Ragefire Chasm (Take 2)

“LF2M for RFC, have tank.”

I sent a message to the person saying that I’d like to join them, and they invited me to the group. It consisted of…

• Level 13 Troll Mage (leader)
• Level 19 Tauren Warrior (guild)
• Level 16 Troll Mage
• Level 14 Undead Mage (me)

I ran down and met the other two mages by the summoning stone, and started to summon the warrior. “He’s close,” the leader said. Glancing at my minimap, I saw the warrior running down one of the ramps into the Cleft of Shadows. “I never noticed those stones,” the leader added. “That’s neat.” The Tauren arrived and said, “they’re by every instance.” Indeed. This gave me the impression the leader might be pretty new to all this.

The leader advertised a few times for a healer while we all buffed each other, took bio breaks, and got settled. When we were all ready, the leader suggested that we go ahead and kill some stuff in the front of the instance while we waited for a healer. Three mages and a warrior — sounded like fun to me!

As you can imagine, we had ample DPS. The warrior did a pretty good job of holding aggro despite all the fireballs being lobbed. The level 16 mage drew it a few times with some massive opening attacks (the level 13 mage seemed to be delaying his first strike to let the tank get a few hits in, as I was), and I got a little worried about the frost novas that he was tossing out whenever he got attacked. When we approached the first set of mobs where we’d definitely be pulling groups, I made sure I knew exactly where my potion and bandage hotkeys were, fearing it could get ugly any second, particularly without a healer. Then, to my surprise:

“Kill order is skull, star, circle, then diamond. Please sheep the star, circle, and diamond only if they’re pulled,” and then there were instructions about which symbol matched each mage. WOOHOOOOO!

This is where the fun really began, and let me tell you… everything went pretty much as you would hope. Fire was focused on the tank’s target. A few sheep were accidently hit but then quickly sheeped again. There were no panicked frost novas, and a few resists on the second and third rounds of sheeping meant that the tank took a few extra hits, but everybody did a really great job in following the leader’s instructions. Sometimes, if it was unclear what we were going to pull, the leader marked things slightly differently and we’d toss up a test sheep to see what would come to us.

This is what I really love about doing instances. You have a limited set of resources based on the classes and specs of those in the party. The pulls are like puzzles where you need to determine what will be most efficient (or least damaging!) for your party, and then execute the plan. In this case, for example, we had no healer but lots of crowd control. The strategy was to polymorph as many mobs as possible on each pull. We used small waits between breaking the sheep to take turns bandaging the tank. Teamwork!

It was going great, but the tank expressed some doubt about our being able to take on the bosses without him getting killed. The leader advertised again in the LFG channel, but kept saying, “already have uber group… looking for healer.” They said it over and over the same way. “Already have uber group” was making it sound like we didn’t need any help, frankly, but I didn’t say anything. I was having fun.

We got to the first boss, Oggleflint. The leader expressed some hesitation and suggested that we wait for a healer. “I think we can do it,” I said. There were just two mobs aside from the boss, and we’d taken on bigger pulls earlier. From recent experience, I also knew that you could pull the mobs in front and the boss would stay behind, but I stayed quiet when the leader marked Oggleflint with a skull. No matter — we killed Oggleflint pretty handily, and then squished the other two mobs one by one. No problem. The leader updated the LFG with the progress of our uber group.

It was pretty clear to everyone how well we were doing, and there was a lot of cheering and encouraging comments all around. We did have to stop and eat and drink quite often, but we went on to kill Taragaman, Jergosh, and Bazzalan, all without a single death. Someone commented that it would be fun to create a guild that was all mages, “and a warrior,” our tank added. Heh… At the end, we all ran out of the instance together, exchanged more congratulations and thank yous (and I even got hugged a few times), and a few noted that all were being added to their friends lists. Nice.

I whispered to the leader and told him what a great job he did leading the group. “About a year ago I led raids,” he said. Oh! After he started marking mobs, I had tossed out the idea that he was new, but … I now remember hearing on a WoW Insider podcast a while back that the summoning stones didn’t always function like they do now (they were just meeting stones, and weren’t useful in any way, really), so maybe this was someone who’d been away from the game for a long time and was coming back to it. That could be why he was surprised we could summon folks.

Another thing I noted that was kind of amusing — the leader kept referring to me as a “he.” I suppose with the undead sizes/statures, it isn’t all that easy to tell the males from the females, and my mage does have a short sticky-uppy hairdo. It didn’t bother me, but given that I chose this appearance to ward off flirtations, I think it’s funny that in this case, it resulted in gender confusion.

Now that was a good pug!

Total time spent in the group: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Total time spent in the instance:  1 hour, 30 minutes