World of Queuecraft (Sanctum LFR, Part 2)

Have you ever watched or read about a person playing a game that you're very familiar with and that you personally enjoy, and at first you're pleased by watching them be delighted by all the things you remember really loving about the game when you were new too? But then they get caught up in some random side activity that clearly frustrates them in some way, and you keep thinking: "Just let it go, man... I agree this isn't a great system/situation, but this isn't what the game is meant to be about! Just get back to the well-designed, fun stuff already!"

While trying to get into the last two remaining wings of Sanctum of Domination in LFR, I've been feeling like I must be the type of player who would cause that kind of consternation in random observers. All these things to do in WoW and I'm wasting my days screwing around with LFR for hours on end! What is wrong with me?

I just thought that I should be fine queueing for it on a Saturday afternoon on a long weekend, because I had a lot of time and lots of people should be playing, right? Even the less recent/relevant content? No? No.

When I started writing this post, I'd already been sat in the queue for the "Shackles of Fate" wing of LFR as both damage dealer and healer for nearly three hours. Since I got a bit tired of levelling cooking and fishing, I decided to pass some of that time doing archaeology this time around, but after about two hours I got somewhat bored of that too.

I also became oddly mesmerised by what the LFR UI kept showing me... at around the one-hour mark, I was quite close to getting a full group, then it went into the sort of pause mode while it assembles a group, and then most of the group was gone but I was still there in the queue. I can only guess that a partial group sucked a lot of potentials out of the pool or something, because I'm not sure how else I could have missed out on both a healer and dps spot when I'd already been queued up as both for so long. This pattern repeated a couple more times, with the UI proudly updating to say that the average queue time was "only" 45 minutes to an hour, all while my own wait had already been three times as long.

It was a funny situation in a way because while I was getting increasingly annoyed, I could tell that it was at least partially my own fault for wanting to play the game "wrong" by queueing for old raid finder wings that nobody cares about anymore, but at the same time I was thinking: Why are queues for content from the current expansion so empty? This doesn't seem right. However, I had set myself the goal to do this and I wasn't going to give up this close to the finish line. I will beat you, raid finder queue!

After five and a half hours, time I mostly spent doing things on my second monitor, the queue finally popped after I'd set myself a deadline of six hours - by that time it was well into the evening and I figured that if I still couldn't get a pop by then, there was no point in waiting for it to get even later.

We made our way to the first boss of the wing, Guardian of the First ones, where we just stood around for a while. Since some markers were being put down, I figured that maybe the tanks were discussing tactics in whispers or something. I didn't mind the additional wait, but what I did mind was all the players getting out their noisy toys - there was no Transmorpher Beacon this time, but the classic train set was present and some sort of jukebox that played a horribly out of tune NPC song. Someone complained that the train noises were so loud that they'd woken their sleeping child.

When we finally pulled the boss, we wiped. A rogue posted damage meters in chat that showed them on top and complained that the dps sucked. He also called us a bunch of clowns. I looked at my death message and it said that I was killed by an ability that wasn't on the boss's ability list in the adventure guide, so I googled it. What I found was that it was "the big hit that goes on the tank and anyone standing too close", which left me wondering whether I had messed up or whether it had been the tank, considering that a lot of others had fallen over at the same time as me.

While we were still trying to reassemble, the boss suddenly got pulled and we wiped again. For a couple of minutes a vicious blame game ensued, until it was agreed that the person pulling had been a replacement for a quitter who had simply been loaded into the instance at an unfortunate spot. The rogue from earlier and one of the tanks quit, and several people commented with something along the lines of "glad they're gone", which honestly surprised me, as I'm used to being in the minority in WoW when it comes to perceiving behaviour like that of the rogue as toxic.

After we'd got another set of replacements, we killed the boss just fine, and the consensus seemed to be that the tank who had left had been the problem on the first attempt since there was supposed to be a tank swap mechanic and they had never taunted.

I got a cloak from the first boss, which would turn out to be the only piece of gear I got from the entire run, and someone instantly whispered me to ask whether they could have it. That other person already had a much better cloak, but it wasn't an upgrade for me either so I assumed they wanted it for transmog and gave it to them, since I didn't really care.

On the way to the next boss, we pulled seemingly every trash mob under the sun, which led to some joking comments along the lines of: "You can't pull everything!" - "Hold my beer."

I was a little worried how Fatescribe, the second boss, was going to go, but this one was actually really easy, not to say boring. I even found myself looking at the clock and wondering why some sort of "you're the bomb" mechanic seems to be a requirement for every single raid boss nowadays.

Then we got to Kel'Thuzad, a fight that once again started with an opaque wait in front of the boss and people rupturing the group's ear drums with train sets. There was some talk about "melee going down" which I deduced was about the phylactery mechanic described in the adventure guide. When we finally pulled, we wiped when it came to that part because not enough people "went down" - including me, since I'd been expecting some kind of portal or other obvious visual... but instead you have to step into some menacing-looking swirly stuff on the floor to make a temporary ability button appear that will take you to the room with the phylactery.

