I got some unexpected free time last night so I fired up WoW. I haven't logged in for a few days, and haven't played seriously in over a week. I've been very busy, and in a way, kind of burned out from WoW. I've tried to stay away from the Computer in general when I'm home. Usually I'm on my iPad watching The West Wing ( just discovered this awesome series) or Farscape ( also just discovered, also good).
Fired up WoW and went through the long process of updating to patch 4.1. It didn't take near as long as I was expecting. While the Launcher patched up WoW, I was on curse client updating as many addons as available. Curse Client makes this so much easier, even the free version. Even with about a dozen addons updated, most of my main addons were out of date. I bit the bullet and had WoW load them anyway. I disabled some of the more likely-to-be-broken ones, such as xperl. Fortunately Healbot was working ok, which allowed me to try one of the new 5-mans.
I queued up and it popped almost instantly into Zul'Gurub. I'd never actually done the raid before, so everything was new to me. We got to the first boss High Priestes Venoxis.
The fight is pretty tough, especially with a PUG. 2 players are "linked" and have to run away from each other, as well as everyone else. After a few seconds an AOE explosion happens, if the linked players are still close enough for the AOEs to overlap, they're insta-dead. Then there's a maze of green slime on the ground that has to be avoided at all costs, and thats just phase 1. Phase 2, he turns into a snake and does a spit attack, and then something called Bloodvenom. Basically a whole lot of green is sprayed everywhere and you have to make sure it doesn't hit you, and you don't hit the maze. Rinse and repeat.
The PUG I was in was doing ok, learning as we were going. The problem was that after about 2 wipes one person would drop, which means a new person popped up, and it would take them another 2-3 wipes to get up to speed. By then another person would drop, and eventually we couldn't get anywhere because people weren't staying long enough to learn the damn fight.
I'd never had that kind of experience in DF before. Usually people would drop on the first wipe or just stay and finish. Eventually after about a dozen wipes, 3 tanks, and countless DPS I dropped group as well. It just wasn't worth it anymore. Maybe next time I'll try a guild group first.