WoWGrrl's World

On Wednesday night, the night after Patch 3.1 released to the live servers, the 25-man raiding guild I heal for with my Holy Priest started into Ulduar.

Twenty-nine raiders showed up for the raid, and thus four people were put on standby.

I wasn't one of the standby folk tonight, but sometimes, depending on who shows up on any given night, I'm put on standby too, which is only fair.

Just About Didn't Make It

Before the raid invites went out, our Saturday night Undying group headed into Vault of Archavon again for a second attempt on getting to the new PvP zone Raid boss, Emalon the Storm Watcher, and I was looking forward to yet another opportunity to test out my Holy Priest build before heading into a full-on 25 man instance.

We got in and got going this time, but just as we ran up the hallway to Emalon himself, someone commented that they were disconnecting because everyone was running in place for them.

Then a second and a third person chimed in about the exact same thing.

Blah. Same thing as last night - we could talk on the Guild line and on the Raid line but couldn't zone out of the instance. If you disconnected from the game, you were faced with the loading screen until you were booted back to the Character Selection screen.

This time, however, Blizzard was super quick - they must have rebooted the instance server within 10 minutes, because all of us seemed to have "released" from our lock at about the same time, and we found ourselves back at our Hearth point, Dalaran, and able to accept a raid invite.

Heading Into Ulduar

I hopped onto the Taxi and had it fly me up to the general Ulduar grounds we're all used to from Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning, and then I flew way up in the air, wondering where, exactly, I was to go next.

This is where it's good to be going to a raid instance during the evening. If your own guildies don't show you the way, some other guild's people will show you the way.

Like a trail of ants leading from an ice cream cone to an anthill, just follow along, and you look like you know what you're doing!

Waiting For The "Zone In" Call

I guess I missed the call to zone in, because I didn't realize I was supposed to be in there already until someone mentioned that they had been swapped to the overflow team without having realized it.

Of course, everyone else was already in, so when I tried to zone in, I got an Instance is Full message until the overflow DPS made his way out.

I love the promptness standard that has been set and maintained in the raiding guild I'm a member of - nobody needs to be summoned, everyone's online and available 15 min before raid starts!

Waiting For Assignments

Since this was our first time EVER in this content (none of our guildies seem to do the PTR thing, which is a shame on many fronts), it took a while for assignments to come out.

That gave us time to sit in the large "starting" area and look around a bit, and gave people time to socialize a little bit before the Official Raid "vent should be quiet now" time hit.

When assignments come out, we all rushed around to find our teams and our vehicles. Unfortunately, there was confusion because certain vehicles only had room for one passenger but were.... either assigned two, or, possibly the "driver" chose the wrong vehicle type to begin with, leaving one of his passengers behind.

Being one such passenger left behind, I ran around on my mount trying to figure out why I couldn't get onto my Driver's vehicle, then gave up when I finally saw the Dwarf on the other side, in "my" spot.

At that point another vehicle went by that flashed the "mount me" arrow so I followed that guy and sat in his gunner seat instead. I have no idea where his passengers were supposed to be ;)

Wintergrasp Is Great Ulduar Training

Having done a lot of Wintergrasp on my Hunter and Priest, this whole "vehicles" thing wasn't hard at all, and since we were on Normal mode, our raid team literally blasted through everything in its path, and eventually landed at the Flame Leviathan.

And of course, since this was our first time in, someone got too close and started the event prematurely... and my Driver (and another one, too) went around the wrong pole and we got locked out of the event...

And then the Instance Server started having troubles again - likely with the 5million people all trying to get into Ulduar and all the other raid instances at once.

This time, however, we actually got kicked out of the instance and were all piled up at the door, instead of being locked inside like my guildie and I were last night in Vault of Archavon.

And there we hung out, with a whole bunch of other guilds, both Alliance and Horde.

Some of our guildies engaged in a little PvP, but since we're far from being a PvP/Arena guild, the rest of us just watched them die.

After about 25 minutes of waiting, an official 15 minute break was called.

After that, the raid was called, in order to give Blizzard's awesome programmers another 24 hours of frenzied bug-fixing before we dive into it again.

Thursday, we try again!

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Related posts:

1. Emalon the Storm Watcher, Dual-spec'd Shaman, and Ulduar
2. Taking On Koralon the Flame Watcher In VoA
3. How To Destroy Koralon The Flame Watcher

Tagged as: emalon the storm watcher, flame leviathan, ulduar