LFR thoughts: counterpoint

What I'm seeing is that LFR seems to be suited for a certain type of player, the raid PUG-player. The attitude and expertise of these people is very precise, they are very aggressive and bossy, intolerant of wipes, quick to blame, and those that know the fights are clearly pleased with themselves when they know. In fact, they are exactly the people who made raiding Vault of Archavon in WotLK a painful experience. This person is not someone who can deal with progression raiding; the only challenge they are interested in is outperforming the rest of the raid, and when PUG'd in, usually drop group after more than 1 wipe on a boss. With LFR, Blizzard has given them their own playground, exactly suited to them. It's a face roll for any geared character played by someone who knows how to raid. LFR even has a loot system which is not merit based, giving the raid PUG person a perfect target for their displeasure.

I do agree that 25man raids are suffering, but not from LFR, just from the combined lockouts. We can't just go into a 10man to see the fights, then try it on 25. And 10s are easier by far, even if the odds of useful loot decrease significantly. I'm sure Blizzard is seeing this and will deal with it appropriately in Mists of Pandaria. There are quite a few remedies they could apply without significant recoding.

While the various tiers of TOC and ICC was crazy bullshit, I think MoP raids should go back to how Ulduar was done, specifically Hodir and XT, with 10 and 25 on separate lockouts, and "heroic mode" triggered by demonstrating in the fight via a gear check mechanic that the raid could handle it. Well, "heroic mode" isn't the subject of this post. They do not have to distinguish between 10- and 25-man gear. There's really not going to be any harm in letting people go after a boss twice a week.

But if they really want to avoid some people feeling they have to run both, I'd rather see 10 and 25s be separate raids, like in BC; but that would not work well with guild structure as coded in the game and would be the source of "left out" drama. Maybe 10 and 20, instead of 25.

Summer Doldrums, Lord Rhyolith, and Guild Administrivia

Summer Doldrums

Darkfall is deep in the summer doldrums. We usually have anywhere from 14 to 18 people on on a raid night, however roughly 4 or 5 of them are not going to come to a raid, either due to lack of level or gear or interest.

So the tentative plan we've got is to pug to fill a 25man on Tuesday, see how many we've got on Thursday, and do a 10 on Sunday. Last night was Sunday so with only 15 people interested in coming to the raid and only 3 heals and 1 tank in that group we went with a 10man.

I have to say that it was excruciating to have to pick and choose who to bring to the raid. I did my best to fill the raid with raiders and get a good class balance. Unfortunately that left out several people that either I'd really have liked to bring or who will be quite grumpy about not being there or both. I'm not looking forward to dealing with the drama from that, but I need to remember that I'm Here to Kill Dragons. And while I may want to keep people happy my *job* is to lead the raid to victory and shiny purples. Hellshot can soothe the ruffled feathers. (Sorry to throw you to the wolves Hellshot.)

That said, over the past couple of days we had 4 people leave the guild. And then Hellshot and I booted all their alts. So the guild info log looks pretty bad, but it's just 4 mains leaving. I'm always sad to see people leave, but of those 4 people I'm not actually sure that we're going to miss any of them as a raid.

Lord Rhyolith

So Sunday night we went into FL10, and actually did a fabulous job. Shannox was already down from Tuesday night. I think we were all a little bit burned from wiping so much on Beth'tilac (also on Tuesday), so we headed to Lord Rhyolith first.

We had a pretty good start, and once we worked through the add control, fire avoidance, and especially steering issues we got him down. I had been worried about the second phase, but once Rhyolith turned molten he seemed to fall over really fast.

I even remembered to take a screenshot this time.

After Rhyolith we headed over to Beth'tilac.

Poor Earthen, he really prefers to be boomkin, but with me the only tank in the raid he had to go bear for Beth and the trash leading up to that giant icky spider. It worked out pretty well though, he did a super job with the drones, keeping them in the corner and away from all the spiderlings. The rest of the bottom team was also fabulous with add control. And the top team still had the meteor avoiding dance down. I think it only took us 3 wipes to get Beth'tilac down. Two of those were web fails, and the third was spiderling fail. Once those were corrected Beth fell over pretty handily.

It was nice to end the raid on the high note of having killed two bosses in one night, especially when one of them was a new kill for us. Darkfall is officially 3/7 Firelands now. Only Shannox is a 25man kill, but I'm confident that when we actually have a full Darkfall raid in there the other bosses will be 25man kills as well.

