Originally posted on my GuildPortal Blog on May 29, 2013: http://www.guildportal.com/Me/540050797/span/2013/5
Over the past few weeks (the past four to be specific), the Crypt Crawlers have run a raid on Saturday night: The Reaver’s Fate, Tempest Spine, The Chronoscope, and the Shroud. For the most part the raids have gone well, except for last weekend’s run of the Shroud…
Leave it to the Shroud to mess things up. Although we did complete the run, we did have a host of issues with the raid, which has always bothered me about them. Our first issue was that we couldn’t get the raid to fill. It took nearly 45 minutes for the party to come together. I’m not entirely sure why it took that long, maybe it was because he put the raid up at a late time (~1 am EST) or maybe there was just that many groups filled with guild members and the like. Maybe it was because we were doing the Shroud on normal and were running levels 16-19. In either case, we had four Crawlers in the party and the rest we needed to pug out. Eventually the raid filled. So the first problem was finally over.
Then came the second problem. As soon as everybody came together and we zoned into the Shroud, one of the party members disconnected. We waited for another 10 minutes or so and then started the quest with one person short hoping the person would reconnect. They never did…
Then came perhaps the most annoying and third problem. We finished the first part of the Shroud and everybody zoned into the second part and then we realized we had one of those in our party…you know who I mean…the grand ole piker… So not only were we down one person because of the disconnect mentioned previously, we then were down a second person because we had a damn piker in the group. I don’t understand how anybody could be so inconsiderate to just pike during a raid.
So the group pushed, down two players we had no problems until we hit part five. Because we were short handed and some of us were rangers, the group had a hard time keeping Araetrikos boxed in and we wound up breaking containment. In the end, everybody wound up getting killed except for my level 18 ranger and another alt (who I think was also a ranger). Between the two of us we eventually killed the pit fiend.
Although the raid was a success, it had the makings to be a disaster. It encompassed all of my frustrations with raids (except for not failing it of course). I guess I should like on the bright side, at least we pushed through the issues and completed the raid despite being down two party members.
Erdrique's Blog 
🙂 Shroud has in general been hard to fill the last few months or so, but trying to do at level shroud, or even normal, 45 min is nothing.
Pikers are annoying. See, I don’t usually sit there waiting 1h to fill a raid, so one time I had an lfm up for elite shroud on Thazara (cleric 25 at the time). I left last spot open for a 2nd healer, but after waiting a while, I got bored and said, let’s just go. Not only was I the only healer, but comer phase 5 we were down 2 melees (out of 4, rest were ranged or caster). One guy somehow got teleported back to start, and other guy piked the whole phase 5. It was a rough last phase, and everyone but the two melees I was healing, me died. 🙂 But hey, at least I can claim to have solo healed elite shroud, lol.
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It was pretty frustrating sitting there and waiting for the raid to fill. It was especially frustrating to start to make our way through the Shroud and then to realize that we had a piker. Concerning the piker though, while he never got killed, it took us so long to get through the Shroud, that he actually disconnected before the completion, so at least he didn’t get that.
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It’s not too uncommon of late, I’ve seen, to short-man some raids. Often we can do this because two or more characters are low Epic levels and any XP is secondary to completing the run for the prime motivation (loot and ingredients, if in the Shroud). Green Steel’s attraction is lower than it has been with all the abilities of epic gear and changes to Heroic drops. Still, there’s a certain party “flavor” that must be kept for some raids or getting overwhelmed is probable. For Shroud, it’s melee-dominant in that we need several there to keep bosses from rampaging and stomping ranged classes. Others require a more tactical bent.I’m inclined to let pikers get targeted and die if it is clear that they aren’t helping.
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Yeah at this particular point in our questing runs we had decided to run various raids at much higher levels just so we could get the feel of them again. Our guild, the Crypt Crawlers, don’t raid a lot and it had been quite some time since many us actually completed any raid at all. So we had started at the beginning running Tempest Spine and then Chronoscope and then we ran the Demon Queen to get refamiliarized with those runs but in some case we were running lower level epic characters on just regular elite. The Shroud thing just frustrated us and we haven’t really raided since then (just a few sporadic runs here in there, one of our guildies has run the Fall of Truth a few times but that has been about it).
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