Sethekk Halls.... and a confession

So I did my first PUG as a Survival hunter today - in fact only the third PUG I've ever been in, the first two being Hellfire Ramparts and Blackrock Depths. In fact... only the third instance I've ever run, ever. Gasp and alas! I am a newb! For shaaaaaame!

Despite all that, I did pretty damn well.

This being my first visit to Sethekk Halls, of course fate would designate me the group leader. We did pretty much all right - our first wipe was on an accidental link, and we didn't wipe at all after that until the 5-mob pull before Talon King Ikiss. That one got us. Sapped one, trapped one, shackled the undead, and tried to kill the last while the shadow priest volunteered to MC one of the others. Well horror of horrors, both the freezing trap and the mind control broke early, and it was just chaos - our second wipe. We managed to down one of the mobs before we bit it, so the resulting 4-pull was just a piece of cake.

Then things got really hard.

Talon King Ikiss is a bitch. Not his Arcane Explosion - that's pretty easy to dodge, unless *cough* some hunter hides behind the wrong pillar, gets blinked to, and the rest of the group can't catch up with the Warrior to heal him. Ahem.

That was only one of our many wipes - the Arcane Explosion was no problem, but that Arcane Volley is just a filthy, filthy move. It ignores LoS, and does 1800 or so damage. I managed to survive this by bandaging while hiding from the Explosion, in the end, but that damage stacks up really fast. Most of the time, the shadow priest died first, and without his Vampiric Embrace healing, the Volley damage just overwhelmed us. It didn't help that at this point I also managed to alt-tab myself out of the game....

I came in second place (after the Rogue) on the damage meters for the entire run, trapped on most of the pulls, and chain trapped on several of them - even managed to trap the Sapped mob with Readiness once or twice, which is a really great skill. I'm still not sure whether it's better than Scatter Shot, but... I'll give it a few more instance runs before I decide.

I did a pretty good job, I think - I never once broke crowd control, I managed to direct the vast majority of our pulls to a successful conclusion (order of kills and such), but by virtue of having the little crown icon (and that everyone else was kinda... grumpy by the end) I couldn't help but feel responsible for our numerous wipes. I also completely forgot about Misdirection. One of our problems was that the tank couldn't get quite enough threat, and I could have solved his problem rather nicely, if I hadn't been so concerned about what I was doing wrong in this instance.

Ah well, I can only get better. My pet served as a handy supplement to my DPS and as a pretty decent off-tank once or twice -- too bad he didn't get any action at all on Ikiss. I just couldn't keep him up against the arcane volleys, and the priests had their hands full keeping the tank alive, so he stayed in pet limbo and Expose Weakness took the spotlight.

And I got my Terokk's Quill and my Shadow Labyrinth key! One good spear down, one great one to go.