Darkfall Officer Administrivia

I also need to make a few posts on the Darkfall forums.

One post with raider attendance requirements. I'll also try to stress that if we drop to 10man sometimes I'll try to fill the raid with an eye to raider rank, but that will come second to class balance. It's nice to bring all raiders, but we need healers and tanks along too. It's also important to make sure that we don't overstack a certain class, especially in 10man. And, of course, noting that everyone is welcome to sign up for the waitlist, especially if you were bumped from the raid due to space issues.

A second post saying that we're actually going to try to be disciplined with raid times. I think we can give ourselves a lot more time to work on the bosses, if I start raid invites at 8:45 and we plan to have the first pull at 9. Of course this means that *I* need to be home and ready to go at 8:45, which is not going to be easy.

A third post will deal with the way we're dealing with EPGP. I bumped the decay to 7% last night. There was a lot of discussion in gchat once I did that. I'm not sure that everyone understands how EPGP works. Regardless, it'll work a lot better once we start regularly killing bosses, and people stop worrying that the loot they see today is the last time they will ever see it.

A fourth post will announce how we're doing the Eternal Embers for the legendary caster staff. Currently they are going to the person in the raid with the highest number of embers. If there is a tie they will go to the higher rank person. I know several people were unhappy about that, but we do actually want someone to get the staff. And with anywhere from 1 to 3 embers dropping from bosses it won't take too long to get the first person their initial quest done.

Further adventuers in PUGing

PUG
- n. Pick Up Group. A group of semi-random people assembled, usually through the Dungeon Finder in WoW, to slaughter the creatures in a dungeon in search of phat lewts.
- n. Pug. A very annoying small and ugly dog.



At the moment, in WoW, the first time your character does a random heroic you'll get two Emblems of Frost. With enough of these you can buy fabulous pieces of gear. So everyone wants to do their daily random.

The problems with the daily random is that everyone has a different wait time. This time depends on time of day, day of week, and your role.


Often the wait for a dps is loooong. I've heard that it can be as long as half an hour, but I have never experienced that myself. I usually have waits of anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, with the occasional 20 minute wait. Generally the best way to get the notification to pup up is to start doing something else. Murphy's Law never fails to kick in then.


The wait for healers is not nearly as long. I've never had to wait more than about 10 minutes. The single exception to this was late at night; I think there weren't any tanks around anywhere.


Tanks have a queue wait time of anywhere from 1 to 2 seconds. I have been queueing Mornara as both tank and dps since she got her dual spec. Not once has she been chosen as dps and not once has she waited longer than 2 seconds for the dungeon to pop up.

Perky Pug

Viljo has apparently pugged with 100 random people. To commemorate this the WoW dev team sent me a letter:


Which contained a pet:


I am never going to pull this pet out. I don't really like pugs, and this one will occasionally wipe its ass on the carpet...

Oops...

So Mornara and Ikoli have been continuing to do random dungeons. And as much as I'd like to make yet another rant about stupid hunters or ret pallies who think they are tanking or that mage who thought it would be so helpful to pull for me, I really need to complain about that idiot tank who forgot to put Frost Presence on.

Wait, what's that you say? Mornara was tanking? ...Oh yeah,she was... I was that idiot tank, and I forgot to put Frost Presence up after swapping specs.

Now, in my defense I only forgot for the first 3 pulls in DTK. But that is balanced by the fact that I was not the one who noticed that I didn't have it up. In fact what happened, was that I lost aggro on that 4-pack at the end of the first hallway. While Ikoli finished rezzing the dead dps, I apologized profusely for losing aggro. On of them asked if I had Frost Presence up, and of course I actually didn't. So I apologized even more, put it up, and then we proceeded to smash merrily through the instance.

The moral of the story here is several things. First, check if Frost Presence is up, check it every time. Second, everyone makes mistakes. But the way to tell if the person is an asshole or not is in how they respond to their mistakes. If they don't fix them and apologize they are assholes. This of course is contingent on the mistakes being pointed out gracefully or at least not in an abrasive fashion.


