Mechanar Marathon

Over the past few days, I've been in and out of Mechanar, and have... tales... of my adventures to share.

Round one: Regular Mechanar
Tuesday morning, right after the servers came up. Regular Mechanar was the instance daily of the day, so I was able to get in right away, and as a kitty even. The hunter in the group was in a battleground, and we decided to go in without him. We do all right four-manning it, getting to the top of the stairs leading down to the first boss's room, and he finally asks for a summon. All righty. We go out and summon him, come back and keep pulling, him with us. We get to the first boss, and he stands there, looking at the boss, then poses the question - "Whos tank?". We stop and stare at him. [ The group is composed of my mage, a prot pally, a DPS warrior, him, and a healer of some sort. ] Apparently he couldn't tell that the shiny tin-head with the shield rather than the two-hander was the tank that had been keeping the mobs from smushing his face... but we get the boss down well enough.

And then the servers went down. Stupid Blizzard.

Rounds Two and Three: Regular Mechanar yet again, and Heroic Mechanar as well.
I am just sitting around Netherstorm in Looking For Group: Mechanar, just waiting for something to happen. (Was probably mainly paying attention to BAChatroom, I think.) Someone random invites me, and I auto decline -- if I don't know where you want me to go with you to, I'm not going. Policy, really. Keeps things uncomplicated, and then (especially on characters such as Losse and Kanta), there won't be a collision of jobs. A few seconds later, he invites me again. And again I decline, and put up a note: Ask before invites. A couple of minutes later, I get a whisper from the same person: "Mechanar?" Smart cookie. He finally read my note.

We get the group gathered (consisting of an elemental shaman (an acquaintance of mine on his shaman -- said acquaintance has five seventies, I believe), my mage, the warrior leader, and an a duo that came together: a hunter and a holy paladin) and go in.

The first couple of pulls are fine... until we get to the stairs. That always seems to be a bad spot for some reason... We had skipped the group between the first gate-keeper and the stairs. Normally, everyone knows to hug the left.

Not the hunter. He gets and stands too close to that group. And we wipe. Gee, good going, genius. We get back and buff, then pull care of the three at the bottom of the stairs... and guess where he stands? Let us just say that we made a few friends from the group on the other side of said stairs. Oh. Did I mention that after the wipe from the first one (the second big oops of his we recovered from), he hearthed back to grab something (we later found out it was his "lucky rabbit's foot, which he thought he should grab after the wipe"). Yes, you read it right. Lucky rabbit's foot. So that was five minutes of wasted time...

First boss down all right, and, as the only enchantress, I greeded and sharded it. The hunter rolls, followed by his paladin friend, and, after a bit, our tank. I tell them that we'll wait to roll at the end, so it's fair -- usual loot rules and all, so it doesn't throw me off -- and I move up the stairs and wait for them to show up so we could keep pulling. I look at the mini-map and neither the hunter nor the paladin have moved. Reading the party chat, I find that he -really- wants the shard -now-, or he'll leave. I told him that I'm keeping the shard until the end, and that it wouldn't kill him to wait until then. His roll could count if he really wanted it to.

And he left.

So did the paladin friend.

And left the tank rather disgruntled with me, and the shaman and I exchanging looks. It was quite a childish reason to leave, really, but hey. As they really pushed the matter, what were we to say? -shrugs- We got another elemental shaman, and a shadow priest to replace them, with the shadow priest healing (he was all right with it, and our group was well geared enough that it didn't really matter) and finished without too much trouble.

Then we swapped out the second elemental shaman with a holy paladin, and let the shadow priest do his job as we tackled it on Heroic, which didn't turn out too badly either (other than the fact that it was getting to two in the morning and all of my buttons looked shinier than normal, and threat meant absolutely nothing to my mind). So a decent end to the whole business, I suppose.

Round Four: Heroic Mechanar.
Dying a lot makes me grouchy. Plain and simple. This time around, I was on my druid. I got an invitation to Heroic Mechanar as a kitty -- something fairly rare, so I jumped at it, even though I really had little desire to go.

Zoom forward to where we're standing in the foyer, buffing, and I get DC'd. Great. Just great. I get back on, and find that Losse is eating the floor. Er... tasty? Sometimes, but as I cast my eye around the instance and at the group... not so much. Not a mob is dead, and the whole group has every single buff that they had before I DC'd. "Erm... hey, guys? What happened?"

"You got too close."

I look back at my corpse (I was being rez'ed), and see that I am about four steps away from the back wall. In Mechanar, you go about fifteen or so before you come in range to be able to moonfire pull something. Hrm. Too close? How very curious...

Brushing this off, I go ahead and stay with them, hopping in cat. We had a hunter that was decked out in ZA gear, and, even though I know I'm good DPS, there was no way I could beat him, being so outgeared. So I settled for second... 10% of damage behind him... and left at the very end disgruntled with a bigger repair bill than I normally get in Karazhan (having died multiple times between that first death and the last boss, including the times when the paladin didn't seem to be interested in healing me, and I stayed at 3% for more than acceptable before I went up to pop heals on myself (and his heals came in after my hots slowly popped me up to 50%)).

The first boss, by the way, the melee group, apparently, because the whole time I ended up with the opposite polarity of the tank, and had to go to the back and moonfire/wrath him to death... in cat gear (most efficient, I assure you).

Oh. and one last thing. People either need to read Phae's Resurection Sickness To Resurrection Fitness post or just understand that the smartest rez'ing order does not go Warrior > Warlock > Hunter > Druid. Said paladin healer did not get a Paw from me until he asked for it, and even then I was very irked to give it to him -- if he really wanted a Mark of the Wild buff, he really, really ought to remember that I need mana for buffing. And I could help him heal everyone else to full... Save the buffer for last. Yeah, that's the way to go.