How Blizzcon Wiped My Raid

This past weekend I decided I would make the 2000+ mile journey to Anaheim in October and nerd-out with a great friend of mine and thousands of other people at Blizzcon. I've never been to CA before; my friend moved out there a couple years ago, and I have been wanting to visit. So yesterday, I spent all day trying to get a ticket. It was awful. While I've never tried in years past to actually get a ticket, I can't imagine it could have possibly worse than Blizzard's huge bag of fail this year.

The online store opened with tickets at around 8:00 am central time. From the very beginning, the site was plauged with errors. It was a nightmare just to log into the store. Eventually, I got in and started feeling pretty good entering my character info only to slam into another wall of random murloc error pages. After hitting refresh three or four hundred times, I would finally make it all the way to payment selection only for the site to crash completely, sending me all the way back to the beginning. Ugh.

This went on until almost midnight, when Blizzard annnounced they were closing the store until the start of business next day. While I'm glad I didn't have to stay up all night, I'm frustrated to still be ticketless after 24 hours. My friend, however, had a moment of luck and actually got his somehow, just minutes before the store site went down for the final time last night. As an unexpected side-affect, doing so also happened to wipe my raid.

I was in SSC at the time on Leo. The normal MT had stepped out because we were tank-heavy (as usual), and I was the primary tank picking Leo up in human form. It was actually going pretty well considering we've only downed him once before. We kept getting him right to his split phase when things would fall apart. Everyone had gotten a pretty good handle on transitions, but people were still dying to inner demon and whirlwind. On one particular try, we were doing extremely well. Everything was going abnormally smoothly - he even seemed to be coming straight back to me at the end of each whirlwind, making it way too easy to pick him back up. Then, my phone rang from across the room.

I knew what that meant - it would be my friend alerting me that the store was up again for tickets. I looked over at my laptop on my desk which had been auto-refreshing the store page for the past three hours. Sure enough, one of the windows was showing the store front instead of the SCV Maintenance page. An AIM window poppped up "DUDE I GOT MY TICKETZ!" I hit a fresh shield block/shield slam and quickly typed back, "boss fight." I couldn't believe it - after waiting all day, this had to happen during the one time in weeks that I'm actually MT'ing something, and we were just over halfway through the fight. My mind quickly tried to figure out how I could somehow login to the store while still taking care of Leo. I knew I had plenty of time during demon form as long as I didn't get inner demon. I could totally buy the tickets during that phase! Suddenly I tuned back into vent. "Warlock doesn't have him. Demon form - why doesn't the warlock have him? Why is V still tanking??"

In the chaos, I hadn't even noticed that demon form happened, and I just kept right on going with maximum threat. I stopped attacking and glanced down at Omen. It was too late - I had completely left the warlock in the dust. A rogue was killed by the AoE on me. I backed away from Leo and hit last stand and shield wall. Amazingly, the warlock pulled him back after about 10 seconds. We moved on all the way down to 15% for the split. That's when the warlock died. I held on to Leo while two other tanks bought some time tanking the demon until they went down. Then, he came after me. I didn't last long, and we wiped at 9%.

While my mistake may not have immediately and directly caused the wipe, it definitely wasted my two biggest emergency buttons when they may have helped me last just long enough in the end to finish the fight. If anything, I at least threw off our groove mid-fight, and I felt pretty badly about it. We never did get him down. At least we did manage to take out Karathress, where I got my T5 legs. I definitely luck'd out and all 3 tokens were priest/warrior/druid.

As a sidenote, it was incredibly fun tanking a boss again, even one with very annoying threat transitions (something about beggars not choosers...). It makes me even more hesitant to abandon my tank for WotLK. Then again, the only reason I had the chance was that the MT basically didn't feel like it and wasn't needed. Do I really want to go into 25-mans as a spare tank for the leftover bosses? Not really.

So yeah, I'm still putting my mage down as my main character for all the Blizzcon stuff.