Wednesday (27 Jan) - Can This be Happening?

Wednesday (27 Jan) - Can This be Happening?

Wild was in game around 5:30pm and the lag in Dalaran seemed a bit more bearable than yesterday. Still, Wild got his business done quickly and then flew to Icecrown Citadel, ready for the evening ICC10 run with the MM raid.

Wild noted that there were only three of his own guild's healers in game, including Wild, so I whispered one to see if maybe Wild had already missed the healing discussion that was supposed to happen. Nope, I found out, there hasn't been one, and since so few healers were around we wound up not having one. Healers became an issue for the guild's ICC25 run as well, and all I could think to say was, already? Wednesday is the second raid night now and one the guild calls "training night" since a lot of the time is usually spent learning a new boss and wiping a lot. Some raiders shy away from those nights, and unfortunately it looked like this was already happening with the new raid schedule. The raid leader even whispered Wild, knowing I had declined the invite, just to double check in case I might have become available, Sorry, I had to tell him, Wednesday night is my ten man raid night.

After considering doing a badge run in ToC25 instead, the raid leader managed to get six healers and went ahead with the ICC25 run. They spent most of the evening wiping on Deathbringer Saurfang. It's not clear whether they actually killed him, but they did move on to the second wing of ICC to try their hand at the first boss there, Festergut. I haven't had a chance to check that out.

In the ToC10 run, we took down the first encounter, NRB, without any trouble. We were looking to clear the place in an hour so we could get over to ICC10. However, we wiped on our first attempt at Jaraxxus, the second encounter. Wild was getting some lag, as were others. Not nearly as bad as the night before, but it was there. The healing might have been able to overcome the lag, but a critical element of the Jaraxxus fight is interrupts of high damage abilities, and both tanks and DPS complained they could not get them off quickly enough. We wiped four times on Jaraxxus before we managed to kill him, and that took an awful lot of time.

A leather caster belt dropped, and Wild lost the roll to a moonkin shaman who was with MM but hadn't raided with us before. However, he passed on it so that Wild could have it. That was very nice of him. He whispered Wild that he had four level 80s, all ToC geared, so passing on a piece of gear didn't bother him a bit. When he told me who his other toons were, I had to laugh because three of them Wild had run with before, including in this group. "Well," I told him, "looks like a know a lot of you."

The Factions Champions were up next, and we simply could not make it work. We wiped three times with no visible progress. It was 8:30pm, and rather than bang our heads fruitlessly, we called it a night. We have cleared this place multiple times before, so it was really frustrating that we would stall on this night, but the old adage still applies that just because we've done it before doesn't mean we can do it every time. Thursday night we are going directly to ICC. If we are going to wipe, let's do it on bosses we are still learning.

I promised a post about druid healing based on Tuesday's ICC25 run. That post turned out to be a fairly dry dissertation so I am not going to post it on the forums. If you really want to read it, you'll find it on the blog at: