GDKP

I think everyone knows what GDKP runs are these days; if not, the quick version is that when loot drops, you bid gold on what you want, high bidder wins, and at the end all the gold spent is divvied out in equal shares to the raiders. Guilds often run GDKP raids for their raiders’ alts as well as a few pugged potential buyers.

Tuesday after the ICC zone buff was raised to 10%, one of the officers of our guild announced they’d be doing a GDKP run of ICC this Saturday. I immediately went to town, clearing out my bank vaults and doing some serious auctioneering. With six 80s between us, Reversion and I have most of the professions covered and mine are especially lucrative; jewelcrafting, enchanting, tailoring, and my pally tank has a glyph business that has been netting us a few hundred gold a week. Basically, Tuesday my mage, who is our auctioneer and has all Reversion’s and my money, had about 14k gold; Saturday we had 32k. I sold a couple primordial saronite from frost badges that my alts had collected but mostly it was bank leftovers, bags, and gems. Also a weird quirk on my server has runed orbs selling for more than 4 times the cost of frozen orbs and I took advantage of that.

Anyway, Saturday rolls around; the raid leader asks Reversion to bring his hunter instead of the druid, which he’s happy to do, and I get an ok to come on Analogue. This will be the first time we’ve actually gotten past Marrowgar on 25 man ICC and I’m looking forward to it immensely. An hour before it’s time to go we hear a horrible thumping and crashing from the garage. We go out and find our washer has walked off the pedestal, fallen on its face, ripped pipes out of the wall and there’s water going everywhere.

Great. The joys of home ownership.

We shut off the water, move the boxes off the floor, start hacking at pipes. Reversion assesses our tools and gear and we make a quick run to Home Depot. Five minutes before raid time, we’ve got a fix that lets us have cold running water, the washer is on its feet and given a tentative “maybe it’s ok” verdict, and we decide to raid.

Marrowgar gets one shot and a pair of caster leather gloves drop, which I buy even though it breaks my Tier 10 2 set bonus; they were just too nice to pass up. Deathwhisper takes two attempts and some nice hunter pants drop for Reversion’s hunter Approximate; we both got lucky and got these pieces cheap as my competitor druid was afk during bidding, and Approximate was the only hunter around.

Then Gunship, and I’m holding my breath the whole time and then it drops: the Abacus, the trinket I’ve been wanting since I first heard of it. The bidding war is fierce but once it gets past 3k gold it’s down to just me and a holy priest; we bid it up to 4.9k before he drops out and lets me have it, telling me privately that if Trauma drops off Rotface he’s not giving up so easily. I tell him it’s on and don’t tell him that I still have close to 20k if Trauma drops and man do I want that mace.

Saurfang gets one-shot. So far the fight that I’ve found the most different on 25 versus 10 man is Deathwhisper; the mind control and the sheer number of adds made that one interesting. Most of the fights are actually easier for me as a healer, since I can concentrate on raid healing and just spam Rejuvs and WG everywhere.

We head to Rotface first. It takes two tries, and the second time we succeed even though one of the pugged guys does not take his small ooze out of the raid – someone managed to pull it out after two minutes. That’s the first time I’ve seen that fight and I enjoyed it even though I ended up dying twice on the second attempt – bad luck with slime puddles.

Trauma, of course, does not drop. Argh. I’d been setting myself up all week but I guess when I’d already got the Abacus I couldn’t be too greedy.

Then we go to Festergut and we wipe and wipe and wipe, mostly by hitting the enrage timer. I end up pulling out my mage, we swap out the worst dps (the aforementioned pugged warrior who didn’t move his slime) and finally – finally – get him down, after a heartbreaker attempt where the last one of us died a nanosecond before he did.

Why am I writing all this up? Because I wanted to emphasize how awesome GDKP runs are for people who have skills, ok gear, and not enough time to commit to a real raid schedule, or just don’t want that pressure regularly. If it had been a “real” guild raid some of the wipes would have been… unpleasant, but because everyone there was a customer as well as a raider, the raid leaders had to put up with a bit of idiocy. The idiots’ gold is just as good as anyone else’s.

