The Tale of Two Raids

I meant to write this up last week and didn't get it done.

On New Year's Day, DV got the call to pug 10 man Obsidium Sanctum. I was relatively well geared by that time and had a real hope that I wouldn't be a liability in the DPS department.

And I wasn't. As previously mentioned, I was number 4 on the meter behind three monster DKs. I had over 4K attack power and did a very respectable amount of DPS. In fact, I died on the last boss and got a battle rez because of my good DPS. And then died again.

So, what's the problem? My big problem with this raid, and the reason I might not get an invite to another by the members of this pug, is that I had a very hard time moving around.

Specifically, the flame wall that appears on the last boss has an opening that everyone has to stand in. The wall starts on one side of the fight area and moves through to the other side of the area. It has at least one opening in it and can move E->W, N->S, W->E, or S->N; I could not discern a pattern, and it may be random as to the start point.

If you happen to miss the opening and get caught by the firewall, then not only do you take damage, but also a fire elemental spawns. Bad news x2.

I could not for the life of me (literally) negotiate my way to the opening on a consistent basis. Some of the issue may be with my laptop and getting bogged down on frame rate. To counteract this, I need to modify my settings to decrease the detail and hopefully increase my frame rate.

The other part of the issue was a failure on my part to pan the camera around to find the wall and the opening in it AND start moving so I can make the opening on time. Getting to the opening > DPSing. I forgot the golden rule of DPS:

You can't DPS when you're dead.

So, after getting a battle rez, I still failed to stay alive and the raid downed the boss with my corpse watching on. I blew the second chance that the raid leader gave me. In my book, my performance was not acceptable even though I was 4th on the damage meter; if I can't stay alive during critical times, I'm less than worthless and take up raid resources (battle rez, healer's mana) that can be used for better purposes.

I have to go for now, so the second raid write up will have to wait. Preview: I did much better in Naxx...8~)