Saturday afternoon, The Nomster down for her nap and Reversion down too (he wasn’t feeling well) I got on my neglected paladin intending to post my glyphs. While hanging around letting Auctioneer do its thing, I noticed someone spamming trade for a paladin healer. For Ulduar. For achievements.
What the heck. I’d been to a full three bosses in Ulduar and always regretted not seeing more, so I whispered, told my not-great Gearscore, said straight up I didn’t know the fights but that I did know how to heal. After answering affirmatively that I had Vent (which turned out to be a lie; I had to get it set back up, had forgotten after making the Win7 pc my gaming machine), I was invited.
It didn’t really start that well. They didn’t give any real direction about the Flame Leviathan fight so I got in one of the two vehicles I know how to drive there, the siege engine, and fortunately someone gunned for me. Embarrassingly, I died about thirty seconds before the end. Ouch. And then discovered I’d left all my reagents in the bank when I went to buff people up. Double ouch. I went and grabbed more and we got down to business. The raid skipped the next two bosses and started right in on XT.
From here on, they explained enough to get me through – “don’t stand in this” – “heal this guy” – “avoid laser beams”. I beaconed people, spammed Holy Light, tried to remember to keep Judging light on the boss, and didn’t stand in stuff. We steamrolled boss after boss and I felt somewhat carried. The tree was healing about 60%, with me doing not quite 40% (shadow priest accounted for a bit). But they didn’t complain.
I really started having fun as we descended farther and farther into the place. Wow… I wish Blizzard had made Ulduar a Sunwell-style expansion cap raid. Like “Oh, you defeated Arthas, well now the Old Gods are free to be evil”. I Like the fights in ICC but the scenery is not nearly as cool.
Anyway, we defeated all the Keepers, getting all the achievements necessary for the drake meta along the way, until we got to Mimiron. We wiped twice before that I think – picked ourselves up, and knocked the bosses back down. But now it was time for Firefighter. And I wasn’t the only one to have no idea how to do this fight.
The first three attempts, the tank died ten seconds in. The rogue died even faster. She (and fun fact: half of us were girls! I’ve never been in vent with four other women before) wasn’t used to playing melee and kept getting squashed. It eventually got almost funny, as the tank survived phase 1 into phase 2 and the rogue… didn’t.
After an hour and a half we were getting into phase 3 pretty well, and then several people had to go. I was sad… even though I was one of them. But the raid leader told us to come back Sunday afternoon and we’d finish Firefighter.
I didn’t believe it. But I logged on ten minutes before the appointed time and he whispered me, told me he’d be throwing out invites soon and thanking me for being on time. And sure enough, there were ten of us in front of Mimiron at the appointed time…
I’d like to say Firefighter happened then. It didn’t. We had a lot of trouble with phase 3. There were two attempts where I died and screwed us up. The rogue had yet to live through phase 2, on the rare occasion she made it that far. We got overwhelmed by robots.
It started getting better, and we got into the final phase once, then again. Then the rogue gave up – and switched to her shaman – and then suddenly we were all alive and it was phase 4 and the dps coordinated their attacks and suddenly
Achievement spam time: I think everyone there got it. Firefighter. Wow.
I learned a whole lot about holy paladin-ing that fight. About Divine Sacrifice + Divine Shield, about using Divine Plea wisely, about how to heal and move and heal and run. I didn’t know how to do that on Divergent before. Analogue’s hots are so easy to throw while running, I’ve never had to really think that hard about second to second heals, fight placement, and where exactly the fire is…
So that done, we went and wiped on General Vezaxx a few times. The tree had to go and I got Reversion’s spare druid in, and we got the Vezaxx achievement. Still missing the second and third Ulduar bosses, we went and had a look at Sara, but after extended AFKs and peoples’ moms yelling, had to break agin. Sad paladin 😦
Except this group is planning on running achievement runs like this for the next several weeks and two weeks from now, we know who to whisper on Saturday afternoon…
Awesome! congrats! We’ve been working on the Uldy achievements for a couple of Sundays now. I’ve only been in there a couple of times myself, not counting Weeklies. I’m gonna have to study Freya and Mimiron sometime before the weekend …