Running Circles Around Violet Hold...Literally!

Well, last night was the first time in over a month that I've really spent any time at all playing my druid. It was really fun! I got to help a friend with some group quests in Icecrown. I unlocked the Shadow Vault, finally, and got my Knights of the Ebon Blade tabard (finally). So I was ready to earn a little rep. We ran Heroic: Utgarde Keep without any problems at all. It was a really fast, smooth run. Painless. Flawless (give or take). It made me realize just how much I missed tanking...so hopefully I'll be able to do that a little more often.

I was feeling pretty good about my druid and decided I'd give healing a go for a Heroic: Violet Hold run. (I, quite generally, fail at healing, and therefore hate doing it. I just don't like to see my friends die and be too noobish to prevent it.) We had myself, the little tree, plus two Death Knights and two Warlocks. My group makeups are never that exciting, it would seem.

We rocked it out until we got to the first boss and wiped. Erekem. *shakes fist in anger* We had the strategy backwards. The warlock with us had advised he's run Violet Hold loads of times- we had to kill Erekem's two little friends first. Well, that didn't quite work out like we had hoped. Killing the two adds causes the boss, Erekem, to gain a buff which apparently grants him the power to instantly wipe the entire group. It was painful. But we decided to give it another go.

We run back to the instance, heal up, mana up, and we are ready for battle! Let the games begin! They start the event, and run to the bottom of the stairs where the first portal has now spawned.

The tank starts beating up the portal keeper. The DPS is doing their jobs. But what the hell is the tree doing?

What was the tree doing...

The tree was running around in a circle on the stairs near the entrance of Violet Hold. That's what the tree was doing...but...why?

The tree's keyboard decided to make the instance more..."exciting"... for her. The tree's keyboard decided to stick on auto-run, but in circles. Yes, my keyboard is fail. But as it's attached to my laptop and I can't afford a new laptop right now, I have to make due with what I've got. And it's been behaving lately. Usually if my character gets stuck on "auto-run" I just hit the forward key again and it cancels the affect out. Mind you, I don't even have to press Num-Lock to start auto run. I can sometimes hit the forward key to move forward "just a little more" to get in range of something...and then I find myself not able to stop. Lots of deaths have come at the hands of this miserable piece of technological failure.

So...there I was. Running around in CIRCLES...in Heroic Violet Hold. I'm sure the group thought I was an absolute noob. What can I do? I hit every key on the keyboard trying to make it stop. It refused. I was doomed. The only healing I could cast was Rejuvenation, Swiftmend, Lifebloom, and Nature's Swiftness+Healing Touch. That was all I had. And half of those wouldn't cast because I was "auto running in circles" on a path that took me to the top of the stairs, putting my tank out of Line of Sight of the healing.

Initially, I was incredibly aggravated by it. But looking back, we were on a doomed run anyway. One of the little warlocks had rubbed the group the wrong way completely by being a little..."gruff" about things. Groups tend to disintegrate when even one of the people is a jerk. So we were doomed to begin with. The circular running in the heroic instance was at least some sort of comic relief for me. It helped make the repair bill a little easier to swallow.

I got a pretty good giggle out of the situation. Our tank double-checked on the Erekem strategy, but by then our DPS had left and we decided we'd try again some other time.

Oh technology...what would we do without ya?