Druids, Raids, and Spellblades

Raids. Ah, wonderful things. Really.

Lets backtrack a bit. A while back, I told my raid leader that I won't be able to make most of their raid times due to school and work. He accepted that, and replaced me with a darn good druid I've grouped with before. That part was all right. Skipping forward to Tuesday night...

"Hey, is Kara going on tonight?"
"Yes. Want to bring your mage?" [ It is my druid that goes with this raid. ]
"The mage goes with GWX-1."
"Right."
"But I could bring Losse."
"Your replacement is here this week, and we don't need any healers."
"Okay..."
[ The conversation continues as I log to my hunter, also in the guild. ]
"What kind of DPS do you need?"
"Not a hunter. Or a rogue."
"Losse isn't either, and she could backup heal."
">.< I'm a druid."
"I'm sorry."
I didn't respond.

Forwarding on. Wednesday night came rolling around. My mage's raid. Normally we're down to looking for one melee DPS, and the two weeks before that I had been able to supply one. This week, I came up with a mage friend of mine. I offered to bring Losse instead, so they would gain a mage and a melee DPS. (Yes, I suppose that not going with the guild paid off. That, and "karma" came and bit Vese, the co-guild leader, because something -- I don't recall what -- from the Prince dropped that Sol, our guild leader wanted and the shadow priest outrolled him for it). They took it, and we went. Things went fine, more or less. A few deaths here and there, but nothing noteworthy (nor stuff I recall a week and a half later, rewriting this part of the blog for the third time... I have yet to figure out Blogger all of the way, and this post seems to give it a lot of trouble).

So we get to right outside of the Opera Stage. The sets of guards out there were being tanked by our warrior MT, and OT'd by the raid's normal feral druid. The MT gets frozen, and, instead of the OT getting aggro, the rogue and I did. The rogue, being just that, did his fancy move that got rid of aggro, and it came to eat my face. I hopped into bear form to absorb the damage, and started to maul away with an occasional mangle to continue my damage while waiting for the OT to pull him off of me and making it easier for the healers to keep me up. I ended up tanking that one until it died.

After that pull, he mentions, "bear form and mangle creates aggro".
"As a druid, I know that. Bear form allowed it to die, instead of me dying. And it's easier on the healers."
The others chimed in with, "it's always the DPS's fault if they get aggro".
I had absolutely nothing to say to them either, except, "I wouldn't be able to pull aggro if he had Omen so I knew when I was close to passing him."

This was true. The OT didn't have a threat meter. Heck. The MT didn't either until we brought it up one day and convinced him to do it. Why the OT didn't is beyond me. Also, I waited four seconds for the tanks to get aggro before I started attacking, and that is normally ample time for them to get more hate than me shredding their back ever gains in that amount of time. Oh, sure, it is the DPS's job to watch their aggro, but I would also like to mention that it is the tank's fault if he doesn't generate enough aggro (how he doesn't is beyond me. I had a DPS reach seven hundred threat per second or so (far greater than what I was causing as a cat, I would guess) and he couldn't pull aggro off of me, and yet...)

The raid leader (also the MT) told us to stop, and we continued on getting Opera (yay. First time in at least a month that we -haven't- gotten Romulo and Julianne! (Wizard of Oz).) and slowly made our way up to Prince without too many more difficulties. (At least, none I care to recall). We got him down, and [Nathrezim Mindblade] dropped.

My mage friend is practically jumping around, excited. The other caster, a warlock, already had it, so it seemed like she would get it.

Our loot is what I call the "three tier system". Everyone gets lumped into a role -- DPS, tanking, caster, healing. The people in those roles get priority in rolling. That's tier one. Counts for your epic of the night.

Open roll -- anyone can roll of they can use it. Tier two. Counts as the epic of the night as well.

Trash roll -- last roll before shards. Doesn't count as an epic for the night. This is where you roll if you got something earlier as well. Anyone can roll for any reason -- roleplaying and the like (as Feathermoon is a roleplaying server).

So my friend already wasted his priority roll, so he had to wait for the trash roll. No one rolled under priority or open, so it was down to the trash roll. He rolled.

Then the feral druid off tank rolled.

And he beat him.

So. The feral druid that was a perm. off-tank got the blade.

Left me and my friend upset. Thankfully, that was the last kill of the night, and we both left. I mentioned to the raid leader (and our hunter, who was in the chat with us), that I found it ridiculous. He agreed, and the hunter did too. However, he also mentioned that he was irked that my friend wanted two epics from the raid.

...

-blink- He's a feral druid. He's a mage. Isn't it common sense that casters should have priority on caster gear no matter what? I guess not.

He has put the druid on ignore. I can't, as I raid with him, but I wish I could. It was quite a jerkish move.

Did I mention that I loved raiding?