Murphy’s Weekend

Going in Friday our raid was 6/7 in Firelands.

After  a grueling weekend, we’re still 6/7. It was one of those weekends. Everything that can go wrong, did.

First sign of trouble was Log being out both nights, and Ado and Fahlala out Saturday. Missing a tank and two dps is never fun. But I figured we could get at least 6/7 Friday night.

Second sign: Thursday night my computer was showing signs of a virus. I started downloading antivirus tools and working.

Third sign: Slice let us know he’d be late. Hopefully not too late but we were looking at 9 manning at least the trash. Oh well, we could do that.

My computer got worse and worse but I hoped it had stabilized and had a backup plan before raid time. We got everyone but Slice in the raid and started clearing trash to Beth’tilac. My machine was flaky but I only dc’d once. Not too bad. We got to Beth’tilac and figured we’d invite Bocat rather than have an empty slot. We pulled – and I dc’d. Got back in. Healed things. Dc’d again. Logged in, was dead. Rev rezzed me. I stayed in this time until the boss was dead – and then dc’d again, so we called a break while I switched all my peripherals over to my laptop. Then realized that some of my addons were out of date. Just little ones like Vuhdo, DBM, and TidyPlates. Nothing big.

Somewhere around there Sorak lost power and now we were short a rogue. But hey! There’s Slice, finally.

Ok, the next few hours were a blur for me because my settings weren’t quite right and I felt like I was fighting my computer all night. We had afks that took forever. At some point Sorak got back online but was going to stay out and let Bocat and Slice be in – but then Slice’s computer exploded, so we put Sorak back in.

It took us 3 hours to get to Rags and I don’t believe we wiped on a single boss. It was just that much other stuff.

We managed a few tries. Didn’t really get anywhere. Well, we’d try again Saturday.

Saturday rolls around. I have all my replacement people in raid – but where’s the substitute tank? Oh. Crap. He got a job and can’t raid tonight.

Well, grats on the job and Grom, let’s see your tank gear. But that meant we needed another fillin. I asked everyone I knew, finally found someone – and Slice’s computer blew up again.

That was that. We weren’t downing Rags. We decided to go play in ICC and work on some achivements. A couple people dropped and we brought a couple in from guild and went off and had fun. I do like going back in there. We’ve got a couple achievements to get on normal, and need to kill the LK on heroic, for the next time we go in there, but as far as “ways to say we raided at raid time, while not just throwing ourselves into magma over and over”, it worked.

Sunday night Log returned and suggested we go try Rag if we could put our raid together. Well, Kerick was up for it of course, and Ado and Falahla would give it a try… Bocat was on, and a few guildies willing to help. At almost the last minute Kisara showed up so it wasn’t a bad group. We only had an hour and  a half, had one person who hadn’t seen the fight and two who hadn’t seen it with us, but hey.

We did some great pulls, two healing the whole time. I think we got some good practice in and I’m glad the raid isn’t getting rusty, but with some of our mains out the attempts just didn’t gell. So Rags is still standing.

And if people will just stop seeing that Molten Core Rag kill and congratulating us, I’ll be happy.

 

Oh, right. So on the theme of “Murphy’s Law”. I ran Brewfest this weekend on most of my alts. I want a kodo on Invariant. Saturday I queued up – and got a kodo. On  Analogue.

Sunday I ran everyone through again. This time:

That’s right. Now Analogue has TWO kodos, and Invariant doesn’t have any. Sigh.

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The Upside of the Nerfs

We went into Firelands Friday and promptly wiped on Shannox, Beth, and Ryo. Because we were doing Falahla’s epic staff quest and wiped on purpose. Then we went and killed the special boss for her, went back and one shot everything. Even with the extra stuff quest, we were staring at Ragnaros at 9:30.

Did an hour on him, broke up feeling really confident. Came back Saturday to find that our substitute couldn’t make it, so we cleared trash and then played the “so…. now what” game until Bocat noticed we were talking to her and agreed to come help. Yay! But she had to watch a video, so ok, 15 minute break.

