Wednesday (31 Mar) - The Good news and the Bad

Wednesday (31 Mar) - The Good news and the Bad

Wild is beginning to feel a bit like a regular raider - at least on Wednesdays. Wild was again a confirmed invite for the 25 man ICC raid. Tuesday's raid had cleared the Lower Spire (4 bosses) plus two in the Plagueworks (Rotface and Festergut). The Tuesday raid also took some shots at Putricide as well, but didn't get him, so our guild has still not downed that boss.

For Wednesday, we decided to leave Putricide for another time, and moved purposefully to the wing called the Crimson Hall. We got off to a little bit of a late start as we were short two raiders. We eventually cleared the trash with 24 raiders, and then waited a bit more for our 25th.

The first boss encounter of the night was the Princes. Wild is getting some good experience on this one. On previous visits, Wild has been both a raid healer and the tank healer for Prince Keleseth. On this night Wild was the tank healer for Prince Taldaram. The battle went pretty smoothly and the Princes went down on our first try.

The other encounter in Crimson Hall is the Blood-Queen, but the raid leader opted to bypass her and go instead to the fourth wing, the Frostwing Halls. Perhaps I should explain how the wings work in ICC. The first wing, Lower Spire, must always be cleared first before any of the other wings will open up. Once that is done, the other three wings become available and the raid can choose whichever wing they want to. However, all four wings have to be cleared before we can access the final encounter in the Frozen Throne - against the Lich King. So, since Lower Spire was cleared on Tuesday, we could go pretty much anywhere we wanted with the exception of the Frozen Throne.

The raid leader chose to go after Valithria Dreamwalker. We had shocked even ourselves last week when our Wednesday raid got a guild first when we won this encounter for the first time. We were hoping we could do it again. Wild learned a lot more about how this fight works, too.

Dreamwalker is a dragon, already near death. The Scourge use her for ghastly experiments and our job is not to kill her, but to heal and free her. I didn't really understand this last week when I was an "outside the portal" raid healer. As usual, three healers were chosen to go into the portal along with other raiders. Instead of DPSing the boss down like we do in 99.9% of all boss encounters, it's the task of the three assigned healers to heal the dragon from 50% to full health while waves of mobs attack her and the rest of the raid. Wild was assigned as a tank healer this time, and had to run half the length of the chamber to get into position at Dreamwalker's tail on the northern side in order to heal the tank. This is one of the rare times when standing at the dragon's tail is NOT a bad, bad thing to do. Essentially, two tanks must get aggro on every mob that comes calling to keep them from attacking Dreamwalker. There are five different types of mobs and the DPS has to know the kill order to ensure the most dangerous mobs die first.

On our first attempt Wild kept his tank alive, even though it got a little tricky at times. Late in that first attempt the tank mentioned that he needed someone to dispel a stacking disease debuff that was causing the damage he was taking to spike higher and higher. So that's what was happening. Wild can't clean diseases, but the raid healer on Wild's side of the room was a shaman who could drop a cleansing totem.

We wiped on our first try. I wasn't sure of the details, but apparently there is a stacking issue with the healers that wasn't going well. Inside the portal are Nightmare Clouds that stack additional healing, damage, and mana regen. The three healers must keep a full three stacks up at all times inside the portal, and there were some problems with that.

On our second attempt Wild had no trouble keeping up the tank, and even had time to help raid heal as long as the cleansing totem stayed up. We wiped again, however, when the southern side of the assault came unglued.

For attempt #3, the raid leader swapped healers around, asking our cat druid to switch to healing and take over for a paladin as one of the three portal healers. I'd never seen him heal, before, and he was impressive. The raid leader was pretty hard on the paladin that was swapped out to raid heal, but the raid leader's a pretty gruff guy anyway (usually). We got Dreamwalker up to 96% health but just didn't quite have enough to save her, wiping a third time.

While we were setting up for a 4th, and what the raid leader said would be our last attempt on the dragon this evening, the raid leader whispered Wild.

