I swear raid leading feels like this…

First off, it’s so nice to finally have a pool of raiders with enough redundancy that I don’t run around in panic when Log has duty weekend. It’s going to be hard making sure that 12 people get enough raid time, but if the alternates aren’t getting enough play time we’ll make some changes. I finally have backup for every role! Now, if we’re missing a healer AND an rdps AND a tank, then we might have issues, but…

So Friday we went to Firelands. We killed our trash like pros. We had three wipes on Shannox and then killed him. Then we had a choice. We could go do Baleroc again, or we could do Beth’tilac and then attempt Ryolith, skipping Baleroc. We’d taken 25 tries the week before to get him down, we had a healer who hadn’t been there…. I was really leaning toward skipping him and going after another new fight.

Reversion pointed out that we need to keep downing fights we know so they can be on farm status for us. If we put off killing Baleroc again for a month we’d have lost all the knowledge we had of how to do the fight. I definitely saw his point… but I so wanted to get another boss down. The picture up top is what I imagine our raid was thinking. Usually we do a better job of blending our raid leading roles.

Anyway so we went to Baleroc. And two shot it. Reversion was definitely right 🙂

Then we went to Beth’tilac. We’d done four pulls on her about three weeks ago, that was it. We changed things up a bit from our last attempts – Reversion stayed down to tank the drone, Kerick went up to heal the tank, and I stayed down to work my druid awesomeness on the raid. We had a good attempt, but the raid damage was high, so Ado instructed people to be sure to taunt down the adds. Did another attempt, adds were better but still a lot of damage, so we swapped who was going up for dps and kept the mage we’d been sending, downstairs.

Next attempt was really good, so we kept the strategy and pulled again. This time the adds died awesomely and we made it into phase 2 for the first time ever – and next thing I know she’s dead. I just barely got my head out of the “aaahhhh new phase what do I DO?” mode when boom, dead. Nice job raid!

Then we went to Ryolith and spend the next hour, four hours the next night, and two hours Sunday wiping on him. Stupid volcanos. But you will go down, you monstrous…. thing…. you!

And then we get to play with a big bird. I watched a vid. I’m psyched.

I am loving how our raid is gelling. When Rev and I decided to start a raid, it was because we wanted to see new content before it was old content. About all we really hoped for was a solid group that could down things. Instead, I’ve got an awesome group of friends who can surprise me even now with awesomeness. I know some of the raiders better than others, but I consider all of you my friends. Heck I actually have a “real” friend right here in town now because of this raid, and that’s just too awesome to contemplate.

Oh wait. I take that back. Log’s not my friend, he’s my brother. And Reversion probably doesn’t want me to put him in the “friends” zone either 🙂

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Back in the Swing of Things

Oh, hi there. How was your Christmas break? Did you play a lot of WoW?

Welcome to Monday. Hope it didn’t hit too hard.  Honestly it wasn’t too bad here; the water heater was on and that always makes for a good start to the day. Now here I sit, working – er, waiting for someone to get back to me – and it’s time to get some fresh content up!

So Friday was our first Catacylsm raid night. As a reminder, Reversion and I are wrangling a raid with guildies. It’s not a raid guild – ie, no applications for raid slots, no serious raiding culture – but we’ve got some darn good players. We’re not officers, nor do we have powers to reward or punish beyond just inviting or not inviting to the raid. During the end of Wrath, we ran with an open loot system; I’ll be doing Loot Master from now on but we’re still just planning to roll on stuff. Honestly Loot Council takes too much time in a raid like ours, DKP is a pain in the butt, and anything else just doesn’t fit us.

As always I sent out invites the weekend before. I had one straight “can’t make it” and one who warned me she was unlikely to be able to go; that was ok. I asked a backup, and we had two empty slots to fill anyway.

There’s another raid like ours in the guild, on Sunday/Mondays, so after asking around and finding out that they planned to start in Blackrock Descent, I decided we’d go to Bastion of Twilight. Some of our raiders are the same people, and until they get all their alts geared up they may be raiding on the same character in both raids. I didn’t want to worry about lockouts, or burnout. Plus, I figured if we had empty slots it would make sense to try to fill in with people from the other raid.

As Friday approached, my gear looked ok, Reversion’s was looking good, even my brother’s tank set was nice and shiny. He came to visit last week and we were able to do some good runs, as well as rep grinding to get gear. But I knew some others in our raid weren’t really ready yet. I decided we’d wait and see. Then Thursday night Repgrind told me that Bastion trash is dropping epics at a pretty good rate, and I had a plan. I sounded out several of my invitees and they agreed; we’d start with some trash clears and see how things went.

Friday night rolls around. One of my raiders doesn’t show, one of the new invites. I find out later his internet choose that time to explode. We gave him twenty minutes, as we went out there (pro tip: there’s no summoning stone at Bastion of Twilight, so get there early) and got arrangements made. Then we pulled in a  dps DK to replace him. She was in the other raid so I figured we were helping guild raiders anyway.

We start clearing trash. It hits hard, but we had an expert guide – Ado, a hunter who used to be in our guild and whose wife is a core raider in our run. He’d been in here enough to be an expert on setting up the pulls, and was willing to clear trash for a chance at epics, even if he couldn’t help with boss attempts. It sure made the first few pulls a lot easier! Not to mention his 14k dps…. anyway. Toward the end of the first trash clear, a one hand sword drops. I’m conflicted. The stats are more dps-y than tank-y, but my brother’s warrior really needs the sword. The DK, who is not a member of our run, could definitely use it. Finally I tell them both they are eligible, they roll, and my brother wins the sword.

I believe there may have been some discontent with my decision but hit is a tank stat when you’re not hit capped against raid bosses yet! And I allowed both to roll, I didn’t just award it to my brother. Regardless, three pulls into the next run, it drops again and goes to the DK, who was thrilled. It dropped again later that night and we gave it to the same DK, so she’s dual-wielding some pretty sweet swords now!

We reset trash five times and had five epics drop; three of the sword, the agility trinket, and a gun that went to my brother as the only person there who could use it. The trinket went to someone not in our raid. So as a gearing up attempt, less than stellar. As a learning experience? Just great.

So after the fifth clear, the natives were restless and we decided to try some pulls. We read what abilities the active dragons would do and decided to release the whelps and the guy-who-gives-giant-aoe-damage ability. First time through, we released both and once and died. Ooops. Second two attempts we released the larger dragon first, and died to fire. Final attempt, we took the whelps first and died, more slowly but as surely from being knocked around. Honestly we knew going in that we didn’t have the dps for it.

I’m hoping the night served as a reminder to a few people that they still need some gear, maybe enchantments or flasks or whatever else. I’ve got next week’s raid scheduled and some personnel changes to make, perhaps (apparently the person I thought was tanking the other raid, does not in fact have a raid slot at all right now. I need to talk to him and see if we can change that) All in all I had fun though I’d like to actually start downing bosses soon. I’ve got the raiding bug!

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