Last night I achieved two little WoW milestones – I got into ICC and we got our 2 man Arena team above the 1000 rating. The ICC 10 man was being organised in-guild as I logged on and I gamefully stuck my hand up. As they were searching for more players I went and tried to find the entrance. Flying up and around and all over the place until someone pointed out to me that it was the big broken front door with the war machines around it and people fighting. Oh, you mean that entrance?

We have a new rogue in the guild who transferred his main that very day, and it was just the two of us sitting amongst what seemed to be an army of blacksmiths just inside the door. I sneaked a peek at his gear, and then I sneaked a peek at my gear. I have been dedicating myself so much to my PvP gear set over the last few months that I had kind of neglected my PvE set, and a close look at it was not pretty. I even had an empty socket for gods sake, and the only thing I had to put in it was a green gem. It really is a mish-mash of gear and I found myself explaining in a joking way to my very well geared companion that I’d been doing a lot of PvP … heh heh heh …

He said I should find a JC. I told him that I am a JC. He didn’t know what to say to that.

So we went in and started the raid. How exciting! I am proud to say we one-shotted the first boss. The raid leading was excellent – calm and clear with roles and strat very patiently explained and set out in chat. A nice countdown for the tank to run in so I could time my tricks of the trade perfectly and the first fight went off without a hitch. 2 plate drops. Meh. The second fight on Lady deathwhisper started off badly when we wiped in the first 20 seconds. But we picked ourselves up off the floor and got her down the very next try. Plate drops once again. A hunter in the group who had distinguished himself by pulling out a train set asked if hunters could roll on leather. I said sure, if us rogues can roll on mail. But you can’t use mail! he said.

Then we got to the gunship battle. We jumped on the ship and someone started the event immediately, I won’t say who, (the fucking hunter!), and that of course led to a wipe. So we came back and our raid leader put a big skull on the dude not to talk to and began carefully assigning roles and explaining what to do when somebody talked to the guy with the big fucking skull on his head and we wiped again. So we called it at that point. No drops but it was good to see inside the ice cream citadel.

Straight onto my arena team after that, (no breaks for us hard cores!), and we played around 20 matches, winning about 14 of them if I remember correctly. We are starting to gel very well together as a team, and rogue/druid is a great combo for annoying people particularly at the start. You stealth in and see the panic on their faces. Either they run around like crazy using all their abilities to show stealth in a big random mess while we watch from the sidelines and giggle or they huddle together behind a piller or a box and hope that we might not see them. The only team that we didn’t look like winning against was a DK/Druid combo who were both decked out in full heroic ICC 277 gear, and even on that fight we got the DK down.

The difference between running a raid and playing arena’s is your focus. In arena you have a lot of tunnel vision – you only need to worry about what’s in front of you and keep one eye on the other opponent. In raids you need to be much broader in your scope, taking in the whole fight and the whole 10 man team. Balancing between running both of these back to back is a good excerise in trying to become a well rounded player. Now all I need to do is go and find a JC …