aggro radius. When I read about the DM-North tribute run, I thought that it wasn't going to be a big deal, but now I see with the aggro radius those ogres have it'll be quite the challenge.

Oh, and my repair bill? Well, I kind of earned that bill given my poor performance, so I'm okay with it.

***

And oh yeah, the kicker on this was that I explicitly turned off "auto loot" to check the reward gear and yet it still auto looted.

"WTF, I turned that off!" I said.

I have actual independent proof that I did it, because my oldest was watching the last part of the DM-North run and she saw me turn "auto loot" off.

"Hey," she said, "I saw you turn that off. What the fuck?!"

Luckily I killed the auto loot before the greens were looted and I gave the water and healing to the people who requested it. Along with a bit extra.

*When you're L55 and up, the struggle is real when you're constantly trying to drink with L45 water and you're sucking wind with mana because a single fight with a couple of uses of Blizzard can wipe out about 2/3 of your mana. Unless you get lucky at constantly getting best in slot items out of instances, you're going to not be totally optimized until much later, once you have run multiple instances to get "raid ready." I for one am not fond of slowing down the group by constantly having to drink, so I just try to get "reasonably close to 2/3 mana" and then catch up with the group once the tank has a good lock on aggro.

**Creating a portal, however, is a bit different as you need a Rune of Portals to create a single port, and I don't have any issues recouping your losses there.

***My voice carries even at normal volume, so accidentally waking the entire house up because I got excited isn't necessarily a good idea.