That Worked

How many people out there raid with their full perfect team every week? I envy you. I don’t know we’ve ever had our “perfect” team. Seems we always have to pull someone in. This week may be an exception; I don’t know. After that we’ve got three weeks in a row where Reversion and I will be out definitely twice and possibly more. That’s not going to help.

Anyway, this week we were missing our mage, the lovely Falahla, and Saturday her husband our shadow priest would also be unable to play. I started recruiting a guildie early in the week but he tentatively was helping out a different raid. He promised to keep me posted. And one of our semi-regulars would be available Saturday but not Friday so at least that was one slot filled.

Friday rolled around and I asked Repgrind to make sure that either we got the warlock or someone else – because I was going to be over in the next town standing in line for an ipad. I’d be back before raid time, but maybe not in time to find our tenth man. She promised to help out, of course, and I set off on my quest without any concerns.

I get back and find that Whodowhat can after all! Huzzah! Lock buffs for me! But…. where’s our hunter? She logged off right before raid time…. I got into a conversation with her sister and it turned out there was some RL stuff going on. Ok. RL comes first… but now I have to find a replacement. We get someone and head to Bastion.

Halfus dies easily but the Twins take a bit. Actually even Halfus and his trash took us a while – yes we one shot them but things just felt slow, like we weren’t all really feeling it. I certainly wasn’t and I couldn’t identify why, but raid just felt off.

After far too many wipes  – I think 3 maybe 4 but I’d like to two-shot those guys, at most – we got the twin dragons down and started clearing toward the Council. We wiped on that trash, came back, cleared it, and just before we started discussing the pull, two of us dc’d.

We waited…. and waited. Nothing. Finally we gave up and decided we’d switch to BWD and do Magmaw and Omnitron. We got some guildies’ alts and went over. We decided to do Omnitrom first; it took a couple tries. Then we went to Magmaw, wiped, and we were past quitting time so we disbanded. A bit disappointing, really, only three bosses down in the whole evening and no attempts on our progression fight but that’s how things happen sometimes.

Saturday night, rinse and repeat – again had to get a spare guildie in to fill a slot. Only… what we could get, was another healer. Empyrean, our new priest healer, isn’t comfortable dpsing. Kerick would have swapped to her mage but we really needed those paladin heals. We were bringing in a  disc priest and I realized sadly that the best person to go dps was me.

Probably I should have gone for my mage but I do want to be able to boomkin respectably, and there’s gear I need, so I just swapped specs and we started on Magmaw. The first couple attempts didn’t go to well; Empyrean was trying to heal our whole ranged group and it wasn’t working. So we had the disc priest come out too, and Kerick kept Logarithm and the melee alive. That worked and the worm died.

Downstairs to Maloriak. We one shot him, just like last week. Logarithm is an awesome off-tank and does a great job rounding up the adds. I never get healing aggro  from the giant untauntable guys. We did better on that fight than we ever had before because our setup was just a bit more AOE heavy. That was probably the only fight in BWD that night that I felt like I was really doing my job as dps.

Reversion and I had previously discussed strategies for what to do Saturday nights after Maloriak and had sort of agreed we wanted another look at Chimaeron. So we went over there. We ended up using a four healer strategy…. and the fourth healer was not me. Nope, we had our elemental shaman go resto and I… stayed boomkin. There were a couple wipes as people learned the fight, but eventually we got everything down. Reversion and I used our Tranquilities at specific Feud phases, we had two shaman casting Healing Rain, and just enough dps to get through it.

When Chimaeron went nuts and started one shotting the dps, I wasn’t totally sure we’d make it before enrage, but after the tanks died, he went after Grom, who bubbled and managed to keep his attention for a long time. It gave us the edge we needed, and he went down.

I am really glad we got that kill, but selfishly – it’s  healing fight, and we didn’t get it until a setup where I wasn’t healing. It kind of makes me feel bad. It was the right call for our raid setup but I just don’t enjoy dpsing, not when I should be healing.

 

We did a few tries on Atramedes then went over to Throne of the Four Winds to do Conclave. Had a couple new people so we had two wipes. After the first, I went heals and swapped with the disc priest. She hadn’t been there before and I know how to heal that fight in my sleep and we were all tired… so after the third try, when they went down, it was more a sigh of relief than of triumph.

It worked. It wasn’t the most fun I’ve had with this raid, but I did enjoy myself.

Next time though, I’m making Kerick switch. So what if the tanks die? I think we know what’s important here…

About these ads