Alternately titled “How Vonya Got Her Bear Back”

Welcome to patch day!

Some of you may remember that my guild has been trying desperately to get all of our raiders bear mounts from Zul’Aman before they are gone forever.

So how did we do?

Eleven Bears. Oh yeah.

We got a bear for all of our raiders, including the treedruid who dinged 70 recently, and thus isn’t geared enough to do a full timed ZA run.

Oh man, I could tell you some stories. We had some truly epic runs. We had deaths on the eagle boss, deaths on the dragonhawk boss and internet connectivity issues galore. Though there was more than one time that we got the bear with more than five minutes to spare.

I think everyone in the guild, however, would agree that the day we got MY bear was quite possibly one of the most epic bear runs we’d experienced.

It started out simple enough. We gathered, buffed, hit the gong, and moved on to the eagle boss in good time.

Eagle boss fight starts, we get him down to about 50%, and all the sudden the entire raid lags out. It’s like a bizarre game of red-light green-light. Vonya would start a heal, and then freeze, heal still casting. About ten seconds later, the screen would flash. Three raiders would be dead. In Vent, all of us were swearing up a storm - it affected not just our raid, but every raid going on in ZA at that time.

Long after my death, I finally regained control of my character. Swiftly, we regrouped, but we had lost a lot of time. Too much, we were afraid, but we were going to keep trying anyway. One of our hunters put in a ticket, and a GM got back to us while we were taking down the bear boss.

No, we couldn’t get a free reset. No, we couldn’t get a free bear mount (hey, never hurts to ask, right?) and no, they weren’t going to assume any responsibility for our ruined run.

“Tough Peanuts” would be the TLDR version of that particular GM discussion.

Grimly, we moved forward. During the dragonhawk fight, our rogue disconnected. We weren’t terribly surprised - every time his family uses the microwave, he disconnects. They are the sort of lovely yet non-gaming family that doesn’t really understand why he can’t just pause the game to take the dogs for a walk.

We make it all the way to lynxboss without the rogue, and we have only a few minutes to spare. The seconds tick through those last trash pulls and the entire raid is on edge. The rogue is still not back, and we don’t have time to wait. We pull the boss and both healers (myself and the shaman healer) are dpsing as much as we possibly can between heals and dispells.

The fight was intense. Every second counted, every cooldown was burned, every eye flickered to that unforgiving timer. A minute left. Thirty seconds. Twenty seconds. Ten seconds, and the boss goes down!

The shadowpriest FLIES to the pot holding our loot, and every raider holds their breath. Did we do it? Did we get him down in time?

Amani War Bear - Need or Greed?

The cheers in Vent were probably heard all the way to Canada, where our rogue was finally getting his internet connection back.

I rolled need (as few bears as remained to get, we’d already decided what order they were going to be looted) and left that room with an incredible feeling of accomplishment, the cleanest sinuses this side of the MIssissippi, and one more roly-poly, adorably bouncy, troll-armored Amani War Bear mount in the guild.

/cheer

The Shattrath Bear Parade will be EPIC.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 and is filed under Bold Face, ~ Vonya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.