Finally, an hour into raid time, we were ready to start. We made some great progress. Kerick and I got cocky and switched to two healing it. We had a 1% wipe. A 4% wipe. A 5% wipe.  But in the end, we couldn’t pull out a kill. Oh well.

So – upside to nerf – we’ve got scheduling issues coming up again. Falahla and Ado are out Saturday, but we can easily get 6/7 on Friday and keep working on Falahla’s staff. Log’s out both nights, but our substitute tank will have no problems. In two weeks Rev and I are out both nights – and I feel sure the raid will down 7/7 that weekend unless they’re working too hard on heroics.

We’ve been turned out to pasture, so we might as well enjoy the sunshine and hay.

Seriously, Blizzard, don’t do this again.  Not like this. It sucked.

 

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Tanking Shannox, trap timing

If you are a  tank who is still wiping on Shannox or it seems overly hard, READ THIS.

I thought this was obvious but the offtank we had last night clearly did not get it. Look, the goal of tanking the add is to clear stacks; the stacks of the off tank and the stacks of the main tank. There is only one way to do this ‘right’. To clear your stacks you want to have as much time as possible with the dog not hitting you… that clears the off tank stacks. But you ALSO need as much time as possible with the boss NOT HITTING THE MAIN TANK WITH HIS SPEAR.

That is, you wait until the spear throw is starting and you trap the dog THEN. This gives you two segments of time for your stacks to drop. The first segment is the time the dog is in the trap and the second segment is the time for the dog to grab the spear and run it back to the boss. If you, the off tank, just trap the dog over and over, like our offtank did last night then you MIGHT get lucky. If you get lucky the dog will come out of the trap just as the spear throw happens. If that happens you will get both of those segments of time back to back. You will have the dog in the trap (not hitting you) followed by the dog running with the spear (not hitting you). If there is no gap between those two then you end up with plenty of time to clear you stacks. That is if you are lucky. If you time it wrong the dog hits you between those two (before running to the spear) and your stacks are refreshed.

If you trap the dog BEFORE the spear throw then the main tank gets NO extra time to clear his stacks. You might as well not be trapping the dog at all from the MT perspective because if you just stood there and tanked him the MT would get the SAME amount of time to clear stacks. That time the MT gets will ONLY be the time for the dog running to the spear. What the MT needs is for the time when the boss does NOT have the spear to be prolonged as much as possible. This ONLY happens when you trap the dog just as the spear is thrown. Not just before. Not well before. The boss has to not have the spear in his hand while the dog is in the trap. His spear has to be stuck in the ground while the dog is trapped. This and only this will give the MT a safe margin of time to clear stacks.

If you, the off tank, just chain trap the dog, and you get lucky, then you might clear your stacks every time. The main tank, if he gets lucky and kites the boss a very long way, and someone is slowing the dog (like a frost mage), then the main tank MIGHT get lucky and clear his stacks. Or the MT might regularly get to 10-11 stacks like I was doing last night.

Remember the dog gets a debuff from getting trapped. You should ONLY be trapping the dog right as the spear throw goes off. It is very easy. Find a trap. Stand next to it while tanking the dog. When the red mark appears for the spear throw, run around the trap in a tight circle just far enough away that you don’t trigger it. Done! Yeah, if you just trap that dog over and over like a moron you might get lucky sometimes and occasionally down the boss. Even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut.

It amazes me how many people out there completely fail to understand a fights mechanics but sometimes still manage to down things. I think it is tragic that they will never get what they were doing wrong and will still get stuff down. Is it elitist of me to not like nerfing things until the clueless get them down? Oh well. Then paint me as a wanna-be elitist.

So I have to disagree with my wife. Yeah you have to ‘handle the mechanics’ but only sort-of. That off tank was doing the dog as wrong has he could have possibly done it without trapping himself. And we still got the boss down…

Of course that was just the first boss. We tried Beth a couple times and that was beyond bad.

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This Just In: Fire Still Hot!

