Thursday (9 Jun) - Die Sartherion - PLEASE!

Thursday (9 Jun) - Die Sartherion - PLEASE!

The Wednesday Icecrown Citadel run became a challenge match between the two MM ICC10 groups and the FS alt ICC10. I didn't really think a third FS ICC10 raid would work, as that has not done well in the past. But FS has fielded a third raid the last three Wednesdays or so, and fielded one last night as well. The two MM ICC10 raids have also started to coalesce into two distinct teams, with healing and tanking members pretty constant and only minor changes to the DPS. The Mf led group that Wild has been in was happy to see a shaman join us for the first time. We're hoping he'll become a regular DPSer for us.

We were back to slow and slower on getting started again, and it was closing in on 7pm before we were all assembled and ready to go. A lot of that time was spent sorting out raiders and getting them assigned to the two balanced teams, so hopefully that will shorten up as raiders become "regulars" on our two respective teams and it becomes easier to make assignments. Our group was a bit embarrassed that we wiped on the first boss, Lord Marrowgar, on our first attempt. It's been weeks since that has happened, and it put us behind in our little race with the other team. The boss seemed a bit glitchy, and some of the melee raiders complained that the "white fire" cast by Marrowgar was appearing inside Marrowgar's hit box, which is where the melee stand and where the white fire is not supposed to be. But we worked around it and Marrowgar died as he was supposed to on our second attempt.

After last week's loot haul Wild's biggest gear need was a spell power trinket. Wild has one high end i264 trinket with +179 spell power, but has been using a mid level +128 int i245 trinket in the second trinket slot. Wild's gear has improved to the point that he no longer needed that extra +int and wanted to replace it with a spell power trinket. Lord Marrowgar dropped [Sliver of Pure Ice], a +158 spell power trinket that, while not best in slot (BiS), would certainly do. Wild rolled a 100 (out of a 100) and won the ilevel 251 trinket.

Lady Deathwhisper gave us no trouble and she died on our first attempt. The Gunship was mercifully free of it's usual glitches and we won that battle as well. During the Gunship battle Wild achieved Exalted rep with the Ashen Verdict, the ICC specific faction the rewards a high end ring upgrade at each rep level. Wild picked up the ring upgrade (ilevel 277) prior to the the next boss, Saurfang.

We had made up some time on the other MM ICC raid. Wild had learned that the FS altICC had already beaten Saurfang, though, and was working on Festergut. The Saurfang battle gave us trouble, too, because we forgot what we had learned the week before. Last week we kept wiping because it took too long to kill the beasts that spawn at regular intervals throughout the fight. Those were hard hitting beasts that disrupted the raid and also healed Saurfang when the beasts could do damage to raiders. We had the same trouble this week, and wiped three times before we had our belated "Aha!" moment. Last week, and this week, we started with three healers. We only need two, and when we switched to two healers (allowing the #3 healer, a priest, to switch to DPS shadowform), we killed Saurfang. Finally remembering that, we switched the priest healer to DPS again, and down Saurfang went. The other MM ICC group also killed Saurfang, but we beat them to it by a couple of minutes.

Both MM groups had to break up and we didn't get a chance at Festergut. The FS group gave Festergut a few tries but didn't kill him. The calibre of the bosses in ICC go up considerably once past that first wing.

The weekly frost raid was the dragon Sartherion in the Obsidium Sanctum. There were enough MM guildies around to get a group together to get that done and Wild joined them. On a straight run where we kill the trash and the three mini-bosses, this is about as easy a fight as there is to get five frost badges. However, we decided that it would be more fun to "zerg" Sartherion. The "zerg" strategy leaves all three of the mini-bosses alive, and they join in the fight once we attack Sartherion. The basic premise is to kill Sartherion before he, his three mini-dragons, and all the other nasty things that occur, wipe the raid. It's a race to see who dies last.

We agreed to give the zerg approach two chances, and if that didn't work we'd do it the regular way. Only one tank and one healer were needed, since we would be ignoring all the bad guys except for Sartherion. Since our paladin healer only had a healing spec, Wild got to switch to moonkin form for the fight. Wild was raring to go.

We made our two attempts, and we came oh so close! both times, but wiped. We agreed to take another shot. And then another. And then another. It was so danged frustrating! We could ALMOST kill him, getting the dragon to under 1% health, but just couldn't seem to muster up that last bit of DPS, or stay alive those few extra seconds needed to finish the job.

We got so single minded about it all thought of just getting it done the regular way and just getting out of there was lost in our frustration. Most of us already had the "zerg" achievement, too, so it wasn't like we were going to get anything special. It's just the weekly! But we plowed on - for more than an hour. With that determination and with that amount of time we could have killed Festergut, I'm sure, but all that effort went into our zerg obsession.

Finally, mercifully, after uncounted attempts, we threw up our hands and did it the regular way. It took less than a minute to kill Sartherion. It cost Wild more than 60 gold in repairs, and an hour's time to get those five frost badges.

Wild did get something positive out of all those attempts, though. Wild got a heck of a lot of practice DPSing a raid boss and his DPS certainly showed improvement over the course of the evening.

On the few trash mobs we had to kill to get to Sartherion the first time, Wild's numbers were right in line with all the other 8 DPSers. Wild was actually #3 with 4156 DPS. The leaders were two shaman topping out at 4581.

Over the course of the boss fights Wild finished on average fifth in damage dealing and with an average of 5364 DPS, very good for Wild. The top end average DPS was 6832. Wild's best single fight DPS was 6132. And with a full hour's practice against a living, breathing raid boss, Wild really started to feel comfortable doing raid DPS.

But PLEASE, let's not do that again!