D.U.I.

That was me last night. DPSing Under the Influence. NyQuil, in this particular case, trying not to move too much because when I did, my head started to pound like... like... well, like something getting pounded on. With a large mallet.

Repeatedly.

In any case, lying in bed with the laptop and playing WoW was more or less what the doctor ordered. (Yeah, I've got a great doctor :-) So when my dailies were done, I jumped into a guild random, and we ended up with Heroic Blackrock Cavern. Yay me! The first time through, I forgot to grab the dungeon quests from the quest giver until the first boss had been downed... so now I finally had a chance to complete them.

I'm going to blame the NyQuil for my death on Rom'ogg, as well as my abysmal performance on Corla and my inability to interrupt the beams properly. Ended up being the safety guy on that fight after 2-3 wipes, which finally worked out. Karsh went down fairly easily, and then I managed to do a decent job keeping one of Beauty's pups locked down with Polymporh, at least. Oh, and I pulled kiting duty on Obsidius, which went pretty well, all things considered.

All in all, it would have been at least a decent run, if it wasn't for that last quest. Remember how I mentioned that I picked up the dungeon quests this run? I didn't realize until Beauty that you could pick up the next boss kill quest in the dungeon itself. In the other cases, I had (purely by chance) ended up back at the entrance, so I got them directly from the quest giver.

So there we are, heading for beauty, and I see a golden "!" hovering over the ground. Run through it, and - whoa! There's the next quest! Nice - now I know how it works! Kill Beauty, exit her cave and head right towards Obsidius, and...

Oh, hey!

There's a big, glowing "!" hovering in the air!

That's the next quest!

Cue Pavlonian repsonse.

I run towards the big, glowing "!" hovering in the air.

The big, glowing "!" that happens to be placed in between two trash packs.

The big, glowing "!" that happens to have been placed - in a fit of sadistic genius by some game designer at Blizzard - right at the point where the aggro radius of those two trash packs overlap.

I'll leave the subsequent events - the dawning realization, the sudden horrible sinking feeling, the mounting shame during the corpse run after the trash wipe - to your imagination. You've all been there, I'm sure. I don't need to explain it, I don't think.

So... just so y'all know. That final, big, glowing "!" in Blackrock Caverns?

Yeah. It's a trap.

I blame the NyQuil.