For the second night of our ICC10 raid we chose as our first target the green dragon Valithria Dreamwalker. In an FS guild ICC25 some months ago Wild had got to experience this battle, which is quite a bit different than most of the encounters in ICC, or anywhere else. Wild was assigned to raid heal, which was a challenging but pretty straightforward task, but not anything like what some of the other healers in the raid were doing. We beat the encounter, so Wild can say that he has experience winning it, but frankly I had no clue even after the fight about what all was going on.
The only other raider in our current ten man group who'd ever seen Dreamwalker was Bf, Wild's shaman friend and FS guildie, who was playing the hunter alt he has in the MM guild. The other eight raiders would be seeing it for the first time, and Wild was going to get to learn how this fight really worked - for the first time.
Valithria Dreamwalker is the first boss in the third wing of ICC, called Frostwing Halls. The main wrinkle in this fight is that Dreamwalker is not the enemy. She had been captured, and it was conjectured she was used in experiments having to do with the spectral world of the Emerald Dream. Our task in this encounter is to save Dreamwalker. Dreamwalker begins with 50% health. Winning the fight requires us to heal her up to 100%. Of course, if that is all that we had to do, it would be easy. However, Dreamwalker's keepers don't take kindly to having us trying to free their pet dragon, and they do everything they can to stop us.
Valithria Dreamwalker
There are five different kinds of attackers, all with different and nasty abilities, and they come in wave after wave throughout the fight. It took more than ten minutes to describe all of the abilities and the rather complex kill order. Sh, our shaman healer, was assigned to heal the entire raid on his own. Wild and Ch, our holy priest, had a different role. Our job was to concentrate all our healing on Dreamwalker. By ourselves, it would take far too long to do that, as the dragon needs about six million in healing to get her to 100%. But Dreamwalker can help a bit. Regularly, throughout the fight, Dreamwalker opens a portal to a part of the Emerald Dream. Raiders entering this place can fly. Floating yellow clouds surround Dreamwalker, and when flown through provide powerful healing buffs that stack as you fly through more clouds. The trip only lasts a few seconds, and the raiders are returned to the real world again, but with those stacked buffs our healing output is monstrously enhanced.
We were excited and restless. Let's get this underway! We began.
We figured to need only one tank, and Mf got the call. The other tank, Bd, opted to switch to fury spec and do DPS. In front of Dreamwalker were four hostiles. Mf engaged them, and the DPS brought them down. Wild waited until the four mobs fell before running in to take up position to the right of Dreamwalker's head. Ch took up her position on the left side of the dragon's head. The rest of the raiders spread out and began tackling incoming mobs. Wild's heal reflexes twitched every time someone took damage, but I tried to focus on my single goal - heals on Dreamwalker. We had one minute of healing before the first portal opened and Wild tried to make the best of it, stacking all his HoTs on the dragon and then spamming my best large heal, Nourish. I was a bit cautious, not sure how the mana would last with that kind of non-stop heavy healing. Dreamwalker's health began sputtering upward from 50% to 52%.
A raid warning announced that a portal would soon open. Wild looked around and noticed the appearance of a number of small, green, eggshaped things floating about waist high to Wild. I tried to interact with one of them, then remembered that it took a few seconds before the eggshape opened into a portal. Wild has seen a lot of different kinds of portals, in all shapes and sizes and ways of opening them. The eggshape began morphing into a circular swirl of green light about three times the size of the eggshape. Wild tried running through it, jumping through it, coming in from one side and the other, but nothing worked. The portal closed, and Wild had not gotten the buffs. The battle around Wild raged on, and on this first attempt the lone tank went down quickly as raiders worked to figure out the fight. Ch had made it into the portal, and her 7k healing vs Wild's 4k healing showed how much those buffs helped healing. Wild asked for clarification on how to get into the portals, and I was told that they didn't really work like the portals we were familiar with, they worked more like vehicles. There is a special bar the game uses to display vehicle commands, the most common being an arrow bent into a half circle used to mount and dismount the vehicle. Wild made sure that bar was active for our second attempt.
We didn't get much farther on our second attempt. Raiders were still learning. Wild failed again to find a way to enter a portal, as his vehicle bar never displayed anything. After another discussion with Ch, she said that the half-circle arrow would show on the swirling portal itself when the mouse hovered over it. Ok, Wild said he'd give that a try on the next attempt.
On our third try Wild successfully entered a portal. What a relief! The first time Wild entered, it took a second to realize anything had changed. Dreamalker was still exactly where he was in the "outside" world. But all of the other raiders were gone. And floating some twenty feet above Wild's head were a ring of floating yellowish clouds that shifted this way and that, as if in response to some unfelt wind. Wild made a move like he was in his flying form, and sure enough, he could fly. A flying tree! Ch had also told Wild that she had learned that when she flew through one of the clouds, it was best to hang inside it a second to catch the soundless, harmless explosion from it. That explosion is what provides the buffs, and if she flew through it too quickly she'd miss the explosion and the buff. Wild had a brief bout of panic when he first tried to fly through one of the moving clouds, with visions of his ineptitude in other flying encounters like the hated Occulus dungeon. Wild started getting buffs, though, and from there on he was a demon flying through the air, pricking clouds, and getting his buffs.
The portal closed and Wild found himself twenty feet in the air. It was a hard landing, but only a pittance of health lost. One buff enhanced rejuv got Wild back to full health and pouring heals into Dreamwalker. After the first portal, new portals came up pretty quickly. Wild had barely started spamming Nourish after dropping his Hots than a new portal was announced as incoming. Mana regen was a completely non-issue with the buffs. Wild spammed his entire arsenal of heals and never dropped his mana below 95%. What power! But things went south soon after that, raiders started dying, with Wild and Ch having to divert healing to try to keep the raid alive, and we wiped.
One tank was just not enough, so Bd switched back into tanking spec for the next attempt. Our fourth attempt went much better, but it was another wipe. Wild had almost caught up with Ch in dragon healing, her with 7.6k healing and Wild at 7.3k. We should be able to do much better, and needed to be quicker in getting the maximum buffs we could.
Our fifth attempt was our best yet, and we got Dreamwalker to 88% health before wiping.
We slipped a bit on attempt #6, although Wild and Ch both had gotten our healing per second (hps) up over 9.5k. The goal, I think, is to get total hps on the dragon up above 20k. We were close to that.
On our 7th attempt Wild missed the second portal. I don't know how. I just couldn't find the handle and it went away before I could enter. All those stacks of healing buffs dropped off and Wild's healing fell dramatically until I could start building them back with the next portal. That proved fatal. The fight went longer than any of our previous attempts, and as the pressure mounted we suddenly saw Dreamwalker start to stir. She spoke words of encouragement to us and warning to her captors. She was getting stronger. She was at 92% when we wiped. Boy, does Wild wish he'd not missed that portal!
We never got any closer to winning her freedom. We made a total of 11 attempts, trying a number of different things, all "learning encounters," ie, failures. Wild and Ch both were able to break over 10k hps, but we would need to either squeeze out even more dragon healing or find a way to keep the rest of the raid alive longer.
Next week we'll hope for another six boss kill night so we can get back at her again. Despite the cost in consumables and repair bills, and the absence of loot, I really do love learning new encounters!
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