Last night Reversion and I decided to see how badly nerfed Firelands was by taking our less geared alts, some guildies, and some trade chat pugs in. We had Reversion’s other druid tank who is pretty well geared other than having a blue weapon, my mage who can manage11k on trash, 13 on bosses, two well geared shaman healers from guild, Bocat, and two other guildies: a well geared dps warrior who knew the fights, and a somewhat geared mage who also knew the fights. Then we grabbed a resto druid and two dks from Trade, one dk as a a tank, and headed in.

Trash was fine. Our dps was so low that the nerfs meant things died about as fast as I’m used to. My dps was the worst at 11k, I believe, but only Bocat and the warrior really performed well. It was a bit painful. The dk tank was pulling about 5k so no help there.

After we got it cleared, it was Shannox time. Everyone said they knew the fight so we pulled. We had a couple issues:

The dk tank was on the dog and was using a different strat than we used…. basically trying to trap the dog before spear time, not after. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, and often Reversion couldn’t clear his debuff

The dps was low. We had the melee staying on Shannox and Rageface just would. Not. Die.

People were standing on traps. To be fair, it was mostly two people who did had known computer issues (lag and addon problems). But that didn’t make it easier to deal with the traps.

The resto druid wasn’t a raid -level healer. His spell choice was bad (did not want to use Lifebloom. Seriously?)  and his gear was light. It wasn’t a deal killer but it hurt.

Did I mention the dps was low? I’m an arcane mage, I ought to be able to do more than 13k. Bleah.

On the third try (Reversion: was it only 3? I think it was 5 or more. Ug.), we got Shannox down. That was the first time everyone stayed alive to phase 2. P2 didn’t take any time and the healing seemed way less intense.

So basically, the nerf meant a group that had no business being there could kill the easiest boss, after a few fails.  But it wasn’t a total pushover. The “bads” that some elitists seem worried will get “free loot”, won’t. If you couldn’t down Shannox before it’s probably because of mechanics, not raw numbers, and the mechanics still have to be handled.

I may be complaining this weekend when we go in with our real crew, but at least it’s not a complete joke.

Oh, and did anyone else notice a buffed epic drop rate? We cleared Shannox trash, got one, and Beth trash and got another (Rev’s other bear now has a purple weapon!). Could be coincidence but after all the nights we’ve gone in there without a single BOE trash drop… Got a crafting ember on our one boss kill too, but that’s not a big enough sample size to make any guesses there.

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Sing, o muse, the wrath of the nerfed

Tomorrow the nerf bat comes. We don’t actually know how much or how exactly, yet, but the official Nerfing comes soon. I kind of like the short cycle between announcement and nerf; it keeps the commentary and qq’ing it a minimum. Everyone gets to focus, say what they want to say, and then boom, it’s over, time to get on to the next news. Like patch 4.3. There’s a lot of news there.

Since we only had a week between the announcement and the execution, I knew we weren’t going to get Ragnaros down. Going into the weekend we were still 5/7, though I knew Staghelm was in our reach. Went in Friday hoping to stomp those 5 out flat and have a whole night for Staghelm; it didn’t really work. Our ret paladin was out and we brought in Bocat, our friendly guild shadow priest. She knows the fights and is great and we killed the first four with no problems. Then we hit Alysrazor and trouble. That fight is hard and having one person who isn’t in the normal roster can really throw the rythm off. She did great; we just didn’t have the team synergy we needed.

Saturday night, who shows up, unexpectedly, but Grom? Yay, we’ll have the full crew. We went in and two shot Alysrazor. Bang, dead. It was great. On to Staghelm. We started by pushing more stacks than we had last week, and kept adjusting as we went. We actually started doing more scythes on the third scorpion phase than the second, because all our cooldowns were back.  The fight felt increasingly stable; we were getting to the point where the orbs were killing us every time, but we were getting TO that point, which was progress. And then one attempt we managed the orbs right, we stacked back up, we blew cooldowns, and Staghelm died.

Finally. That kill was hard. I think our second kill won’t be as bad.

We even went and did a couple pulls on Ragnaros. Maybe could have done more but I was tired and we need time to digest that one.