Also: bonus points to Ikoli for managing to keep me alive for those three pulls even though I was missing the extra health and armor from Frost Presence. Ikoli is an excellent healer, and I never worry about dying with her behind me.

that last dps

Whenever I run a random there is a wait before the dungeon window pops up. As I've mentioned in the past the time between queueing and getting the window is extremely dependent on your role. Tanks roughly .5 seconds, healers about a minute, and dps can go as high as 20 minutes or more. Because of that I'm never surprised to see this:


You know that last dps has fallen asleep at their keyboard. Or maybe they have tabbed out and are reading blogs. Either way it's taken so long for a group to form that they have tuned out. Hopefully they tune back in before the timer runs out...

the New Eeyan

Eeyan and Telt pulled Halls of Reflection, which they still hadn't done, for their random daily last night. They also pulled three rogues as the DPS. This simply didn't work and after vote-kicking the tank, then wiping to red despite replacement better tank, the rogues dropped group. We oneshot everything once a ret pally and a mage were pulled in.

Last week, when running Forge of Souls, Eeyan picked up the axe [Nighttime]. An evaluation of it showed that it was not a big enough increase over the ever-cool-looking [Calamity's Grasp] to be worth switching specs until Eeyan got a decent sword for the offhand.

So lo and behold, what should drop in the end of Halls of Reflection but [Liar's Tongue]!!! And nobody else wanted it. So now Eeyan is Combat Swords, or rather H&S. I've never had him Swords before.

Here he is waiting on the steps of the Bank of Dalaran for Teltanara to come enchant the weapons.



Respeccing is expensive when you're dual-spec'd! Ugh. Anyhow for raiding, after comparing them, I used the spec (right out of Elitist Jerks), and for farming/outdoor questing, I have this spec. I haven't re-glyphed him yet.

Dos and Don'ts of Pugging

In the usual case I'm a fan of the new LFD system. The algorithms do a good job of gear matching. And finding a group quickly is allowing more runs to happen faster. However, while most of my experiences have been positive I've run into a couple of ridiculous and annoying situations. Therefore I've compiled a list of suggestions.


DO: Take a few minutes at the start of the instance to drop some buffs.
Everyone should do what party and self buffs they have. Mages and warlocks should drop a table or fel toilet (healthstone thingy, but I swear it makes the same noise as a toilet tank refilling). Part of this should be making sure that everyone knows who the tank and healer are. Various classes and specs have buffs that are best used on a specific role. For example you really want the hunter and rogue putting their threat stuff on the tank.

DON'T: Go charging off as soon as you've got the buffs you need.
Having just buffed everyone and dropped a table Viljo would like a moment or two to drink.
Having just buffed everyone and healed their damage, Teltanara really needs a moment to drink. I know, Mr Uber-Leet-Pally-Tank, you're at full health, and you want this run to go fast. But trust me it'll go a lot faster if I don't have to rez the dps warrior because you were out of range and I couldn't catch up in time to heal both you and him before one of you took a dirt nap.

DO: Be polite to the other people in the run.
Give a polite greeting to everyone. Or at least don't be a giant flaming dickwad. I'm not expecting to be best buds with the random people from another server, but I do expect not to have to deal with rudeness. I'm here to heal or dps or tank, not put up with your crap.

DO: Wait for the tank to get aggro.
You may be annoyed at not being the top on the damage meter, but let me assure you you'll only get farther down if you die three seconds into the fight because you didn't let the tank get aggro. And by not letting the tank get aggro you're increasing the risk that the other dps and the healer will pull aggro as the tank runs around like a chicken with his/her head cut off trying to grab the mobs you yanked before they eat someone else's face.

DON'T: Ninja loot and then drop group.
Be reasonable with the loot. If something is a upgrade, need it. I'm glad you're gear is now better. If it's a frost orb or a Winter Hat and everyone has clicked greed, then you should click greed as well. If instead you wait to be sure that everyone clicks greed and then you click need, loot and drop group. Well, you're a ninja and I hate you.

DON'T: Try to level up some weapon skill.
I'm running this instance for rep and badges and maybe a piece of offspec loot. I'm not running it to help you get that last point in unarmed skill. Equip your goddam weapons. Next time my holy priest does more damage than anyone I will vote kick their ass.

PUGing it

I've tried out the new LFG system a bit. I have mixed feelings so far.

On one hand it's pretty speedy about finding groups. No whispering back and forth, no trying to find out what spec someone is. Just queue and, when everyone is set, off you go. Since there is the whole battle group to pick from you're more likely to actually find a tank and healer in a reasonable amount of time.

On the other hand, well, it's a PUG. A full on pickup group with people you'll never see again. Or at least you'll never control if you see them again. You may group with them in a BG or in another random dungeon.

