Over the weekend I was able to jump into a couple of expert runs in Rift. For those of you who are unaware, expert dungeons are equivalent to heroics in WoW. Prior to getting to max level, I had heard a lot of horror stories of four hour runs and endless wipes. To be quite frank I was a bit hesitant to run one.
As some of you may have read, I diagnosed some of these wipe fests by just listening to the mumble chatter. Far be it for me to brag but I was right. Nearly everything I thought was going wrong was indeed going wrong. All of my suspicions were proved correct by talking to a number of the guild members who were running in those experts.
Needless to say, all of this negative chatter has begun to have an affect on some of the members of the guild. One of the most glaring examples was revealed on Saturday. As we were gathering the needed people for a five man run, one of our members declined by stating that he did not have four hours to invest in a single run. I bravely declared that this run would not be like his previous attempts, he still declined.
As we prepared for the run, we changed channels in the voice server. Oddly Mr. Negative moved to our channel as well. Soon after changing channels, Mr. Negative sent me a whisper telling me why he didn’t want to run with us. He claimed the tank was weak and someone else’s DPS was suspect. I didn’t even respond. I knew why his previous runs sucked and I also knew that I could combat those reasons.
Prior to the first pull I started dealing with the poor raid etiquette. I asked the tank to give us a mark on his primary target and was told that “we haven’t used marks before.” I insisted. I also insisted on the proper use of crowd control. We also gave brief fight descriptions and shied away from letting two or more people suggest fight strategies. As we moved thought the content we morphed from five individuals into a team.
As we fought on, Mr. Negative spoke up in the voice server. He said he was expecting more chatter. What he really expected was us to be like his other runs; whining, frustrated and overwhelmed by content and suggestions. We were none of those things. Mr. Negative was expecting a show, no a re-run of something he had already experienced. I am glad to say we didn’t give it to him.
Mr. Negative’s prediction of a four hour run almost came to fruition. He was timing us you see, just so he could prove his point. Unfortunately for him it took us nearly four hours (3.5 but who is counting) to complete TWO expert runs. Okay, Okay. It wasn’t two complete runs. The server mysteriously went down on the final boss in the second instance. If we were to measure the night based on Mr. Negative’s yardstick, we kicked ass. This is how we do it where I’m from.
