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Tilted Cat Head
Administrator
Location: Manhattan, NY
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based on previous releases, aug/september and they are already downloading the patches. I was really hoping for November.
Quote:
Granpappy Frostheim on Wiping – Warcraft Hunters Union
Granpappy Frostheim on Wiping
By Frostheim
Granpappy Frostheim on Wiping
By Frostheim – July 24, 2009
Okay kids, sit down and make yourselves comfortable while grandpappy Frostheim tells you a little story about a boss called Razorgore the Untamed in a place called Blackwing’s Lair.
This will maybe learn you kids something about what wiping was really like, back in my days.
Now this was a long time ago, before most of you were even rolled. Our guild had finally gotten Molten Core down on farm status and many of us were itching to move into BWL and start collecting more T2 pieces, the legendary Dragonstalker’s set.
As you can imagine, we had our share of wiping while learning Molten Core. There were the wipes while learning each new boss, and the retro-wipes on Sulfuron when we didn’t get the priest positioning right. But to be honest, I never learned what wiping really was until BWL.
You step in to BWL and you’re in the room of Razorgore, the first boss. No trash, no wasted time – just step in and fight the first boss. At the time we were raiding twice a week. One night we cleared MC and Onyxia, and the other we started learning Razorgore.
w-razor1
And how we wiped. We would play for three hours, wiping on the same boss over and over and over. And then the next week we’d come back and do it again. Then the next week, and the next.
The fight required someone to control Razorgore and use his ability to pop all the eggs in the place. Meanwhile, various mobs spawned continuously until there were 40 of them in the place. Every time you killed one, another spawned to replace it.
It was chaos.
Our strat was to have two tanks kiting the mobs around in circles while the dps took out the one kind of mob that wasn’t kitable (hoping that the random respawn would be a kitable type). The result of this is we had tons of mobs spawning with no aggro.
As hunters, we had some unique roles in this fight.
Now this was before Misdirection, so we had no way to direct the mobs to the tanks. We could and did lay freezing traps to slow them down — and that was no easy task as the time. You see, back then you couldn’t lay traps while in combat, so when the cooldown was up we’d have to recall our pet, Feign Death (which dropped us out of combat) and try to instantly lay a trap before we were thrust back into combat.
Now a big problem was healers getting ganked by the newly spawned mobs from healing aggro. One way that we combatted this is the healers were only allowed to heal their kiting tanks — they could not heal anyone else because they had to keep their threat down. We had a whole other set of healers who weren’t allowed to heal at all — they were on standby for phase 2.
Healing the dpser and the healers was the hunters’ job.
Seriously.
Whenever someone (usually a rogue) in our vicinity was low on health, we ran over to them in a pause between spawns and bandaged them. They couldn’t bandage themselves because, again, they would get healing threat. As hunters this was our job because we could Feign Death to remove the threat we got from bandaging.
w-razor2However, this was much harder back then than it is now. You see, back in vanilla days FD worked just a bit differently than it does now. As you know, all mobs have a chance to resist your FD, and anyone who resists isn’t fooled and can keep attacking you (and remembers your threat). Well back then if any mob resisted your FD, then every mob resisted your FD. And, of course, you were in a room with 40 mobs. The chances of just one of them resisting was pretty darned good.
Of course back in those days we hunters had honed a slightly different skillset than kids today. We’d bandage our comrades, a mob would aggro on us, and FD would get resisted. So then we’d whip off a concussive shot and start kiting the mob over near one of the kiting tanks in hopes that they’d have a taunt available to take him off our hands. Once the handoff was made we’d return to our assigned group to find them all dead, and shortly after we’d die too as the whole raid wiped. Again.
It was good times.
Nothing in Molten Core had prepared me for this kind of wiping. And while it was at times frustrating, it was mostly exciting. Raiding in vanilla was an elite occupation. Very, very few guilds could even get the necessary 40 people together for a raid, and fewer still could get through MC. Just by being in BWL we were fighting a boss that fewer than 1% of players had ever even attempted. We were thrilled to be there, and excited by our slow progress from week to week.
Nowadays things are a bit different. I can’t imagine many guilds today that could wipe for 3 hours on the same boss, first in the instance, week after week after week without having half the guild members give up and probably deguild in anger.
Heck, when my 10-man group starts to approach an hour of wiping on one boss people start suggesting it’s time to give up and move on.
Kids these days don’t know how easy they’ve got it.
Back in my day we had perseverence. Those first couple bosses in BWL were designed so that you would spend weeks wiping on the boss before getting it. Nobody one-shot them. I can tell you we appreciated the slightest progress from one wipe to the next. We were encouraged by living an extra few minutes; that was progress. Back in my day we knew how to HTFU.
So that’s how endgame raids were in my day. And after a month of wiping on Razorgore I can tell you it felt good to finally take him down, and we were excited to step into the next room to fight the next boss, Vael, who required more weeks of wiping.
So remember that next time you’re wiping endlessly on a boss. Remember what wiping used to be like, and quit paying so much attention to beating the boss. Just pay attention to living a little bit longer, making just a little bit more progress. Focus on just making the next step.
Eventually you’ll get there. One step at a time. And it will feel so good.
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