Raiding whilst on the road

This week I am on the road for work. So I am having a few days of long meetings, bad food and hotel Internet.

When you’re staying at an airport hotel, London Heathrow in this case, you realize there really isn’t much to do. The hotel bar is entertaining for a little while, but since I hardly drink when I am at home, I don’t see a reason to start when I am on the road.

Luckily I packed my Blizzard authenticator before rushing out, so after doing some work-related emails, I fired up WoW. Looking at the price Marriott dares to ask for 24 hours of wireless Internet, I should have a solid data pipeline which will give me 2 ms latency. The reality was of course totally different. The connection felt somewhat like two tin cans and a bit of string.

With all the settings on minimum, I had a playable client and a group invitation soon followed. (I forgot to mention, last night was our Naxxramas 25 follow-up night).

These were not optimal conditions to try out my new dual spec. Yes, I folded and am now dual specialized in BM and Survival. Out with the old shot rotation macros, in with the shiny new abilities; Black Arrow and Explosive Shot.

We started off on the construct quarter and quickly blew through Patchwerk and Grobbulous. When we hit Gluth, I started to notice slight lag, more guests playing WoW?

Then came Thaddius, a complete pain in the behind. Not because of the difficulty but mainly, I couldn’t stay online. The third disconnect killed me and I had to look on whilst the guild killed Thaddius. He was nice enough to drop a T7.5 token I could use and my guild was nice enough to let me have it.

Next up was the partially finished Military Wing. Gothik was the first to get some attention. As soon as things got hectic, my connection went down the drain again, but I didn’t die and I managed to actually add some dps. The four horsemen was a repeat of the above. Didn’t die, did some DPS, logged back in twice.

Next was our first encounter – on 25 man – with Sapphiron. Before calling it a day we had 4 tries at him, each time getting him quite close to dropping.

Apart from the semi-regular disconnects, it was quite ok to play through the hotel wireless. I think 5 or 10 man instances really would not have been a problem, trying the 25 mans was pushing it a bit.

How my survival spec performed? I have no clue. The connection was just too unreliable to judge it.

Well, after work I’ll be heading back to the hotel and going for the Argent Tournament dailies again, my tank-a-troll wants a new axe!