Fall-down, Stand-up Comedy

I know I haven't sounded very happy about raiding recently. To remind everyone (including myself) of why I still love it, let me tell you a little story.

On Saturday some of my guildies and I did Nature of Progress story mode on Imp side. Dxun actually received heavy nerfs in 7.0, and then it was nerfed again in 7.1, something I unapologetically love. I always thought it was a fun operation, but the difficulty could make it a bit of a chore to run casually. Nowadays you can underman it, bring both inexperienced players and alts, mess up in silly ways and still muddle through somehow, which is how I like it.

So we were doing 16-man with ten people, and we had just made a pig's ear out of the Mutant Trandoshans fight, finishing off the last of them with only two people left standing. When we continued to Huntmaster, somehow our tank died nearly instantly. I used my combat revive on him and one of the other healers got all apologetic for not healing him fast enough.

However, when he did get up and we definitely made sure to heal him, his health still kept bouncing up and down like a yo-yo, prompting the same healer who had just apologised to say: "OK, either [the boss] does insane damage or someone is not wearing tank gear".

It was only at this point that I took a closer look at the numbers on my unit frames and noticed that our tank's maximum health was oddly low - less than 300k when everyone else had nearly 400k. I quickly inspected him mid-combat and it was as I suspected - half his gear had hit zero durability. Just as I shared this with the group, he died again, and one of our damage dealers commented: "I was wondering why I got the tutorial for disabled or destroyed items..."

Our tank expressed some confusion as according to him he hadn't seen the usual indicators for broken gear on his UI. Around this time, Huntmaster did his move of retreating to the lake. Someone asked whether we still had a combat res available, and I opined that it wasn't worth resing our tank again since you can't repair in combat so he was going to be useless anyway, but someone else had already done it.

Even better though, one of the other dps had managed to plop down a Revan statue (a utility item that serves as a vendor) and our tank quickly clicked on it while he was briefly out of combat after the revive. So even as I kept repeating that you can't repair in combat, he smugly replied: "Oh yes I can, now I did it!" And just like that, he was back in the fight and fully repaired. "Oh wow, he has so much health now," commented the other healer, and we all had a good laugh.

Unluckily for our tank, he died again less than two minutes later because Shelleigh ate him, but that's all part of the fun. I just thought the whole sequence of events was pretty amazing, both that we managed to be oblivious to the fact that our tank was half-naked throughout the entire trash leading up to Huntmaster, as well as that people somehow managed to get him up and repaired mid-fight and on the fly, when I hadn't thought that to even be possible.