So. Back to my point. The nerfs are coming and I am ok with that. Yes, I know we could down Ragnaros the way he is now, with more time on him. But we did get to 6/7 and that’s actually enough to be the number 10 Alliance guild on our server, which is kind of sad. I had a random rogue whisper me asking if we were recruiting, so that was kind of cool. We’ve got a solid core group and I’m looking forward to 4.3. I don’t feel like our first Rag kill will be devalued because it came after the nerf. It’ll still be a kill for us, will still take work, will still require us to push ourselves more and more. I’ve been kind of a hard nose in recent weeks, pushing raid members to improve. I try not to be too mean about it but I feel like our team is good enough to be more than server 25th on a low population server. I want to still enjoy raiding with our team, so I still value having fun as most important, but it’s not that fun to wipe and wipe without progress. We haven’t had that happen this raid tier. Maybe we would have on Ragnaros. Maybe the nerf is saving us from raid drama. Who knows.

I just can’t get worked up about it one way or another. I might be losing geek points for not engaging in drama, but… I’m more concerned about raid roster next week, whether I need to max out my vps tonight or not, and how we can hit the ground running in 4.3.

Let’s kill some bosses.

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Take it up a level

So. We raided Friday and Saturday as usual. Sorak was missing Saturday so we took Squishi. Friday we got our five bosses down, bang-bang-bang. We actually had two wipes on Beth which was a little embarrassing at this point but hey. And she dropped my gloves so yay.  Just need my head. Took 5 attempts on Alysrazor and our kill ended up being considerably faster than our previous kill – Slice got her while she was in the air the third time. Yay! Our hard work on that boss really paid off. We’re still using a three heal strategy and our dps have stepped up to make that work.

We even went to BH Friday night, killed Occu’thar, and still got done a little early.

Saturday was time to work on Staghelm. And work, and work…. we’re definitely getting there, but we aren’t having the easy time some groups seem to have. I wonder if it’s because I’m a healer that I see this fight as really hard? I’m calling the cooldowns and trying to remember what we still have available to use, and it’s hard. By the end of the night, we were taking 8 stacks of Flame Scythe and 7 cat jumps every time, and I’m thinking we should try increasing that to 9/8. We can blow heroism off the top and just burn it down.  Our best attempt was 11% so we’re not that far off. I think we’ve more or less got the Burning Seeds part, but the Mushroom things are still killing us. Part of the problem is I’m not seeing the debuff show up and so not getting targets hotted up fast enough.

It  just feels like our heals are a bit weak right now. Our numbers look good, and Kerick and I have awesome synergy, but I don’t feel like we’re using our third healer right. Usually we have a disc priest. She’s awesome and a personal friend, but I feel like I don’t understand how best to tell her to work with us. I know what Kerick’s job is going to be, on a fight. I know my job – usually, “heal all the things”. But how to best work with the disc priest? Do I stick her on the off tank with a side of raid healing, or straight raid heals?

We’re also questioning whether Divine Aegis is doing enough on Flamescythes or whether she needs to do more. All I know is I’ve read “COH moar”, but she’s doing that. So  I just don’t know.

Kerick and I can two heal some fights in Firelands, and more as we get them on farm (We’ve done Shannox and Ryo, and I’m willing to try Alys again sometime. A little more gear and I might even try Beth). But we can’t two heal Staghelm, and I think what’s holding the raid back right now is communication on my end. I have taken the job of heal lead and I need to be serious about it, and that means improving my awareness of the fight, my ability to call and analyze things, and not sacrifice my effectiveness, either.

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Contest Winners!

Announcing the results of our comics contest!

First up, the winner is Khizzara. We had a disagreement over which of her two entries were our favorite so they’re the joint first place! I really liked the special effects in the second one!

The second place winner is Bocat who obviously knows a thing or two about pulls:

 

 

Third place goes to Ado

 
Thanks for the entries, guys!

Finally, we had one entry from Repgrind that made me laugh:

And one from Slice that was a different take on things:

See the original at http://slice213.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/dupliyhe.jpg for some reason my copy looks weak.

