EDIT: This post at Slash Two made me laugh today, and reminded me of the helpful chap mentioned below.
Last night I had a number of “firsts” and other remarkable events.
Please wait …
Queuing for RFC (actually for a random, but it was always going to be RFC) last night took *ages*. Now that’s fair enough, but this made no sense. We already *had* a tank. We already *had* a healer. We even had a dps. But nothing, zip, nada. No-one in LFG was interested in us. None of the Singles were up for joining us — too high level, too low level, already busy elsewhere. So we sat and, being in SAN, wittered away in guildchat with all the other fine folks, and waited. And waited. I swear it must have taken close to an hour before we finally got in for a run, which then proceeded to be a total cakewalk (thanks largely to Hurtado, who was sufficiently indestructible that I spent as almost as much time whacking mobs as I did healing). And whilst one member of the group dropped after Taragaman, the rest of us hoovered up XP from the remaining trash and minibosses.
Deadmines
Fresh from RFC we requeued and were ported fairly quickly into Deadmines. I was a bit of a passenger on this run — I zoned in as DPS rather than healer and was most definitely bottom of the meters for damage. I’d like to think that I was still useful, as I switched to healing periodically when our priest healer went OOM or the overexuberance of the other DPS meant we had a chunky pile of adds to deal with. There *was* a little minor drama over loot, but no-one got too excited and we cleared all the way to the end, again gaining levels (Ano, as I clearly should have named her, is now level 18!).
All growed up
I finally ran my first raid, or at least the weekly raid quest portion of one, and received the achievement Besting the Black Dragonflight for beating Sartharion. “Only” a 10-man raid, sure, but still. They say you always remember your first. It certainly makes me keen to do more — albeit with a few structural changes…
While there were quite a few of my guildies there, the raid was led by a couple of clearly more experienced players (edit: who weren’t from our guild, I should make clear). Unfortunately no-one felt the need to respond when I admitted my noobishness at the start and asked for tacs/tips, so I just wandered about hitting whatever the tanks seemed to be hitting and not really having a clue — does that still count as “raiding”?
Thanks to a “this is too slow, hurry up” vibe bouncing through raid chat I didn’t have time to find tactics to read on my second screen — we had one member of the raid stranded somewhere because we couldn’t stop to summon him. This meant I didn’t have a clue what was going on when the drakes were creating portals and the like. I guess I probably should have been looking around more but there was also complaints about the group dps (from our somewhat irritating experienced leaders) so I was too focused on my rotation and didn’t realise what was going on. Yes, ok. I’m a bit thick. Plus I think I may have been the only melee so I was always alone apart from pets. But mostlyI’m a bit thick.
This continued to Sarth himself, where to another question about tactics I received the detailed response “look out for the flame walls”. Which I did. I saw them. I saw no way through them (der, clearly wasn’t watching that carefully then). So I carried on regardless. Yay me, I’m *that* dps 
. Healers, start your battlewagons.
In the end though, no-one (except the bosses) died, various people who weren’t me got loot, and everyone got a small stack of badges. So it was ok, really.
Except…
…that I couldn’t help but reply to our helpful leader when “Did you all just turn 80 today or something, lol” (or thereabouts) was broadcast in raidchat.
“Why? Is there a problem?” I asked. “Too slow and not enough dps” was the answer. *grrrr*
And so the final part of my growing up came to pass. As my guildies were standing round, wondering in /g why our peerless leader was such an aggressive jerk, I thought I’d find out. I whispered a question to our long-since dropped group hero, asking why he couldn’t have offered some advice or suggestions instead of just repeating “not good enough, do better”, reminding him that I had specifically mentioned that I was a first-time raider and was keen for any tips. His response:
“Sure, I’ve got a tip: Learn2Play”.