So both of these situations has led to a little bit of bad behavior from everyone involved. I can see the start of a battle group instancing culture forming, but it's hard to tell so far how it will turn out. I've done random groups with Viljo and Telt so far and have had good luck to have decent tanks and dps and healers. Generally any issues come from over-eager or careless dps pulling aggro on the wrong thing.

I haven't run into any loot ninjas. And I like the new auto-disenchant option. There really was nothing more annoying for Telt than having to remember to DE and distribute shards at the end. Invariable someone forgot and hearthed out so I would have to chase them down in Dal or elsewhere.

The runs I've been on have been quite speedy and mostly wipe free. There are always a few deaths (see earlier mention of over-eager dps), but mostly things have been wipe free. The only exception was an AN run where it took 5 tries to get the Watch Him Die achieve. It would have been less if the group had listened to Viljo tell them how to do it before they tried a couple of other strategies...

The other odd thing about most of these runs is the absolute silence from most people. There is a tiny bit of strategy, but mostly people are just silently chain-pulling the entire instance. Even when I've said something I usually don't get a response. I can't tell if that is the other server's culture coming through or people being nervous about not looking like a fool.

So in general I have positive things to say about the new LFG system. Time will tell if Hyjal and the Whirlwind battle group gets a good instanceing culture, but so far things seem pretty good.

Random observations

I've not jumped all over the game in the last 3 days since the patch dropped, mostly because of work. But I've played some and here is what I have experienced and learned. Most but not all of it is patch related.

• Northrend Inscription Research actually stops working, once you've learned all the glyphs you can use at level. Imagine my surprise to find out that now Ikoli is 73 it starts working again. So I've resumed building Ikoli's ... Inscription Resume.

• There are a lot of changes in Icecrown that aren't really part of the Citadel. A shrine, for example, has been added with Blood-Queen Lana'thel talking about a broken blade (Tolkein is rolling over in his grave). This is related to the new 5 mans in a way we shall soon discover; she is also a boss in Icecrown Citadel in the part not yet unlocked.

• Speaking of the new 5 mans, Sylvanas is the quest giver. Blizzard is clearly using a new voice actress for her; the difference grates on the ears since they did not replace her normal emotes.

• Timear is boring now and gives no quests. His stuff is replaced with random dailies you access from LFG. His achieve is now a Feat of Strength.

• Proof of Demise is now a weekly raid "...Must Die!" quest. Yes now I'm echoing the patch notes. The first one is Ignis. We will make sure to do these with Eeyan and Telt. That achievement is also a Feat of Strength. As far as I can tell there is no achieve for all the "...Must Die!" quests, which I interpret to mean they are leaving it open ended and will assign them in weekly server updates.

• The first boss in Icecrown Citadel, which has been acronym'd to ICC, is Marrowgar. New art - awesome. Old tactics - he's basically an uncomplicated combination of Leotheras, Patch and Najentus. We down'd him our first time in there, the second try ...after we got past the strategy writeups and realized what we were seeing.



• It appears that tabard rep now applies to all four Horde Expedition factions. I know, "tabard rep" is a misnomer as those reputation gains are what you get when you wear anything but a faction tabard. Anyhow Kuan & Viljo's Taunka and Hand of Vengeance rep shot up when they went into a 5man.

• ditto for some, but not all, of the Tourney dailies.

• Forge of Souls was a straight shot. I would rate it easy. But Kuan healed in a pug our first (and thus far only) time through, and he had to work for it; we had a few deaths and a wipe even. So some might dispute my "easy" rating. Honestly though, you're supposed to be struggling through an instance.

• Forge of Souls is pretty. Blizz continues to rock the art with the undead instances. I loved Stratholme in "vanilla" for all the detailed art, and I love this.



• The pug was cross-server! I hate pugs in some sense. The above screenshot is everything wrong with the pugs, as well as illustrating a lot of what I've typed in this entry. Notice the pug-badness even is contagious to me, there I was the healer, idle and targeted on Viljo. The lock is not targeted on the skull and has pulled a mob with AOE damage into the casters. etc.

Heroic Naxx!

Friday night Rahlenti joined Kuan and Viljo to knock out a bunch of the Outland dungeons. Since all 3 of us had, many times over, done all of those heroics, we just hadn't actually got credit for them.