"You're healing is pretty low, is there something wrong, or something I can help with?" Frankly I was a bit worried about that, too. Part of the issue early on was that I was getting used to how to heal the tank for this particular encounter, and I am pretty conservative about throwing heals elsewhere until I'm sure I have the measure of the tank healing I need to do. It's also in part that I tend to heal what needs healing, unless I'm raid healing where I can spam heal without worrying about keeping a tank up. Third, I had changed Wild's gear around and I wasn't sure how that was going to work out. I'm getting really frustrated at how slowly Wild heals compared to other healers who have double and more in +haste than Wild has. So I intentionally lowered Wild's base spell power and mana regen to add some +haste. Based on the results, that didn't work out too well. The added haste wasn't enough to overcome the loss of spell power, and I found that Wild needed both his innervate and a mana potion to keep my mana up. The raid leader offered some suggestions (he's a druid moonkin/healer too) which did help on the next attempt. We plan to get together to talk about gearing, tactics, fight mechanics, etc, which I think would be very worthwhile.

We saved Dreamwalker on our 4th attempt, getting our second ever victory against this encounter.

Maybe we could go kill the Blood-Queen now? Please? She's a lot easier than the other choice we had. Nope, it would not be the Blood-Queen. We headed for Professor Putricide, who laughingly reminded us that he was still undefeated.

The raid leader had been studying this fight, and decided to change things up a bit, since we were still zero for forever against this guy. Instead of six healers, he figured he could get by with five, and add another DPS to kill things faster. The raid leader asked Wild if he had a DPS set. Wild swallowed hard and said, I do. Wild switched to moonkin for the Putricide fight, which gave us three moonkin - Wild, plus the raid leader, and also one of Wild's oldest friends, a former priest who was now a super powerful druid moonkin/occasional tank.

Wild had no idea what he should be doing fight mechanic-wise as a DPS, but I figured I could just follow the other two chickens around from a movement perspective, and I would set the raid leader as a focus and attack whatever it was that he attacked. Simple, no? No, not really. If Wild thought that this fight was a crazy mess as a healer, it was even worse as a DPS. Wild was no better at getting where he was supposed to be, and all that movement played havoc with Wild's DPS. Wild was already seriously undergeared versus the two other moonkin, but . . . well, enough excuses.

On our first attempt, a wipe, Wild did 3773 DPS, compared to over 5k from the other two druids. That was the high point - it went progressively downhill from there.

We got Putricide to 19% on our second attempt, one of our best attempts ever. Wild could have gotten us closer, as we had lost a raider I was going to battle rez, but slime pools closed up around me and Wild died before I could get it done. We tried a third time, another wipe. Wild was getting a bit better at avoiding all the nastiness going on around him - slimes pools, exploding pots, bouncing goo that chased after their targets - and that was just the avoidable stuff. Wild also had to get used to actually aiming at his target. The game is pretty forgiving of that, and one can be almost at right angles and still shoot bad guys, but Wild is used to being able to heal targets with his back to them, and this aiming thing was an interesting wrinkle when Wild was being chased in one direction and the thing I'm supposed to be hitting was going the other way.

Wild finished 18th out of 17 DPSers, being beaten in DPS by one of the tanks as well. Not one of Wild's shining moonkin moments. Just to rub it in, Wild finished at 2809 DPS, getting a pitiful 2.5% of the total DPS. The raid leader finished 13th, with 5438 DPS, and the other druid topped us both with 6116 DPS. I frankly forgot to do some things I should have been doing, like using my long cooldown attack called Starfall. The other two druids did a lot of damage with that. Wild is still basically a healer trying to learn to DPS. It was only Wild's second time DPSing in a raid.

BUT - On our 4th attempt, Putricide said the words we had been hoping to hear from the ever pleasant, happy, and insane Professor Putricide: "Bad news everyone.... I don't think I'm going to make it..."

Putricide died, our first ever guild 25 man kill.

Two sanctified tokens dropped. The raid leader won the first one. Wild won the second one. The tokens are used to upgrade Tier gear. Wild exchanged his ilevel 251 shoulders for the i264 one. It's a nice upgrade, but it didn't add any +haste.

In guild news, Wild made a suggestion in the guild forums to rotate raiders between the two raid nights. Raiders like Wild that only get in on Wednesday miss out on all the gear from the first four bosses each week, gear that has to start getting pretty old to the regulars who run it. We'll see how that goes.