Tuesday (15 Jun) - No Moonkin Help in ICC

Tuesday (15 Jun) - No Moonkin Help in ICC

Last weekend Wild came "this" close to spending 8k gold for a pair of boots to upgrade his moonkin gear. Happy talked him out of it, pointing out that Icecrown Citadel had seven items that would upgrade Wild's gear at no cost. The gear just had to drop, and Wild just had to roll high enough to win them. Tuesday night, Wild figured he'd get four chances to get one of those seven items. On the night two nice trinkets did drop, but they were trinkets Wild already had. None of the seven +hit gear available in ICC dropped. Happy is doing his darndest to keep Wild away from the Auction House.

Our ICC10 on Tuesday night had several new faces. The MM guild did finally get two groups together, but it was well after 7pm before our group was able to get started. We did not have our regular off tank, but a DPS pally that is one of our regulars switched to tank spec for this run. We were also missing our regular paladin healer, and for awhile there I thought we would try to two heal it with Wild and the priest, Lg, who is also a regular. He's a good healer, but not nearly as well geared as the paladin, and that would have made things a real challenge. We did get a third healer, though, a druid healer like Wild who was in the MM guild but who I'd never run with before.

Wild was asked to heal the off tank instead of the main tank, giving that role to the other druid. Since the paladin who was doing the off tanking did not usually tank, the raid leader felt it was better to have Wild healing him. It was a good strategy, even though it got Wild killed. More than once.

We were working on the groups of trash mobs leading up to Lord Marrowgar, the first boss. Our lovely lady rogue, who's microphone was no longer working and who's voice on vent I missed, was having a little bout of lack of confidence in herself. Her job was to stealth around the area and find the traps that if tripped would release a big nasty hostile. But she was missing them somehow, and we kept tripping traps. Compounding that, the off tank was trying very hard to get into tank mode, and normally the trash mob battles were a good way to get settled in. With the big nasty's adding more challenge and confusion to the fight, the off tank was having a little trouble keeping control of the mobs he was tanking. And when that happened? Those mobs came right after Wild. Wild did what he could, Barkskinning, eating his "candy" (slang for a healthstone, which each raider usually has one of when there is a warlock to make them for us), casting his instant heals, and trying to kite the thing attacking me to the off tank so he could take control again. Wild still died twice before we were through with the trash.

All was good, though. We made it to Marrowgar and killed him on our first try. Wild was curious about how Wild and the new druid would stack up with each other. After all, we were likely going to be stealing each other's heals to some extent, assuming he would be a better geared healer than the priest since he'd been assigned to tank heal. The numbers for Marrowgar were Wild #1 (4803 hps) and the other druid #2 (3846 hps). That was still a very good hps for the other druid, and Wild figured we were set with our healing.

We had more interesting problems on the trash leading up to the second boss, Deathwhisper, and Wild died a third time. "What, am I covered in honey or something?" Wild asked after the third death. "Mmmm, honey," the lady rogue typed in chat. If only I could hear her voice. Deathwhisper went down on our first try as well. I must have been really distracted by that rogue, as the other druid healer beat Wild in healing, 3378 hps to 3005 hps. Concentrate, Wild, concentrate!

After a solid Gunship run last week, the quirks and bugs reappeared when we cast off the lines and launched the ship on this night. The raid leader asked the off tank if he wanted the jump ship role. It was his first time using the rocket launcher to fly to the enemy ship to bring the battle to them. He made the leap just fine, but didn't position close enough to the rails of the enemy ship for Wild to be able to heal him. Wild and the raid leader tried to talk him over to the right spot, but he didn't make it, and died. We won the battle on our second attempt easily. Wild got back to #1 in healing, 2809 hps to 2763 hps.

The fourth and final boss in the first wing is Deathbringer Saurfang. We've finally learned, I thought, that for this fight we'd use only two healers, with the third healer switching to DPS. That third healer has always been the priest, but since we already had a shadow priest in the raid the other druid decided to switch to cat form DPS. From a pure DPS perspective, that was a good move because on our first attempt our cat druid was #2 in DPS (5166 DPS), second only to the rogue. Melee DPS should lead because Saurfang never moves during the fight, making him an easy target for the melee. The problem, we soon discovered, was that we had only two ranged DPS. Ranged DPS is critical to stop and kill the beasts that spawn several times during the fight. The beasts do HUGE damage and love to target healers. The ranged DPS has to aggro them, kite them, and kill them. With so few ranged DPS some of the melee had to help, taking away from doing damage to Saurfang, and giving the beasts a chance to hit the melee (which has the side effect of healing Saurfang). We fought well, but we could not bring down Saurfang and eventually hit the enrage timer and wiped.

On our second attempt we went with two druids healing and two shadow priests, which at least gave us three ranged DPS to work with. Again we made a good attempt, but our healer/shadow priest could only deliver 2530 DPS (#6, last among all the DPSers), and it wasn't enough to kill the beasts fast enough. Beasts found targets, Saurfang would gain health back, and eventually we were overwhelmed by beasts.

We gave it a third try, but one of our DPS disconnected right after the fight started. Short a ranged DPS, we had no chance whatever and wiped again.

They will be going after Saurfang again on Wednesday night, and the pally healer should be back to take Wild's place. Wild won't be there. I'll be cheering on the San Diego Padres at Petco Park.