We were going to finish up last night, but first DraNgNon and I were eating dinner and then Rahlenti was eating dinner. So we figured we'd wait for him on some alts. I was checking some auctions on my banker when I saw someone asking for more for Naxx 25. So we decided to do that instead.

Miraculously it was actually a pretty good pug. Starting from a fresh Naxx we cleared all 4 wings and Sapph and KT. This got Kuan and Viljo 5 new achievements since they had only ever done the Plague and Spider wings on heroic. We one shot every boss except Razuvious and KT. For Razuvious our priests were new and had trouble the first time with the MC. KT we had a bit of an interrupt and healer fail. I think there was too much raid damage and the healers couldn't deal with that and forgot to heal the off tanks.

But we did it! Viljo got a belt and boot upgrade and his Valorous chest. Kuan got a couple of upgrades too, but I forget what they are.

meanwhile, Naxx!

One of the tanks in Thwarted Destiny is in India on business and can't make regular raid times. So, he got his act together, logged in quite early Sunday (IST), and organized what was for us a Saturday night 25-man Naxx pug. It was Kuanchichi's first time in Naxx at all and well, whoa.

There's very little trash, it feels like you just go from boss to boss. I guess they culled out the trash in an effort to streamline it for 10-man runs. But a lot of the participants in the raid were from top-notch guilds so we cleared two wings (Arachnid and Plague) even with Kuan's crappy DPS (which nonetheless was better than the balance druid in my group). Kuan ended up getting two of the drops: an offspec mace that went to free rolls, [Angry Dread], and an onspec ring, [Seized Beauty]. The ring is so good he was able to vendor a couple blue rings he'd been carrying around.

Yesterday Kuan and Viljo got into a Thwarted Destiny guild run of 10-man Naxx. The raid leadership decided, probably for optimized loot distribution, to do the harder wings first, so we immediately went to Patchwerk. The problem was, at least 4 people in the raid, including one of the tanks, hadn't seen the fights at all, so after 6 hours we'd cleared the Construct wing and done the first boss on Military. However that boss also dropped the ele shaman bracers, [Iron Rings of Endurance], which Kuan happily equipped in place of his lvl 70 badged bracers, woot. Perhaps in the future Kuan's DPS will be slightly less crappy! A little while later I messed with Kuan's heal outfit and realized that those bracers are also better healy bracers than the leather ones Kuan had. So, two onspec items translated into replacing 4 slots of gear. Yay bag space.

As for Viljo - yes, Viljo went on a guild run with Thwarted Destiny, Clara gquit Darkfall Saturday night! Whoa! And Viljo got his goofy T7 shoulders out of the guild run too, as well as a glove upgrade from the 25-man pug. I don't have the links for those, Clara will have to edit the post and add them in later.

Anyhow, a coworker pointed out to me today in email, that since Kuan and Viljo are attuned for Naxx out of LHC, the AD Naxx quest chains are available, starting with Echoes of War. We will go pick that up tonight so that any future Naxx runs will contribute to completion, even if there are hardly any trash mobs there.

25 Man Raiding

Last night Kuan and Viljo logged in, after a horrendous queue. The queue wouldn't have been quite so terrible if I hadn't kept disconnecting about 75% of the way through it. Three times! Augh!

Anyway once Viljo was finally on he got a whisper from our friend Xstal, who is the alt of Jataka, the healer from the first ever heroic we finished. Anyway Xstal wanted to know if we wanted to come to 25man Vault of Archavon. I said sure, and it turned out to be a complete pug. But that was fine, because we still managed to one-shot the boss.

The loot that dropped was quite nice. Including the Valorous Frostfire Leggings! Another mage won the roll for them, but then the loot master messed up and passed them to Viljo anyway. So, much as it pains me, I have these lovely legs in the bank waiting for the GMs to deal with my ticket to move them to that other mage. Ah well it would be more annoying to look at them and know they should have gone to someone else.

Anyway after we did that we moved on to 25man Obsidian Sanctum. That went quite well actually, though neither of us got any loot, we did get nice badges from both instances.

It seems that both of the heroic (25 man) versions were easier than their 10 man counterparts. The bosses have more hp on 25man, and they do more damage, but all the raid buffs really help.

Viljo's first lvl 80 heroic

Yesterday we ended up playing a lot of Wow, off and on. Mostly goofing about and going the Winter Veil things. But we did decide to do the daily Heroic quest, which was in the Old Kingdom. Viljo assembled a PUG to get it done - us, two pallies, and a Tauren warrior tank.

