Thursday (6 May) - Heroics Can be Fun - Really

Thursday (6 May) - Heroics Can be Fun - Really

After yesterday's less than stellar results from heroics and the weekly, Philly had to wonder what would be in store for her today.

The random dungeon finder's first pick for Philly was the Azjul-Nerub Old Kingdom, or OK for short. We plowed through trash and the four bosses with little difficulty, despite the reputation of OK as a difficult dungeon because all of the bosses have unusual abilities. I like to go back and look at the strats for bosses after the heroic is over. There is never any time to check them once the run started, so an after the fact check is the best I can do to help remember important things for the next time that dungeon turns up. Mostly its a litany of things that Philly forgot about. For example, on the first boss (Nadox) Philly didn't know that the boss became immune to damage when the Guardian add appears, but that's no problem since I can see with one hit that he is immune and can stop casting. The second boss, Taldaram, does a vanish thing, but that's pretty easy to figure out on the fly as well. The third boss I always recognize, but also always forget to stand up close to the boss. I usually die in those situations, but we had a good healer who kept Philly alive and didn't complain that I was out of position. The final boss I did remember, because it's fun and interesting. Harold makes us all go insane periodically, forcing each player into our own private instance where we have to battle images of the other players. Wild usually justs heals through it until help arrives. Philly Shielded and DoTed everyone up, healing when she needed to but also doing her part in killing the images. Finally, Philly also got her first cloth drop, bracers called [Flame Sphere Bindings] that would not do for shadow spec, but were usable in disc/healing spec. At last, Philly had something worth the effort.

Philly was also tickled that she finally did a whole dungeon, and actually out-DPSed someone other than the healer. She was still third, ahead of only the tank and healer, but hey, we're sending out pats on the back whenever we can here. Her DPS was a pedestrian 1384 DPS, but it got the job done.

Feeling frisky, Philly ordered up a second helping of heroics. The main course this time was the Culling of Stratholme (CoS). All right! Wild loves this dungeon, and hoped that Philly would, too. The tank, a druid bear, was awesome. The healer, also a druid, did super fine as well - at first. The three DPS probably wouldn't get invited to ICC anytime soon, but we did fine. Philly is starting to get that intuitive feel for casting the right spells at the right time. And with a heavy tank like we had, Philly could also Mind Sear (AoE) with little worry that she'd pull aggro on packs of mobs.

We pounded down the first boss, Meathook, and kept moving. The tank asked in party chat if we wanted to try the "Zombiefest" achievement. I guarantee no one in that party other than the tank (and maybe the healer) knew what that achievement entailed, but of course we all said "Sure!"

The idea was to collect a whole bunch of zombies without killing them. Rounding up the zombies required engaging the second boss, Salramm, and we were advised not to attack the boss until the roundup was finished. That seemed kind of crazy from several angles, and the plan unravelled pretty quickly. It took a long time to kill Salramm because we were all confused about when or if to DPS him. I think the healer got pretty annoyed as well because he was having to heal through a lot of damage and not seeing much killing going on. We did finally kill him.

For our second try at the achievement, the three DPS were asked to stand at the start of what would be our next battle with zombies and other mobs, while the tank and healer went the other way to collect more zombie mobs and kite them back to us. There was a considerable wait, but sure enough, eventually the two came running back, a thick black cloud of angry zombies hot on their heels. That angry mob merged with the other mobs already in the area and it was AoE or die time. We got the Zombiefest achievement for killing over 100 zombies in less than a minute.

We started up again, but the tank bugged and couldn't move. The tank died before anyone knew what was happening, and without a tank we wiped after fighting wave after wave of mobs. One of the DPS quit the group.

The tank let us know what had happened, and said everything was working again.

We moved on and killed Chrono-Lord. Philly was out of position for not moving close to the boss, who does a Charge at ranged players, but then again all of the ranged players, healer included, stood at range. It didn't seem to much matter. Our DPS replacement made it to us shortly after we started the fight. Philly was pleased to see she managed to reach 2362 DPS on the Chrono-Lord fight.

The tank had started the next series of trash pulls, and suddenly started losing health and getting no healing. Philly had no time to wonder what was happening. Philly Shielded the tank and fired off a Prayer of Mending to get him some immediate health. That knocked Philly out of shadowform, but that was ok, Philly was a healer now. Casting renew exhausted all of Philly's instant heal spells, and since Philly was shadow specced she was missing some critical healing spells. It didn't help that the tank kept moving and aggroing more mobs, as almost all of Philly's healing has to be done while standing, not running. Philly managed to keep him alive until more mobs found Philly and killed her. By that time everyone else was dead as well.

So, what happened? In the middle of the pull, the healer left the group. What a crappy thing to do. After we died, instead of showing up at the graveyard, Philly found herself ported back to Dalaran, completely out of CoS. At first I thought Philly had been kicked from the group, but no, we were all still grouped, and we had all been dumped out of CoS. Don't know why that happened, but we were all able to port directly back in. We got a pally to heal, made the long walk back to where we died, and moved on to the final boss, Mal'Ganis. Thankfully, Mal'Ganis played nice and died when we wanted him to. Actually, he escapes, which is part of the lore of CoS, but we won the encounter. Somewhere among the loot from bosses Philly won a nice healing ring and an even nicer cloth helm. It doesn't look or sound as cool as Philly's Wintry Hat of Doom, but it'll work just fine with Philly's healing set.

Philly felt like a real DPSer on this fight. Oddly enough, the tank actually led all the DPS with 3021 DPS. Either he was very, very overgeared, or perhaps he was tanking in DPS gear? Which might explain how he managed to die even with Philly's wrong spec healing. The mage came in second with 2538 DPS, and Philly was next in line with 2035 DPS. On the Mal'Ganis fight Philly turned in her best performance, getting 2942 DPS on the boss. Philly is getting her technique down. Now she needs to keep improving her gear.