Get Up Off the Canvas

Last night was one of those nights where everything seemed to go wrong. The Endless ran SSC for the first time since our top raiders left, with the intention of downing Lurker. It was always going to be rough, but things went completely gnome-shaped for me when I joined the raid - my ADSL went down and flopped about like a dying fish for the next two hours. I could see it bringing up the line, trying to connect and dropping out repeatedly, but when I finally got through to support, they only had the standard "power cycle your router" crap. It eventually fixed itself, but I am no longer the huge fan of IINet that I once was. You let me down, you bunch of spanner crabs.

When I finally got back in, I swapped for Ozziehunter, who was having serious framerate issues. The poor guy only gets 15 fps in the Arena starting rooms, so A'dal only knows what a 25 man raid was doing to his system. The group was only just clearing the final trash mob group near Lurker when I made it inside, with the respawn timer running down. This was due to the main tank regularly disconnecting in the middle of battle and wiping the raid, which in turn was due to his broadband being capped, which was due to his brother downloading 50GB of porn and blowing his monthly quota. He's clearly the best-geared tank we have in the guild, but stuff like that just wastes everyone's time.

We ended up having only one shot at Lurker, and although it was pretty ragged, we managed to get him down to about 60%. I'm going to suggest that we divide the raid into groups next time, with each group having three dps, one tank and a healer, all assigned to a particular island. I fell through the cracks with respect to healing, and bought the farm when I got Geysered into the scalding water.

After we called the SSC run, the world server crashed, which was nice. After that, we got a Kara group together to finish off Nightbane and Netherspite, but couldn't manage anything better than five wipes on NB before everyone gave up. The tank was having trouble with his stance-dance macros, and we seemed to have all kinds of bother getting the skeletons down.

About this time, I was feeling pretty despondent. All I had for the evening was a big repair bill and a headache, but I decided that leaving the night at such a low ebb was unhealthy. Getting clobbered sucks, but getting back off the deck, dusting yourself off and getting some stuff done is the sign of good character, even if it's small. To that end, we got our ten 3v3 Arena games in, even though we had to find a sub for Ozziehunter, as he had bailed for the evening. It was rough and frustrating, but we got there, and I feel better for it. Whew.