Running from the Eyeless

Last week was Rakghoul Resurgence, and as I often do, I decided to visit the Eyeless with a guild group. We'd done another story mode operation beforehand, and I figured that a quick stab at the Eyeless would be a good way to finish the evening.

There were only six of us, but undermanning the 8-person story mode version of the boss was no problem. Then someone asked whether we should try hardmode as well. I was the only healer and we only had one tank, but I agreed to give it a try with the caveat that our tank would have to kite the boss for a good chunk of the time or else he (the tank that is, not the boss) was likely going to die.

Of course, that's exactly what happened on our first try. I used a combat revive, but by that point the boss had already eaten some dps, so we decided to just reset the fight and try again.

On the next attempt, our tank started running for this life much sooner and things worked a lot better. It mostly felt like smooth sailing at last. Someone did die once - I can't actually remember whether it was the tank or one of the dps, but I got them up again quickly and we continued either way.

But then - disaster struck when the boss got low and our tank died (again?), with my combat revive still on cooldown. I watched the boss target one of our Sorcs. "Cal! Kite, kite, kite!" He started running, and eventually hit his god bubble when the boss caught up with him, which of course made the big guy change target yet again, to another Sorc. "Cest! Kite, kite, kite!" Our resident Swede let out a girlish squeal and took off in the opposite direction, again kiting for a bit until things got too scary and he hid inside his immunity bubble.

It was around this point that someone yelled at me that the cooldown on my combat revive was up, so I quickly resed the tank and started healing him. He got the boss back and things looked promising for a second, until I found myself surrounded by a pack of rakghoul adds and my screen froze.

"I'm having a massive lag spike," I cried on TeamSpeak. "You've got no heals! Oh no, I've completely lagged out..." And indeed, a few seconds later I got booted to an empty server selection screen. Another guildie, who was on voice with us even though he was not in our ops group, chimed in to add that he'd just been kicked out of the game as well.

Usually when this happens and I don't see the server list, I have to restart the game to be able to log in again, so I frantically tried to do that. "It's not letting me back in," wailed the previously mentioned guildie, and I quickly found that I had the same problem. For once, even restarting the game wasn't working, as we both got some sort of error message about the login servers being unavailable whenever we entered our details into the launcher.

Meanwhile the rest of my Eyeless ops group was shouting frantically - I was so focused on my failed login attempts that I didn't really pay full attention, I just remember hearing several calls about the boss's health being really low and something about more people dying.

I was almost sure that they were going to wipe without my heals, but then I could hear that the boss had gone down; I'd just missed it. Just then the game decided to let me and the other locked out guildie log back in again as well. Fortunately I'd still gotten credit for the kill and was able to collect my loot.

Mostly I just loved how crazy what was meant to have been a simple boss kill had become. Usually I like to save video recordings of this kind of thing, but since I got kicked out and had to restart my game, that obviously didn't happen this time. Which is why it became this blog post instead, to remind myself of it in the future that way.