Prizes: Announced first place was the Winged Lion Mount. Khizzara, if you’d prefer a different Blizzard pet/mount, let me know – we want the prize to be something you actually want!

Second prize: Bocat gets a choice of a code for a Nightsaber Cub or a Landro’s Lil’ XT pet from the card game! I’ll email you whichever you prefer!

Third prize: whichever pet Bocat doesn’t want gets sent to Ado Falahla.

 

 

 

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More coming soon

Sorry for the light content this week. It’s just been one of those weeks. Comic contest will be judged soon – but if you submit a comic this weekend we’ll look at it too. Hopefully Monday we’ll post the results!

Raid night tonight! We’re 5/7 now, that flaming bird died last week, so if we can knock them out nicely we’ll have lots of time on Staghelm and, I think, get 6/7 here shortly.

And on a personal note, today is Reversion’s and my 5th anniversary. There’s nothing more fun in WoW than playing with your spouse! I love you honey!

(What’s 5th anniversary, anyway? Ashes or something lame? I’ll let Rev off the hook. Besides I got a new gun a couple weeks back so that probably counts )

(And yes, we’re raiding tonight. After the lobsters. What else would we do? We’re boring old married people with a kid and a raid. That’s what we do!)

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More DPS!

So I started giving advice to our friend and fill-in raider Bocat concerning getting her numbers up on Firelands boss fights. But I figured such advice was good post material so here goes. The thing with firelands bosses, at least the first 4, is that they are movement and target switching heavy. That is tough stuff and it is stuff you can’t just theory craft and optimize or practice on a target dummy… or can you? There are some things you can do to up your damage on fights with a lot of target switching and movement.  These things mostly relate to…

Situational Awareness

Increasing your situational awareness can up your damage done in a few ways. It will let you move less so you have more time to hit stuff. It lets you not move when you don’t have to and not move excessively far when you do have to. It will let you acquire targets faster so you spend more time hitting them. Situational awareness will also keep you alive so you spend more time hitting. Finally it will help you plan your actions better.

Move early, move less, move smaller

On a movement heavy fight it is common to have bad stuff come at your or spawn under you. That is one of the main reasons you move. By being more situationally aware you will see ‘bad stuff’ coming earlier. You will also be able to judge if the ‘stuff’ is really a threat or if it going to miss you. If it is going to miss you don’t need to move. Taking the effort to really see what is going on around you will let you avoid moving when you don’t have to. It will also let you move just the minimum amount. The faster you stop moving and get back to the pewpew the better your damage will be.

Early movement also helps. If you can take one fast movement early you can focus on doing damage again. If you watch the stuff coming at you for a while and move at the last second, your focus is split. Also focusing on just one bit of the ‘the bad’ might mean you don’t see something else.

Look at the stuff, decide on your reaction, do it, get back to the task at hand. Once you have done the move you planned you can ignore that bit of ‘the bad’. Like a car you pass on the freeway. Once you decide to pass it, and complete your pass, it is gone, done, ignorable, no longer a factor in your planning. You should always be thinking ahead to the next step and not looking behind in your mental rearview mirror.

See the targets, know the targets

Before you make a target change you should already know where your target is, what it is doing, and have a plan for when you are going to switch to it. If you have to spend several seconds looking around for a target that is several seconds you are not DPSing.

The power curve

There is an expression called the ‘power curve’. It is a way of expressing if you are in control of a situation or if you are just reacting. It is well known that those who are only reacting are less efficiently. Pilots know this well. Sometimes when a poor pilot crashes they say he was, “So far behind the plane he did not die for an hour”. Morbid, yes, but it aptly describes being in a bad situation where you are reacting. Reacting to things that already happened… and probably reacting wrong because 3 other things have already happened AFTER the one you are reacting to. The pilot is so far behind the sequence of events the plane has been a smoking hole for several minutes before he catches up.

