We decided to have a run through Molten Core as unfortunately there wasn’t enough of us online and free to carry on with the ToT mount run or to do a flex. 

There was issues with people getting dc’ed constantly so a 25 man run was formed from all of the raid teams and some guild members. This left Tsff, Nanutza, Antdruid, Marvv and myself with nothing to do.

After looking through the guild roster to try and find people who wern’t in SoO and finding that there were only two other people it was looking like we would have to find our own entertainment for the night. After quickly vetoing dungeons as the two DK’s had run them all last night to valor cap before reset. The idea of Naked Raiding popped into my head. I said about it on TS but as everyone was talking it got missed. I mentioned it in raid chat and then it got people’s attention. 

“What is that?”

“You go to an older raid like Molten Core, strip off all your gear and then as you go through, anythng that drops that you can equip, you do.”

“Yeah? We can do that”

Antdruid meanwhile, had already gone to Molten Core to start it. “eager beaver”. As the rest of us made our way over Nanutza and Tsff were busy making equipment sets calls ‘naked’ so they could get the gear off quickly. Nanutza then asked “are we actually doing this?” “yeah we are!”

When we got in Antdruid was running around in a brown coloured shirt “can I keep this on? I’m shy?” he said in raid chat, which instantly got replies over TS of ‘you better not be cheating!’ ‘get naked!’. He obliged and you needed to do a double take. The Nelf underwear blended in perfectly with the skin tone of his char. Unless you looked carefully, that was a completely naked Nelf running around! 

It was a sad time when we looked at our health bars. I had 146k. The only small consolation was that the trash would miss us when they tried to hit us. We went in and tested it out on a mob. There we all were in a fist fight with a Firelord. 

It was all very hilarious as we took an absolute age to kill anything, looking at our Skada meters and seeing our woefull DPS reminded me of how far someone comes in the journey from lvl 1 to 90. It also was apparent to the other how shit a hunter is until they have a ranged weapon! I had my pet to help me, and my trusty crows but that was it. I flicked through my spell book on a rather long auto attack/punch the crap out of something for five minutes fight with a whole bunch of trash and everything was the same.

Requires a ranged weapon

Requires a ranged weapon

Requires a ranged weapon

Requires a ranged weapon

It was sad to see, at the beginning of the fight I was doing 0.1k damage. My hit amounts were floating down the screen; 74… 75… 74… 73… 

Antdruid had decided to go in kitty form and was able to rake the crap out of everything. The DK’s were able to use aoe spells, where as I was just running around like a headless chicken trying to keep in range of whatever mob I was targeting. 

It reminded me somewhat of the odd ball class hunters really are, distance fighters with no actual power of their own. This disadvantage of sorts is echoed in the solo scenario where you go to the temple to face your celestial trial. Being ranged, we are sent to the Temple of the Jade Serpent. Although we do not get the benefit of the buff you get from the Celestial Offering, as it is intellect as that is what every other ranged uses. Our capes are the ones represented by the tiger Xuen, which is the melee based challenge. It’s like we are a hybrid of agility melee with intellect users ability to damage from afar but are pretty much totally reliant on our bow, crossbows or guns. If that breaks (which mine has done before in an encounter) then we are completely screwed. I’m not sure we would last long in a raid group just charging up to a SoO boss and punching it! (although it would make a hilarious blog post)

We rocked up to the first boss, after not having much luck on the trash to get anything we could actually use, although Tsff did get some nice intellect plate boots. We bypassed the small core hounds and just went straight for it. It was at this moment our tank, Tsff nearly died. “oh these hurt, I’m dying, I’m going to die…” “oh my god Annnnnttttt!” “kill the boss!” 

We had encountered 16 second stuns earlier on the trash, which was a pain in the ass but not life threatening. Here we had fears to deal with. It’s not too bad and we had one Nelf and the rest of us were Human so we could make use of the ‘Every man for himself’ racial trait to get out of it. Nanutza made a good observation “I’m being feared and I’m naked… That’s creepy”. Indeed it was strange watching everyone run around in all directions in their underwear. Kitty Antdruid was getting aggro, he had to turn into a bear. In desperation we were calling our armies and stampedes. It. Took. Forever. Finally we got them down. Much cheering occurred and the  it turned into class hate. “Paladin boots! Stupid Paladins!” “Oooh legs!” “The legs are for Shamans” “God damn it!” 

We had got the first boss down. On to the next. 

