You can't open the book of my life and jump in the middle

A little background: The Guild I'm in (CNN HEADLINE NEWBS) is an EXTREMELY casaul guild made up of people who, for the most part, work in the various IT departments at the University of Vermont. We have about 16 people who have level 70 characters at this point. Really the only thing we do as a group on a regular basis is the Arenas... And that's every Monday night. Most of the time we'll just PvP on our own or if a bunch of people are on, we'll do an instance. I've become the de facto raid leader for our Karazhan runs and really the ONLY tank for anything else but ever since the sun started coming out again (a novelty in Vermont) we've been having fewer and fewer people on. I still offer to organize a Karazhan run if people are on and interested but the response lately has been lukewarm at best.

Last night was one of our "Alts and Newbs" Karazhan nights, but only 6 people were actually on. While it's disappointing that we couldn't get a Karazhan run going for the third straight week, the people who _were_ on wanted to do something. So we decided to do a heroic... And the daily was Steam Vaults. The problem was that of the people who wanted to go, we had two characters with the gear for something like that (Me on my feral druid and our totally awesome resto druid) and three were not (a holy paladin, another feral druid and a shadow priest - the guy playing the druid has a priest who has the gear but that would have given us 3 healers... We needs something that could do some damage). So we ran with two healers, no CC and limited DPS.

Nights like that can be very frustrating. We struggled with any of the naga pulls that had a healer in them. We just couldn't get them down fast enough and we'd run out of stuns. But you can also take it as a learning experience. Instead of having the other feral druid off tank an add, I took all 4 and he concentrated on saving energy to use maim to interrupt every heal. We still wiped a couple of times when the sirens feared at the wrong time but we got better. We also learned that if you draw aggro you should run at the tank instead of backing away from the mob on you and into a mob that we skipped because it was so mean or... If you're a superfluous healer and you're _going_ to back away from the tank, you should do so along the path we've already cleared - because while that strategy will get _you_ killed, it won't wipe the party.

Having a sub-optimal group composition also forces us to consider alternate strategies. We had the newly minted 70 holy paladin strap on "tanking" gear and consecrate the gnomes before the second boss. On the second boss, the strategy is usually to burn down the adds as they come out. We tried that the first attempt but we hit an enrage timer because we didn't do enough damage to the boss. Plus the paladin went out of mana from spamming Consecrate. So. We had the paladin just spam rank one consecrate to keep the gnomes in combat and not healing (or repairing in this case) the boss. The other feral druid ran around in bear form and tried to swipe as many of the gnomes as he could while the shadow priest and I stayed mostly on the boss. When we got about 10 gnomes out, the resto druid topped everyone off, dropped a hurricaine. That burned down almost all of the gnomes and we got a nice breather. We downed the boss and then took out the adds. Improvisation... Learning to use all of your skills in different situations... It made all the wipes worth it (well... That and the resto druid picked up the stamina enchant for bracers... That's always a good thing). We'll be a stronger group if we ever do get a Karazhan run together.

Ultimately, we didn't have enough DPS to burn down the tanks on the end boss and we were all getting tired so we called it after 3 attempts (two of the people in the party had never even done the instance in regular mode so the first wipe was inevitable). Man... That guy hits hard when he enrages on heroic. I can survive one enrage but not the second.

On an unrelated note, I was pleased to find out that the hunter spell Scare Beast is not instant cast in the latest patch. That would really have messed with me in the battlegrounds.