The more ‘aware’ you are the more you can get ahead of events’. Know what is coming next and have a plan for what you will do. When you get good at that practice knowing what is coming two moves ahead and have 3 plans for that. The farther ahead of events you are the easier it is to deal with the NOW. People that are behind events all the time can’t imagine having the mental ‘bandwidth’ to think that far ahead. But the truth is when you ARE thinking ahead then ‘now’ is a lot less distracting. You are stable and grounded because you know what is happening. You know what is happening because you expected it to happen.

How to be more aware

Look around. Yeah that is all there is to it… no that is not true. First you have to look and then you have to SEE.

Looking

Use your camera independently of your character facing. Don’t look around BETWEEN casts, look around DURRING casts. If you have a long cast started and you know what your next cast will be you have several seconds you can look all around. You can even fire your next ability off while looking. It is better to be slightly less focused on your rotation for a couple seconds, every now and then, instead of losing awareness and getting into trouble. Look around any time you can spare the time.

Seeing

Know what you are looking at and understand it. This means paying extra attention to videos and the prefight briefing. It also means being more knowledgeable about parts of the fight that are not ‘your’ part. Seeing is understanding. Don’t neglect a glance at the DBM timers. Know what is coming up next and how soon. Memorize the sequence of the fight and never get taken by surprise.

Now what do you do with all this ‘seeing and knowing’ stuff?

Plan ahead

When are you blowing cooldowns? Do you have time to blow one now on this target? Can you move your cooldown use around and get more of them in one fight? Can you stack them better? Can you wait for a proc and stack something with that?

When are you saving your resources? When can you blow them?

Where can you stand that will keep you from having to move so much? Where can you stand that will let you SEE more without LOOKING so much? Where can you stand that will anticipate where you need to be for the next phase? Which way do you have to look so you can see the next phase before it comes?

Practice and experience

The thing is… it is really hard to do all this without seeing the fight, a lot. There is a reason progression raiders are better than average. It is because they ‘put in the wipes’ necessary to know the fights inside and out. Two players of equal ‘skill’ one that knows the fights and one that doesn’t are going to have very different levels of play and the numbers will show it.

 

Target switching

On a fight with heavy target changing I can tell by looking at the meter who is good at that and who isn’t. And this you CAN practice on dummies. There are three aspects to a target change: Reorienting, Acquiring and ‘Ramping up’.

Reorienting

This means turning and moving to get into position to attack the new target. This varies by class. Some have to run over to a new target and some can just spin and shoot. Some have ways of moving fast and some don’t. But there is a large element of player skill here. For example a keyboard turning pally will lag way way way behind a really pro hunter… but a really skilled pally using mouse turning and thinking in advance can keep up with dense hunter. Sure player class has a big effect but only your own skill can make the most of the class you are playing (of course it is also up to the raid leader to assign you a role that plays to your strengths and your classes strengths).

Planning ahead makes reorienting faster. This is how situational awareness and thinking ahead ups your performance. Can you move a little between casts and shave get closer to where you need to be on the next phase? If so you are likely to engage a new target several seconds sooner. That is tens or hundreds of K in damage. That really can add up!

Acquiring

Acquiring is the act of finding, and targeting the new target. This is done before, after, or at the same time as ‘reorienting’. Like reorienting your skill makes this faster or slower.  Better reorienting also make this faster. If your camera was already lined up where the adds spawn, and you had already shifted to be in range of them, then you are likely to engage be able to get them targeted extremely fast. Situational awareness wins again.

Ramping up

Once you have a new targeting selected and you are in position to attack it you still have to get into your rotation. You have to apply debuffs, dots, start the right cast sequence, all that stuff that is needed to do good damage. There is a huge element of player skill in this. There is also focus and planning but those are skills too. For if you forget to apply an important debuff (or self buff) until you are the second time through your rotation you probably just wasted many thousands of points of damage. Ramping up is something you CAN practice. It is hard to get feedback though. You can sit on a target dummy and go through the first 10-30 second of your rotation over and over but it will be hard to know how improved you are. I would suggest timing yourself for s set period of time. Like go for exactly 15 seconds each time and then look at the overall damage done. Also read, study, and think. There is always some other tip or trick out there that can improve your opening rotation.

