Wednesday (20 Jan) - Make it Three for ToC10

Wednesday (20 Jan) - Make it Three for ToC10

The Wednesday MM raid began a little differently than usual this night. Bd, the raid leader for the MM raid, invited all his healers and tanks into the raid ahead of the rest of the group. He wanted to get our opinion on an idea. The raid has cleared ToC10 two weeks in a row, with remarkably improving swiftness. Our first clear two weeks ago took two full nights (over 5 hours). Our second clear last week took one full night and about half the time as the week before. This week, Bd wanted to clear ToC10 in an hour. He asked, did we think that was doable? I can imagine the big grins on everyone's faces as we all agreed that it was worth going after.

The rest of the raid also agreed. By pushing the time to clear ToC, that would leave more time available to battle the infinitely more difficult Icecrown Citadel.

Our official raid start time is 6pm. Generally, though, it was closer to 6:30pm before we actually started our run. We didn't dawdle on this night, and everyone was in game very close to the start time.

6:10pm : The raid began. The following times are when an encounter was defeated.

6:23pm : The first encounter, Northrend Beasts (NRB), with it's three waves of monsters, fell on the first attempt.

6:47pm : Bd was DPSing this night instead of tanking, and we had one experienced tank and one that was getting his first chance at tanking ToC. On the second encounter, Jaraxxus, there was some confusion between the two tanks and Jaraxxus turned them both into minced meat. On our second try Jaraxxus went down.

7:01pm : For the first time, the raid took down the Faction Champions on our first attempt. We were awesome! I also have to make a correction. In past posts I've told you that it's a 5 on 10 pvp-like battle. All of that is true, except that Wild can't count (not having toes might have something to do with that). There are six Faction Champions, not five. And we pwned them.

7:24pm : We were doing well, so Bd decided to speed things up some more. We had been using three healers - Wild, t-pally, and Sh. To kill things faster Bd asked Sh, the shaman, to switch to elemental spec for additional caster damage on the fourth encounter, the Twins Darkbane and Lightbane. But there wasn't enough healing no matter how much Wild and the pally healer tried to stretch things, and we wiped on our first attempt. Back to three healers, and the Twins died on the next attempt.

7:41pm : The final boss, Anub'arak, fell.

Well, we didn't make it in an hour, but an hour and a half (1 hr, 31 min) was still pretty darn good. We had two wipes, and cutting those out would have trimmed that time even more. And it was our third straight clear of ToC10.

Wild was elated with the run, but disappointed by the complete lack of drops that Wild could use. Every leather piece that dropped (and there weren't many) were melee based (for feral druids and rogues), and the two usable cloth pieces went to the clothies that needed them. Wild also passed on a nice dagger that would have been a slight upgrade, passing to the mage who would get a lot more benefit from it. We've fully cleared ToC three times now without Wild getting a single piece of gear, and not even seeing a piece of gear that a healing druid could roll on. But it is definitely good for badges, and after dropping to just 12 triumph emblems after Wild's last purchase almost two weeks ago, the number is back up to 39.

Wild was pretty pleased with his healing numbers.

#1: Wild, 2740 hps, 39.1% healing
#2: t-pally, 2414/24.7%
#3: Sh, 1730/20.0% (Sh had some duty as DPS that lowered his numbers a bit)

With more than an hour left in our evening, we definitely had time to reassemble at Icecrown Citadel for some shots at Lord Marrowgar.

We wasted no time. As soon as we all arrived, we started working through the trash mobs, cautious of the traps that release the giant ward mobs. Bd was still DPSing, and we had to laugh when the only raider to die on the trash run was Bd, who readily admitted that he got so excited DPSing that he over-aggroed and pulled an extra group of mobs into our midst.

We had a couple of raiders who had not seen Lord Marrowgar yet, so we went through the strategy, which included a new wrinkle having the whole raid stand very, very close to the boss to avoid the blue flames that have eaten us up on prior attempts. On our first attempt Wild didn't get close enough to avoid the flames. I got caught in the first blast, tried to move forward but got hit with a Spike that immobilized Wild, and then was struck a second time by another wave of flame. Wild died. Wild eventually got a rez and we practiced until we wiped. On our second attempt the tanks got their footwork tangled up, both getting Cleaved by Lord Marrowgar, which is virtual single shot death. We wiped again. We gave it a third try, and this time we did mostly everything right, getting Lord Marrowgar down to 62% health before wiping a third time. I did say "mostly" right. We'll get better.

We were out of time, but on Thursday we have another whole evening to see if we can get Lord Marrowgar down.