Just Keep It Clean

Last week my guild put together an Icecrown Citadel (25) player raid.  The raid consisted of about 10 normal raiders, 10 FNGs that had just joined the guild, and a few social guild members who were around to hang out with friends.  The raid was able to push through to the gunship event despite a sloppy Lord Marrowgar and Lady Deathwhisper kill.

Upon boarding the gunship to gather jet packs, a simple question is raised in Officer chat:

Heroic?

Without waiting for a response or discussion, we switch over to heroic mode.  Jet packs are equipped, ready checks go out and we start the event.  Bronzebeard rides up on the Alliance gunship and it begins spewing hate and discontent our way.  Skybreaker Marines start spawning on our ship and we engage enemy sorcerers.  After a minute or two it is easy to tell that we are slowly falling behind.  The Marines on our side aren’t getting killed quickly enough, the sorcerer is up for too long and we are putting little damage into the enemy ship.  Essentially we have wiped before anyone has died.  Well…then we all die!

We begin the run back and “O” chat flares up again.

We cant do this!  DPS was all over the place, people aren’t attacking the same target, its just a mess.

One of my fellow officers argues his point, that we are too handicapped to obtain a heroic gunship kill.  Instead of spending time on something he felt we couldn’t do, he wanted us to push ahead and show the new people how we handle each wing of the raid.

What did I think?  I have complete trust in my fellow Officers, I may not always agree with what they say but his argument was sound.  We were low on DPS, missing a few people in the raid and half of what we did have was under geared and inexperienced.  I voiced my agreement with him, lets kill it on normal and then move on.

“John! Whats the problem here?” Our guild leader began speaking to the Officer, trying to figure out if we could defeat the encounter or not.

“DPS isn’t attacking the same target.”  

A simple question gives a simple and direct answer.  We were able to figure out WHY we were falling behind on adds and not able to kill the sorcerers and get back over to our ship to throw our our own damage.  

Our guild leader opens up in Vent, spouting orders to the ranged DPS and those in the cannons, asking a few questions and obtaining the necessary information.

We start the encounter again, still on heroic…

After a few minutes we defeat the Alliance Gunship encounter on heroic difficulty.  It wasn’t a heroic Lich King kill, it wasn’t a world or server first, but it was OUR kill.

If nothing else, there are two lessons to take away from this story:

1: Keep a level head, analyze the issue and see what you can fix.  Sometimes you just need to take a second to breathe to see whats going on.

2: Perseverance pays off.  Sure, it was only our second attempt at Heroic Gunship but we looked at how we had failed and gave it another go and the result was success.  I am never one to bang my head against a figurative wall for hours on the same boss, but sometimes it just takes one more try to win.

While we were watching the Alliance gunship fly away I began to type in “O” chat.

Hey G, (Short for Gorthad, the guild leaders character) Thanks for being an asshole!

Haha, anytime buddy…

No seriously, had you not been an asshole, we wouldn’t have done this, I think the next article I write on my blog will be about you!

Just keep it clean he tells me.