3.3: PuG tales and Mac woes

Patch hit a week ago; plenty of time to poke around and see just what we have here.

My guild went into ICC-25 last Tuesday night. It took a bit, but we did successfully down the first boss. In the process, I discovered that I was having bizarre lag, autorun was getting stuck on somehow (and randomly at that), and trying to turn my view would lock me up pretty significantly. Disabled addons, enabled addons, tried a few other things.. and finally checked the Mac Tech Support forums Thursday afternoon before I gave up and benched myself from raids. I only wish I'd done it sooner. It's not all entirely fixed now, but there's a temporary fix in place that makes things playable, and I can live with that. (I also discovered that I seem to be one of two Mac-raiders in my guild, and my boyfriend missed out on these problems completely. No one else was having troubles - that's why!)

With finals over, the past few days have been spent on the druid/priest pairing. They went from 73 or so to 78 as of tonight, largely thanks to the new LFG tool. Running as a healer/tank pair, groups came quickly and frequently! We've had some really lovely groups, and some not-quite-so-lovely groups, but I've been generally pleased with how it's worked.

I've also been doing the random daily heroic on both Caze and Amh, and had some drastically different experiences. I don't heal on Caze - I actually dropped my resto spec for a modified moonkin spec a few weeks ago - so I'm often faced with longer queue times (~10 minutes). Makes sense, absolutely. I'm also faced with the challenge of PUG tanks while being a very high-threat DPS. I've been pleasantly surprised! Some have struggled a little more than others, but I have not had to really scale back my DPS much at all. (Do I watch it and try not to pull? Sure. Have I pulled much unintentionally? Not really!)

Amharach.. oh, my poor priest. Good and bad both with her, usually queueing as a healer.

Heroic Halls of Lightning. Dualboxed BM hunters, rogue, warrior tank, and myself. I think the warrior topped the meters at around 1500dps. The hunters pulled roughly 600-700 each (yes, counting pets). The rogue was somewhere between the two. It took a little over an hour, a handful of wipes, and a fair amount of hair-pulling on my part, but every boss died. I swear at least one of the pets must have been on aggressive at one point or something, because we got all sorts of bizarre pulls going on and the tank wasn't quite aware enough to cover it.

Heroic Halls of Reflection. I got into a group for this after I'd already cleared it with a guild group on Caze, so I knew it would be a challenge. I hadn't realized quite how much of a challenge. Our tank had probably 40k health all buffed, but he was in decent gear; the DPS were in very solid gear, and while my gear isn't BIS by any means it's not awful either. For the first time in ages, I really wished I knew how to play holy. We downed the first boss; we then proceeded to wipe at varying stages before the next boss. We got to wave 9 several times and I just couldn't keep everyone up. Not enough heals, not enough GCDs, too much aoe damage. We called it after awhile; we just couldn't get anything to work for us. But we tried! The other four were all from the same server, two from the same guild. I'm not sure if they were all on vent or chatting separately or if they just happened to all be in there.. but I was incredibly impressed. No one complained when we wiped; we were all frustrated, but we did some troubleshooting, ran through numerous ideas to make it easier, and called it with no pointing of fingers except at ourselves (both the tank and I felt it was our fault it wasn't working - my gut feeling is that it was a combination of the two, but without much either of us could do to fix it). It was a pleasure to run with them, and I wish I'd written down their names.

There will always be good groups and bad groups, patient and impatient people both; the key is to look on the brighter side. Another day, another PUG, another chance to see how awesome people from other realms can be!