Noobish-ness

For my non-gamer friends a "noob" is an unseasoned gamer. Someone who makes rookie mistakes and often seems unaware of the basic mechanics of the game. In a raid, a noob will often manage to wipe the party with some easily avoided mistake. A noob will ask questions about seemingly obvious parts of game play. We all start out as noobs. Last night, as a guild we played that way.

The core group of raiders for the guild tends to be pretty seasoned. We've seen all of Naxx and are now comfortable farming it (with a couple exceptions). As a group we've been to over half of Ulduar and brought down bosses using achievement strategies. Many of them have PUG'd all of the raids in the game. We've had a lot of shining moments. Last night was not one of them.

We started our raid on time and figured we would start with an easy victory. On Thursday we had downed Flame Leviatian, XT, Kologarde, and Auriaya with only one or two wipes. We were feeling good. Last night we started with Razorscale and managed to bring the big dragon down with only one death. We're still feeling cocky and decide we'll quickly handle Ignis and then move on to Freya, who we haven't really fought much yet. Ignis had other plans for us. We wiped on the trash getting to him, twice. Our first attempt on Ignis did not last long. We were killed quickly. The adds took too long and he kept killing people in his flaming pot. The second attempt was even worse with at least three adds running rampant through the party. After four or five attempts (they all blur together) we decided to bypass Ignis and head down to Freya. At least that way we could see the fight and learn.

To get to Freya, you need to kill a ton of trash. We had done this once on Thursday but the trash respawns. So we started with the first pull. And wiped. We managed to bring that down only to wipe again two trash pulls later. Wiping on a boss seems acceptable, wiping on a trash pull is just noobishness. We wiped four more times on the trash, including one terribly hurried pull where we grabbed a patrol as well. By the time we cleared the last trash and faced Freya most of us had repair bills of 30 gold or higher. Not good.

Freya has to be one of the most confusing fights in Ulduar. She has four different types of adds that spawn and each has to be treated differently. The detonating lashers need to be AOE'd down until about ten percent and then killed individually. Otherwise they all detonate together and wipe the raid. The three storm adds need to be killed within a minute of each other or they will respawn over and over until they wipe the raid. The ancient protector needs to be killed while standing under the growing and shrinking mushrooms. And the healing tree needs to be dpsed down quickly so it doesn't heal Freya. Oh and did I mentioned that new adds spawn every minute. Once you get through the add spawns, Freya herself is a piece of cake. I don't even remember how many attempts we had on her. Death after death, until shortly before midnight when we figured out the patterns and got lucky with the spawns and managed to bring her down.

We then decided to try the Assembly of Iron. It was 10 minutes to midnight (the designated end of the run) and we figured it wouldn't hurt to see a new fight. I would like to say that we lasted 30 seconds but I think that might be stretching it a bit. We were dead in seconds. It was just another death in a night of wipes. We died on bosses, we died on trash. Our shaman (my cute and wonderful husband) decided to play with the flowers instead of just dying and brought them down on us just as we resurrected. We died a lot. But we learned. The guild has never had a great raid make-up but we make due with what we have. We learned, we brought down Freya, and we saw more of Ulduar. Next trip will hopefully be better but I'd rather be Noobish with the guild, then masterful with a PUG. Expensive night but a good one.