After a kind druid had explained this in detail, we tried again... and this time it went much better, but we still lost a bunch of dps along the way so that the eventual result was another wipe. Fortunately the third try was the charm, though it was another close call. People were typing their encouragement into chat as the last (wo)men standing shaved off KT's last few percent of health, and then we were done. (And this time someone revived everyone at the end too.)

I looked at the clock and killing just those three bosses in LFR had taken almost one and a half hours. Add to that the five and a half hours of waiting time and you shouldn't be surprised that I had no desire to queue for Sylvanas that same evening.

I took a break from WoW for most of the next day and didn't try to queue again until Sunday evening, this time with more of a plan. I had a raid in SWTOR later, so I told myself that I'd queue for Sylvanas  about two hours before then, and if I didn't get a pop within half an hour before the start of my "proper" raid, I'd leave. The previous run had taken one and a half hours for three bosses, including a bunch of wipes, so allotting half an hour to a single boss didn't strike me as unreasonable.

And I did get that pop just in time! I gotta say, the Sylvanas fight is pretty cool in terms of setup, music and mechanics. Sadly I did not get it down that time though... we wiped twice due to failing to run fast enough to interrupt her one-shot mechanic in the second phase, and then I had to go.

The next evening I put myself in the queue again while doing a bit of housework, and was surprised when I came back after about fifteen minutes and had actually missed a pop. I signed up again and got a pop after only another ten minutes! It may well be that I got into the same group that had formed earlier though, as it was evident that there had already been at least one wipe from the way people were talking.

This time we made it to phase three on the first try for which I was present, but then we still wiped. I won't go into detail about every other wipe after that because I honestly don't remember them all... we had one wipe to the same lack of interrupt that had caused both of my wipes the night before, but aside from that, it was always due to things going south during the last phase. (There were also always at least a couple of people who fell through the holes in the bridges, but that just seemed to be par for the course.)

Bridge talk. Also, you can see someone emitting random boss yells due to that bloody toy again.

Fortunately there was a human hunter from Ravencrest called Corneiius who had the patience of a saint (and I whispered him to say as much at the end) who told people to calm down when tempers flared and was trying hard to get everyone to understand what they were supposed to do. The thing that kept catching us out was that during the last phase of the fight you need to move among a small number of platforms for two different mechanics: One is an arrow that does massive AoE damage around the person targeted, so that player is supposed to jump to another platform temporarily to "explode" there. The other mechanic was Sylvanas razing the platform we were currently standing on, so everyone had to "flee" to the next one down the line to stay alive. We mostly died to the first mechanic to be honest, as the affected people didn't seem to notice what was happening to them and would blow up most of the raid around them.

We eventually got her down with six stacks of the Determination buff, and with Corneiius spamming macros in raid warnings to call out the mechanics as they happened (interspersed with comments like "stop jumping randomly xD", as we were still pretty hopeless at telling what was happening). I was very relieved to be done, though I hadn't really minded the wiping all that much as I was still learning the mechanics myself.

And that finally concludes my LFR exploration for now! The current patch's raid hasn't fully unlocked in LFR yet, but more importantly I haven't even been to Zereth Mortis at all, so my gear is probably way below the raid's requirements and I'd have no context for what's happening in there. The husband and I have been too busy focusing on SWTOR recently to play retail WoW, but seeing how the next expansion (to be announced tomorrow!) is likely to still be many months away, we should have plenty of time to check out Shadowlands' last content patch before it becomes obsolete.

Sanctum of Domination LFR, Part 1

In my last post about Shadowlands LFR, I said that I'd spent about one and a half hours queueing for the first wing of Sanctum of Domination on a Sunday but gave up on it when the eventual attempt to form the group failed due to too many AFKers. On the following Friday, I spent another half hour queueing before giving up again, as I didn't feel like spending all afternoon waiting around.

The next Sunday morning I got lucky with a quick pop while I was checking on my mission table as usual. I liked that the first two bosses of Sanctum's first wing were both enemies that I'd actually encountered as a solo player before instead of random baddies. I also liked that the Terragrue, very appropriately, lived in a section that looked like a Torghast wing and involved anima powers. Also true to the Torghast experience, I got punted off a ramp to my death while we were clearing trash. On running back, I nearly ran straight into the Terragrue itself but managed to stop myself just in time. It was only then that I realised that the group wasn't actually going straight for the boss but rather doing a lap around the platform first, presumably to gather all the anima powers from trash.

Despite of having read the correct dungeon journal entries in advance this time, I was still a bit confused about what was going on at the start, and so were a lot of people from the looks of it, as nearly half the raid died early on. Once things had stabilised we managed to make it through the rest of the fight without any further issues though.

