I know I promised a recollection of the Razorfen Kraul incident a couple fo days ago. Due to certain unforseen events, such as progress raiding (Blood Queen? what a gyp.) and a compulsive need to toy around with my holy priest, I've kinda forgotten to blog. Never fear, though - it's story time again.
After a successful run through the most dreary instance ever - I'm looking at you, Stormwind, City of Men - I got sent into a Razorfen Kraul-group with a feral cat ("am I tanking? xD"), a rogue in caster heirlooms (I can only assume XP > stats), an elemental shaman and an arms warrior. Our merry band starts clearing, and I don't need a single mana break until the first intersection. The feral cat in bear form has surprisingly good control and overview, we pull hard and fast, and when I ask for my MB after next pull, I get it hands down. Continuing trough the instance, we keep a good trend going, until we stand face to face with The Bat Room.
Three things I already knew (and painfully so from playing an elemental shaman through Northwatch Hold), but The Bat Room painfully reminded me of:
- school lockouts are a bitch.
- six second silences are a bastard.
- tanks not knowing these things pull hard.
The bear runs in, grabs a good and solid 12 bats, taking a massive amount of hits to his back, and I have to resort to Holy Light spam to keep him going. Until I get aggro from one, and all my abilites suddenly are on a 5 second cooldown. Ouch. Bear is good and clever and taunts batty back, allowing me a quick bandaging him, but alas, stupid pala needs to go into melee range to do this. And these guys have a nasty, AoE-silencing screech, not really unlike my own belfy one. Six more seconds without healing? You got it.
The bear naturally dies. The arms warrior and elemental shaman share the now scattered mobs fair and brotherly between then. Warrior choose to die, shaman does the clever move and runs for it. My silence ends just about now, and I do the one thing I can think of to survive this situation; Righteous Fury, Consecration, and healing myself hard. Half a second later, all of the warrior's bats, I'm counting five, surround me, still playing lockout and silence now and again, but I keep standing there, burning my pots and stunning, basically everything I CAN that isn't a spell or on lockout.
It is then I notice. The rogue in the dress has picked up on what I'm doing. The rogue in the dress is clever. The rogue in the dress is targeting one and one bat, bursting them down as best he can, playing along to my waiting game. As my interface tells me the shaman is dead down the hall, we have 4 more bats incoming, but only 2 left here, and I'm for once unsilenced, unstunned and unlocked. I torrent up, judge a bat and grit my teeth.
Around two minutes later, I exit combat with 1% mana and 3% health. The rogue is at around 5%, but we're alive. After a quick drink, I resurrect the warrior and feral, who, from their reactions in chat, have clearly never seen anything like this ever before. The rogue and I high-five. We go on to kill big nasty pig boss and ugly piggy crone boss, before we happily go our separate ways. I remain kerfuffled, though - this is the kind of last stand-affair you dream of. The kind that just don't happen in endgame content, and very rarely even in low level content. Being a part of it made me feel really good about myself, and I'm not even ashamed to say it.
Playing to learn is always more gratifying when you realize that you just learned something. Split second decisions involving parts of your toolbox that aren't really in your main arsenal, but still remain in your mental gameframe, are (alongside the knowledge of when to take risks and not) what separates a good player from an average one. Today, I felt like a good player.
And it felt good.
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