It takes gold to make gold of course, but at 80 the gold comes rolling in with minimal effort. Dailies, or auctioneering, or a good profession, add up fast. I’ve never ever bought gold, but I have four characters with dual spec, three with epic Northrend flying, crafted gear, and been a high roller on two GDKP runs in the last four months. And I have a trinket that I’d have given my eye teeth for, a fun afternoon of content that for me was progression, and an achievement in my log.

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Trust

Sometimes it’s easy to forget you’re playing with other people in WoW. Other times the game forces you to acknowledge that for some challenges, you have to be part of a group that’s bigger than just the players involved.

This week the weekly raid quest on our server was Lord Marrowgar. I don’t know about your server but on ours that means the chance of getting a good ICC run actually goes down. The guild runs multiple 10-man-alt runs and there are still folks left out.  Trade is full of angst and vitriol.  Our raid had all the makings of fail; instead we ended up with moments of sheer epic…

After the two scheduled guild alt groups filled up there were enough guildies left over that we started a scrub/alt/pug raid. We needed to fill three slots; two melee dps and a tank healer. The melee dps were easy to pull out of trade, got a paladin and a rogue to help balance out roles. The healer was tougher and after ten minutes I was willing to take the holy priest. It wasn’t til we got to ICC that I started worrying. The off tank, a guildie, was somewhat undergeared, and so was the tank healer. Both of them had slots that still didn’t have Triumph badge gear level items.  Still, we decided we’d start and see how things went.

Trash pulls went smoothly, no wipes. Got to Marrowgar, ran down the strategy, and we started. The off-tank went down. I b-rezzed him. Then he went down again. Bonestorm started, and Reversion popped out of bear to b-rez the OT and help heal the raid (he always throws rejuvs around during bonestorm, just because he can). Start back again – and the OT goes down for the third time. We’re out of druids, Marrowgar is at 50% – but everyone else is still up and taking very little damage, so I start fully healing Reversion. Every now and then I have to throw out rejuvs and wild growth for the raid, but we’re mostly stacked under Marrowgar so we don’t take a lot of fire damage, the dps are being great about taking down the spikes – and we’re doing it. Reversion blew every cooldown, potion, trinket he had, and Marrowgar went down. Nothing like having a tank with 48k health to eat those big hits.

I made sure to compliment all the dps-ers for their attentiveness. If they had taken damage, I would not have been able to help out with tank healing, and we would have wiped. Instead we one-shotted him. (I also will add, the pugged paladin judged Light consistently and it healed the raid up a good little bit, actually accounting for 10% of total healing during our whole run according to Recount; that was a nice buffer)

We went on to Deathwhisper. I dropped to the first set of adds; Reversion got me back up and although I was hurting for mana, I got back into the groove. We ended that fight with four of us alive; the priest went down thirty seconds before the end of the fight, the OT had died minutes before, but I saw the 4% health on Deathwhisper and threw everything I could to keep Reversion and the last dps alive long enough to take her down.

The pug broke up on Saurfang because people had to get off, but it was great.

So, after that long discussion, why the title of my post? Why ‘Trust’?

Because I didn’t, and wasn’t. I did not trust my healing partner and it hurt us. Some of the dps deaths to trash and to Deathwhisper were because I was dropping Nourish on the tanks and ignoring my own responsibilities. Usually in 10 mans I heal with a guildie, someone who I think is probably a better healer than me.  Our pugged healer was great, but I saw her gear and achievements and doubted. I couldn’t help it; I’m the sort who worries a lot over things I can’t control. I do that in real life too, but it’s not as obvious.  I don’t have fun with my mage any more in WoW for the same reason, because I see health bars and start wanting to fix them. My pally tank keeps trying to save the day in 5mans with Lay on Hands or Hand of Sacrifice on the healer.

It makes me a more conscientious healer most of the time, when I can force myself to let the other healer do her job and just do mine, but on raids like this last one, it can wipe us.  And I don’t know how to stop worrying about their jobs. It’s not easy for me.

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