The Eye of the Jailer was fun with its "dodge the beam by swinging around on chains" mechanic, because that sure hadn't been in the in-game adventure guide! Fortunately it was very obvious what was going on though, and it was easy enough to keep up by simply following the more experienced players' lead.

The fight with the val'kyr was the most confusing, with a lot of deaths, and at one point I thought that we were going to wipe for sure as everyone's health kept going down while the boss was hardly taking any damage and people were typing "move her, move her" into chat - apparently the tank had positioned the boss in a bad place for a prolonged period of time. Somehow we still prevailed in the end, and I saw lots of people get the achievement for completing the wing for the first time, so I evidently wasn't the only noob. The only annoying thing was that I had died close to the end, because every time I had previously tried to revive other people after a boss fight, I had been too slow as someone else had done it faster, but naturally the one time I died, nobody else bothered to revive anyone and we all had to run back.

Also, this is as good a time as any to mention the "LFR pet peeve" I'm developing already. There is some sort of toy that turns players into random dungeon/raid bosses and makes them spout voice lines from those fights, and I've decided that this is the modern equivalent of the bloody train set from Wrath, because you just can't get them to shut up and it gets extremely annoying after a while when a lot of people in the raid do it. It was particularly noticeable for me in the val'kyr fight because I was trying to listen to the voice lines of the actual bosses we were fighting for relevant cues, so having these random shouts from old bosses come at me from three different directions was super aggravating.

I did not immediately queue for the next wing after that because there was something else I wanted to do, but I did come back to it a bit later and thought I was lucky when I once again got a pop within only a couple of minutes. Of course, then I loaded into the second wing with one boss already dead, and this time I decided that I wasn't going to waste time on half a wing just to then have to re-queue for the missing boss afterwards, so I just dropped group and ate the deserter debuff. Better to do something else for half an hour than to deal with more avoidable queueing.

When I logged back in after the debuff had run out, I re-queued and had to once again wait for over an hour for things to get going. I used this time to get the last few skill points in Cataclysm cooking and fishing, and also levelled my Burning Crusade fishing a bit. Just as I was once again starting to get a bit bored of the whole thing and went to put some lunch into the microwave, the queue popped. My husband teased me that I should've just done that sooner, because obviously queues only ever pop if you go to get some food, visit the bathroom or whatever. Fortunately I didn't actually miss the pop in this instance; I just had to ask my husband to please get the food out of the microwave for me.

I died again on the first boss in wing two, Soulrender Dormazain, and was once again somewhat annoyed that reading the in-game adventure guide hadn't really prepared me for what was happening, as I was one of many running around like a headless chicken while the boss did some sort of AoE, not sure whether I was supposed to just heal through it or what. It was only after I lay dead on the floor and had a chance to observe what was happening from a less frantic position that I realised that there was a pattern to the AoE that you were supposed to avoid. But hey, at least spending most of the fight dead on the floor gave me a chance to actually eat my lunch.

There was a cut scene at the end of the fight which I watched, and when it ended a lot of people had already moved on towards the next boss. A few others were behind like me though, so I still had someone whose lead to follow, but as we ran, some random damage attacks kept flying through the air and nearly killed us. They seemed to originate from the trash pull the rest of the group was fighting at a distance and whose attacks appeared to have an insane range... when we finally reached them, I did die from the damage.

Remnant of Ner'zhul seemed more straightforward to heal, and I was pleased that I never fell off the platform. Now Painsmith Raznal, the last boss of the wing, was something else. Some people commented on how the whole LFR experience was harder than mythic now, and that back when this content was current people were actually able to complete it much faster than now, even though we were ostensibly way overgeared for it. At least the tanks seemed to make a good effort at communicating what needed doing.

Then the fight started and it was mayhem! My husband was once again amused at my various exclamations of dismay as I found myself having to dodge spiky balls, spikes coming from the ground, and then both at once. Also, the boss had this one move where he throws his giant mace at one of the tanks, and I just couldn't get over how ridiculous it looked to watch that oversized weapon fly towards the draenei in the corner and then bounce off his head with a light "plonk" sound. This was without a doubt the most intense LFR fight I'd done up to that point, but I would say it was also the most fun - because while it was intense, it was at least very obvious what was going on and what needed doing, which definitely hasn't been the case for all the previous fights I'd experienced this way.

For the next queue break I decided to test the limits of Blizzard's AFK tolerance and put myself in the queue before going away from my computer to do some exercise. When I came back half an hour later I was pleased to see that I hadn't been logged out, but then dismayed to see the that the UI claimed that after over half an hour in the queue, I was supposedly still the only person in the entirety of Europe wanting to do Sanctum wing three on a Sunday. I mean, what? I disconnected and reconnected just in case it had bugged out. After a while it looked much better again, with multiple damage dealers and healers showing up alongside me, but then it temporarily reverted to just me again. Definitely an odd thing to observe! I waited for another hour and fifteen minutes after that, but after a total time of two hours in the queue for wing three alone, I gave up again as it became too boring. To be continued I guess.