Darren's Blog Rarely updated, barely interesting but all mine

My First Raid: Naxxramas – Plague Quarter

I logged in on Tuesday night with the sole intention of doing the Cooking and Jewelcrafting dailies to find queries in guild chat for anyone interesting in joining a Naxx raid.  As I hadn't planned to stay on long I decided to give it a miss but after several nudges via /w I thought "What the hell, let's do this", so I joined.

Now the title of this post is slightly inaccurate, strictly speaking I have raided three times previously.  Twice to spank Archavon the Stone Watcher as part of a sponta 10 man and once to join the end of a Naxx 25 man a week previously to take down Loatheb.  However at the point of joining on Tuesday I didn't realise that I had already done part of the instance.

I crossed my fingers and turned on Teamspeak hoping that it would not kill my mouse and eventually crash my PC as it had done the previous week.  With a small feeling of trepidation I clicked on the button to accept the port and dashed upstairs to get a drink, determined that I would not make a fool of myself or do anything daft...

Of course just having those thought immediately cursed me for the rest of the raid Upon getting back to my desk I said Hi to everyone TS and the realised I was the only person from the guild still at the summoning stone, so silly question #1 "Which portal do I take to get to you".  Thus began my comedy or errors which I'll now recount boss by boss.

Noth the Plaguebringer

The door to my office open as the strats start to be given and my wife starts using the printer to copy some paperwork for school.  So for those of you that are unaware, the strats for Noth are "This bost has two phases... whirr, clunk, clack, whirr, kchug, kuchug, whirr, buzz why isn't this bloddy thing working... hirr, clunk, clack, whirr, kchug, kuchug, whirr, buzz etc."

So the fight starts and I try to translate the photocopier noises into a coherent plan, yeah fat chance.  So I asked a fellow mage what to do, "DPS boss AOE adds when called", ah cool something I understand.  I then realise that as we're all huddled in a corner that I can't see anything other than a load of name tags and the area above but I assist the tank and start spamming my spell rotation, see what I think are adds and something that looks like Blizzard and start casting AOE myself.  Blah, blah rinse repeat dead boss... "There seemed to be an awful lot of AOE on the boss there..."  D'Oh /hide

Loot is called, I ask in TS what the loot rules are but my questions seem to fall on deaf ears, so I /w a friend to find out but by the time I find out the piece I was thinking of has gone.  No biggie, on to the next boss...

Heigan the Unclean

Ah the dance, the ready call comes, I press by talk button and ask for a strat run down as I haven't done it before and the dialog disappears.

 "Are you really AFK  Spangles?"

"No, I just asked about strats"

[Raid] Spangles?

/raid Bugger I think my mic is fubar, ready

My eyes fall to my headset controls... oh no all that time the mute switch had been on! Damn the kids!

Cast, cast, run, run, run, die, watch, res, cast, run, die... yeah the rest of the fight went on without incident as I watched from the floor.

/dustoff pride on to the next boss...

Loatheb

Hmm, this bridge looks familiar...

"Anyone not done this boss before?"

"Me"

"You got the achievement after the last boss, you have done it before"

"I did, oh is this where I can last week."

Finally I know what I'm doing Fight goes well and Loatheb drops [Mantle of the Lost Vanquisher] which, thanks to a couple of people passing at they notices that I was only wearing a blue item, I won

Conclusion

I must admit I had a great time and my [Valorous Frostfire Shoulderpads] are really nice. I have already signed up for next Tuesday's run and have read the starts for the instance so I should be better prepared