Daily Archives: February 6, 2007

Crash on the server, mama

After a quiet weekend of watching rugby and winning a pub quiz (despite the music round consisting of clips played backwards, with the pitch shifted!), I was ready to tackle the Blood Furnace, and by happy coincidence just as I logged on four of my guild were looking for a final party member to head there. In we went, made a decent start (other than a slight accidental AoE pulling about three groups at once, but hey, it’s a guild tradition to wipe once or twice while warming up), and had just got our tactics sorted (sap one orc, sheep the other, banish the demon, then stand around for 45 seconds wondering which one to attack until the effects wear off) when… boom! The server went down for an hour and a half. Slightly annoying, really, but such is life.

Still, before the server crash, I did learn something new. Between coming back to WoW and the Burning Crusade, all my instance running was done with a small group of us, often on voice comms, and we got pretty efficient as a team, knowing each others capabilities. Now there are more opportunities to run instances with guild or pick-up groups, it can take a little while to sort out tactics and roles with different team compositions. Last night, strange symbols started appearing over the head of the mobs in the Furnace, skulls, diamonds, squares, moons… Checking with the group leader, it turns out these are raid target icons, or “lucky charms” (once again, I await the flurry of “DUH!”), which can be set by the party leader right-clicking their target. While not really necessary if you’re just blasting through a dungeon, they can be really useful if your group are towards the lower end of the level range and co-ordination is more important. Once the rogue has snuck around the back of a group, “sap cross, kill skull” is a lot easier than:
“I’m going to sap the orc
“Which orc? There’s three of them…”
“Oh, yeah. The invoker!”
“There’s two of them…”
“Right. The invoker on the left, right?”
“Right?”
“Right”
“My right, or your right?”
“No, my left”
“Who’s on first?”
“Yes”
(etc.)