 This stuff is not easy

Anyone that had raid healed, raid tanked, and really pushed themselves at raid DPS will probably agree that dps is not ‘easier’. In some ways it is harder. Healing and tanking get easier as your gear and skill improve but DPS, progression minded DPS, is always a challenge. There is always more to improve. If it gets easy you are slacking! Try harder… well that is not totally true. If you get really good at knowing fights and being situational aware then things will feel easier, less frantic, less disorienting. Your brain, fingers, and awareness will be freed up to work on the task of squeezing out those last few points of damage.

A couple final tips

When force to move here are a few things to try:

Move during the GCD: The global cooldown gives a caster enough time for a very short couple steps. The best time to do this is when you just fired an instant cast or you are about to fire one. Start moving before you fire. Fire while moving. And stop as soon as the GCD is up. If your rotation has a couple instant casts in it you can usually move a good few yards in just one rotation. So, if you have some place you want to move, but you don’t have to move their for a few seconds, you can use this trick to move in short steps without any lost DPS. This is great for things like slowly kited bosses.

Refreshing dots: Sure that dot might have a lot of time left on it but if you can refresh it with an instant cast while moving then that is two global cooldowns worth of movement time that are not completely wasted.

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When a wipe feels like a win

Whew, another weekend of raiding down!

Friday we were missing Log, Grom, and Kisara – in other words, all our melee and the offtank. I’d already covered Log’s spot by inviting Squishi to raid this weekend, so we had tanks, so I looked around the guild and ended up inviting Bocat and another guildie. Bocat wrote up her account of coming with us, so check it out.

We got Shannox down with a little trouble, I wanted to two heal it and while that was a valid strategy we just were really pushing it in the final phase for cooldowns. I want to say, our second two healing attempt, I stepped on a fire trap and died. Kerick kept the raid up until I got a battle rez and could regen mana and we went all the way to the end of that fight. After two wipes though we went back to three heals and crushed Shannox. He dropped shoulders for me…. which means I’ve had amazing FL loot luck, sorry Kerick. I’m sure those plate drops will happen!

Another Ryolith kill. One wipe there, due to him walking into lava. I blame the driver ;-p

Then we went to Beth’tilac. Again, one wipe, then a kill.  Ado is really pro at managing her adds and makes that fight pretty straightforward to us – but everyone who taunts down adds fast makes a big difference.

Then we went and worked on Alysrazor. Friday night’s attempts were…. let’s not really talk about it. Unpleasant to say the least, we died halfway through Phase 1 most of the time.

Saturday night, Grom and Kisara were back, so we started on Baleroc and killed him dead. Grom is really key to our strategy on Baleroc, he takes almost the whole first crystal and lets Kerick build awesome stacks. We could do the fight without him but since we knew he’d be there Saturday we saved that fight.

Then back to the firebird. Saturday was almost immediately better and we started getting a lot farther.  Still, our two healer strategy is very unforgiving, one mistake and a healer or tank dies and it’s over. But we definitely started getting the hang of it.

After about two hours we had our third healer switch back from dps and rearranged the heals a bit. The difference was noticable right away; we just had a lot better survivability.  Yeah, our dps was too low, but at least we were getting through the first phase cleanly.

It was getting late, and we had a good attempt, got through a whole cycle and mostly a second. We were tempted to call it but…. we’re progression raiders, and at some point we have to act like it, so we called for one last good attempt.

Someone died just before the tornados, but when I saw everyone else was alive, I rezzed him, did my mana regen thing, we did the next phase, then the next.  For the first time we actually got through three cycles.

Then we wiped because she was at 20% and we couldn’t kill her fast enough.

We have a lot to tweak. I think we’re going to have to two heal it, but not til we’re consistent about getting through cycles. We need everyone to take the burn phases seriously. Maybe try to get  a little more dps from everyone, even the healers (I spammed Moonfire to regen mana but I really should have been keeping Moonfire up and using Wrath).

But like I said…. that wipe felt like a kill, to me. We can get this kill, it’s just a matter of time. We’ve learned to dance.

I hope everyone watches a Staghelm vid this week…

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