There were a couple wipes, but all in all it went quite smoothly. The tank cracked 31K health after buffs which is crazy. Heroic has an extra boss; I noticed that Heroic Nexus does too. I wonder if they all do. But anyhow. Best of all, Kuan got a new hat! His T4 hat, which he's been wearing for well over a year, is finally replaced with [Brood Plague Helmet] which dropped off the first boss. I hit Need. I almost never hit Need.

Ever since WotLK dropped last month, I was expecting that Kuan's hat would be the first thing I'd upgrade. So it's been quite a surprise to me that Kuan actually hit 80 and still wears the T4 hat. So very happy to have that replaced and upgraded. It's such a big upgrade I equipped it even without the enchant and gems. I note that the enchant and gems were more than 200 gold, so even a drop in a PUG run isn't terribly free.

...too bad T4 gear can't be vendored. Someday soon I will type DELETE in the window for it all...

80!

Kuanchichi and Viljo are 80! They both got to level 80 last night at the beginning of normal Oculus. Which they were running again with a tank we pugged in the other night, Ryegrin. Who apparently knows Babzy IRL.

Side note: Ryegrin is only 78 right now and was still able to tank Oculus just fine. The normal instances are very nerfed, and they have boosted tank threat generation a lot.

Anyway now Kuan and Viljo are both 80. And have each spent a crap ton of gold on upgrades to spells. I didn't keep track of how much it cost Viljo to train at 80, but for Kuan, DraNgNon said it was 317g.

Oh and they each got a chest upgrade from Oculus. Viljo replaced his Scarlet Sin'dorei Robes with Vestments of the Scholar from the last boss. And Kuanchichi replaced his Chestguard of Relentless Storms with Runic Cage Chestpiece from the first boss. It's quite strange to replace purples with blues, but I guess that is part of the leveling process.

TK Pug

Kuan and Vilo were offline when Darkfall killed Kael. We were both quite pissed as we are missing that vial remnant, and therefore lack a title and quest completion. Since Darkfall didn't raid this week because of upcoming expansion we weren't going to have a handy guild run to kill him again. So I decided, fuck it, I want to kill Kael. I'd gotten pugs together to go into heroics, a raid can't be too much harder since I can probably still get a bunch of guildies to come along.

So Sunday night I actually managed to get a raid together for TK. I'm the one who didn't talk on Vent for months after joining Darkfall, but here I was leading a raid in TK. I got a lot of help from various people. Had a couple of people doing the marking and pulling, and another couple telling me what mob did what and needed to die where for Kael. Without those people helping out the raid would never have gotten as far as it did get.

We oneshot Al'ar and Void Reaver and then only had time for 3 tries on Kael. Unfortunately he didn't go down in that time. So I told everyone that we'd try again on Monday night, and if they wanted to whisper me at 9pm server.

We tried again on Monday night, and had time for 5 tries, I think. Unfortunately that didn't go much better. We got the positioning for the advisers down and were able to reliably get to phase 4, but the MC in phase 4 just fucked us too hard. So no Kael dead, no Vial, and no title. :( Maybe when we are all mid-70s we can go back and kill him.

Now leading a pug TK raid on Vent was actually breaking one of my cardinal rules in WoW. Namely: don't let random people know that the male troll mage is a girl. My experience in the past has been that once someone knows you're a girl you're not really going to have a normal conversation with them, unless the other person happens to actually be mature. And even if they are mature, most of the guys will take a little bit of time to adjust to the fact that OMG!!1!! UR a Girl!! Girls play WoW??!?!!

So here I am, leading the raid, on vent. I did a little bit of talking, and someone was all "Is a girl leading our raid?" I briefly considered suggesting they leave if that was a problem, but settled for saying yes. There was a bit of talk about, oh good I was kind of afraid if that was a guy's voice. And most of it ended there.

Unfortunately not all of it ended there... There was a resto druid, who was pretty stoned, who hit on me a bit. He had clearly never encountered another female player, or at least another female player who admitted her gender to him. Not really surprising considering his attitude. He was quite surprised when I told him there were at least 2 other women in the raid.

Anyway, not that I didn't already appreciate Drognin and the other RLs we have, but leading a raid is hard. I imagine it'd be easier if it was an all guild run, where you can trust people, at least mostly, to do what they are told.