We were dragging trash together. Tsff was doing a stellar job putting that intellect to good use and was aoe-ing his DK heart out. I managed to find a sword! I have never been so excited about a grey item in all my life. My newly equipped ‘Fine Longsword’ was my new best friend.

Antdruid and I had found some snake thing (I forget the name) and had poked with a sword/bitten it down to half health when we realised that half of us were with this boss and the other half were with Garr. We raced off to the others, the snake in tow. We arrived just to see them die. Antdruid then got punched in the muzzle and died. Oh my days, I was on my own. I had my pet, put his growl on and activated the crows when I heard over TS “it’s a wipe!” “oh my god, if we actually wipe in Molten Core…” funny as it was, I was on two-thirds health, my pet was not doing well despite my best efforts of spamming Mend Pet. I was doing so much of that, I wasn’t able to make time to poke the boss with my amazing sword. My pet died. Fuck. 

I resssed him up and went at it again. It was at this point where I was frantically scanning my button bars for something out of the 36 buttons available to me that I could use when I realised that my crows had come off cool down. So far this fight had taken over two minutes and it was only at 63% health. I was conscious I was the last one alive, I was taking forever, my pet was dying, my DPS was now only 0.2k due to my amazing sword, the boss was not dying very quickly, and I could not do anything about it. I spam healed my pet, Earwig, looked at his action bar and noticed that he wasn’t using his special reflective shield ability. I clicked it, thinking that if he’s being attacked it might result in some extra DPS. No, it did not. It stopped him taking aggro. I got all the attention and was being killed. It was the longest six seconds of my life. Watching him stand there with his god damn shell, doing nothing! I healed myself as Earwig took the full force again and I just auto attacked, he was going to die again soon so why prolong the inevitable? My crows had come off again. I’d been doing this for four minutes. I resssed Earwig again and just set off the cycle again. There was silence on TS, clearly four minutes to wait is a long time, I would have made a cup of tea, had a smoke, gone to the loo… There was a word of Encoragement as the boss health was read out “34%”. “you can do this!” “it’s my amazing sword!” “that’s all you can do isn’t it with out a bow…” “waaahhhh! Yes!” we were not going to wipe in here so I kept going. Earwig died, came back to life again, crows came back on for the third time (six minutes I’d been going so far!) and I hit Stampeed. All of my pets came out to help and the boss dropped quite quickly. 

OMG so much rejoicing over the death of Garr. Swiftly followed by a request for a res. Antdruid who had died a bit too far away got resssed individually, several times, as we waited for him to return to his keyboard. “Ant is not there?” “Ant is still dead” “Ant, you’re dead” “oh, there he is” Onward! 

It was at this point that Marvv joined us and kept his gear on “I don’t bloody strip for no one!” was his reply, “I’m just going to follow you buggers around and watch” we went to another two bosses and after we had hit them a bit Marvv killed them, although it was nice to have them down so quickly we were also quite defensive about them. “Marvv, what are you doing? Don’t kill the bosses and spoil our fun!” more useless gear dropped and I got a helm! For this bad boy I needed to switch on my ‘show helm’ option in my interface. I looked amazing with my amazing sword and dazzling helm. We trotted off to the other bosses. Killed them and a weapon dropped that we could all equip, leather legs dropped that we could all equip. Many squakings of “NEED!” went out over TS in amongst the laughing. Nanutza got the legs, which had agility on them. It did mean that her DPS went up! I got the weapon. I’d got attached to my amazing sword but the time had come to upgrade to… A massive fork. Poor Antdruid had won nothing so far so we went onwards to the last boss. Raggers. 

As we ran around the giant stone spiral to get to him we killed off the few adds who had followed us around. Nanutza found herself in the lava, desperately jumping up at the ledge to get out. Finally she did and ran back round to join us all at the spot where our certain doom would come. Marvv said that he would stand by and if it looked like we needed it, he would step in to help. We summoned him. It all looked very large and intimidating when we were in awful gear. We started attacking, popping cool downs and giving it our all. I was busy poking Raggers with my pokey-fork and noticed his health bar was going down rapidly. “he’s going down fast” “yeah I don’t think you need me to help” 

It was when Raggers finally fell to his fiery doom Antdruid finally got a piece of gear. A lovely skirt that made him look like a hula girl. We hearthstoned back to the shrine in our triumphant glory to be met with a startled gnome.

Wat
Is going
On
Here
D:

My eyes
Is this real life
?

NAKED RAIDING BABY!