25/10/2010

Ugh, I hate The Undying

My guild never cared much about Undying and similar achievements when they were current content, because we've just never been big on raid achievements. Just getting the bosses down has always been the priority.

A few months ago we finally did an Undying run since the option to earn that title is going away soon, which I tanked on my paladin at the time because we were short on tanks. Since then we've occasionally tried to get another run together to get the achievement for those that missed out on it before (like my main), and it's been nothing but a major pain in the arse. Tonight was our third failed attempt in a row.

Whether someone pulls aggro on Patchwerk or stands in a shadow fissure on Kel'thuzad, there's always something, and it's slowly driving me batty. We have three times as much health as we had when we first ran this content, do six times as much damage, and still people can't get the basics right? I'm not someone who tends to get angry easily, but it's hard not to feel a certain seething rage when this kind of thing happens over and over again. After all that person's death just completely wasted an hour's worth of effort.

The Ulduar version where you don't have to get it all right in a single lockout is a lot more forgiving, but it's still infuriating when you only need one more boss in the whole instance (usually near the end) and that ends up being the one where someone messes up, once again by doing something really dumb like standing in Mimiron's shock blast or pulling aggro on Vezax. I actually managed to get my own Champion of Ulduar title last night (after someone had messed it up the week before), but this time it got borked up for someone else who still needed a different boss.

And then, on top of feeling angry, I feel guilty for feeling angry. Because, at the end of the day, I like my guildies, and everyone makes mistakes sometimes. It just feels wrong to get that mad over them dying a single time. It happens to everyone sometimes, right? Too bad that it happens to them when the whole effort of the night hinges on nobody dying... which just makes me hate the whole achievement in the end.

In a way this is kind of weird, because achievements that reward you for playing well and getting it just right have always been among those that I approved of the most. After all I loved the Zul'Aman bear run, and we spent a lot of time messing that one up as well. I suppose the main differences between that and something like The Undying are:

1) Since nobody ever got to do a bear run while outgearing the instance by multiple tiers, it wasn't as utterly humiliating to mess up, and some of the loot from the other three chests was still useful to people even if you didn't get the fourth one.

2) People were generally better at watching their threat. During this expansion even a lot of dpsers that I value a lot seem to have completely unlearned how to watch their aggro, because it simply didn't matter most of the time. I'm hoping they'll get back into the groove come Cataclysm, because having a whole run turn out to be pointless due to someone pulling aggro is just stupid.

3) As tough as it was, the Zul'Aman bear run still allowed for a bit of leeway and compensating. I remember on the run when we got our first bear we actually had two or three deaths, but managed to make up for those precious seconds that we lost while resurrecting people. There weren't really that many insta-gib mechanics either, where a person standing in the wrong place would die instantly. (Maybe Jan'alai's fire bombs...)

People often like to rant about having to carry bad players and I agree that it can severely affect your fun when you have to compensate for someone playing truly terribly, but not being able to compensate at all, completely having to rely on everyone else to not stand in the wrong place and to not pull aggro on the untauntable boss or else your entire evening is ruined... that's even worse in my opinion.

4 comments:

  1. "Since nobody ever got to do a bear run while outgearing the instance by multiple tiers.."

    My memory is different on this. ZA as an instance could be run wearing stuff from Karazhan. With the items from ZA itself you ended up with a mixture of ZA and Kara items (part T4, part T5). However most people who got a bear mount back then used full T6-Equipment which was already available back then.

    I'm proud to have managed it with the intended gear level, but I know there are few like me on my server. Some got carried by a T6-Raid who got paid by them and if you had T6 it generally was a walk in the park.

    Still, that was my favorite "achievement" ever.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I recently got my Undying on my druid.. and I've never had a more stressed out 2 hours :) (Although we had labelled the run as *practice for an Undying run as we are all a bit rusty at Naxx so it doesn't _really_ matter if you die this time*)
    I was slightly saddened by things like killing Heigan so quickly that the ranged and healers didn't get to prove we can dance, but I'm still pretty proud of the achievement.
    I think it makes a difference if the deaths are due to lack of focus though - and I think it's ok to get angry about that. Afterall, it's your time, you've put a lot of effort in (probably a lot of effort into just getting the run going in the first place), and because it's lower level content, people think it is just a breeze and not to be taken seriously. Yep, I'd be seriously pissed off actually :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Kiseran: It's true that you could outgear it somewhat if you had full Black Temple gear, but relatively few people had that at the time (at least on my server), and I saw even raids in gear like that mess it up. And the ZA drops themselves were in quality slightly above tier five, because the gear from SSC and TK suffered from a lot of poor itemisation. (For example I found that mages and warlocks generally preferred the sword from Zul'jin to this one from Tidewalker because crit was poor for them back then while haste was awesome.) My guild was also running MH and BT, but we kept getting gear upgrades in ZA almost until the very end because the stuff there was just that good.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Errr, the second link was supposed to lead to this sword of course, and it also drops from Leotheras the Blind, not Tidewalker. D'oh.

    ReplyDelete