Thursday (19 Aug) - ICC 5/10

Thursday (19 Aug) - ICC 5/10

Philly's attempts to get the ICC 5 man triplet of dungeons done is becoming comical. Philly has completed the first dungeon - heroic Forge of Souls (FoS). She signed up on the dungeon finder to do the second heroic dungeon, Pit of Saron. Instead, after a 15 minute wait, she wound up in FoS. Not wanting to waste the 15 minute wait, Philly stayed and completed it. However, she was unable to complete the Pit of Saron quest that was part of chain of quests Philly has to complete. Philly was able to talk to the quest giver outside PoS, but she just babbled about the Lich King and was otherwise unhelpful. Wild vaguely remembered some kind of bug that he had to get around to complete the quest. Going to have to research that. Not getting the quest done is probably why Philly was pushed into FoS instead of PoS.

Later ... Philly checked on how to get around the bug and then went back to Icecrown Citadel and entered PoS. Lady Sylvanus "should" be waiting inside, but because of the bug she was was noticeably absent. So Philly wandered around inside, being careful not to aggro the large dragon (Tyrannus) that hovered a few feet away. After a couple of minutes a small army of friendly npcs appeared along with the Lady. She had Philly's quest and completed it. Now, I hope, Philly is finally ready to get into PoS.

Philly would have to wait on that PoS run, however, giving way to Wild and the second night of ICC10.

It was another somewhat frustrating night of delays and waiting around, but more and more the group is starting to realize that we need to step things up if we are indeed want to see the Lich King. The raid leader, Lady Hunter, opted to start with Valithria Dreamwalker. That was a good choice, even when a raider started a trash mob gauntlet before the raid was ready. Half the raid died when the gates closed, separating those inside the gauntlet and those out. Wild knew not to enter, and did what I could to heal those inside.

Wild and Cr (our main holy priest) chat via whispers pretty frequently during our raids. There's a lot of talk about healing and strategies, of course, but we also talk about other things. She has a distinct accent and I believe she is from England. She may actually be playing from England, although I did not get around to asking that. If so, her time zone is 8 hours later than Wild's, putting the starting time for her at 3:30am. Whoa.

We struggled a bit with Dreamwalker, with Wild and Cr only managing to get up to 12k+ on healing the dragon. We seemed to be stealing each other's orbs inside the portal, and Cr suggested that we divide up the area. Wild agreed, admitting that Wild was something of a hog about grabbing the orbs. "Yea, hog," whispered Cr, "give me a chance at some of those orbs." Wild laughed.

We saved Dreamwalker on our 4th attempt, but it was a close thing with most of the raid dead when Wild emerged from the portal for the final time. But Dreamwalker hit 100% health, and when that happens she leaps into the air and kills the remaining bad guys. Wild set a new high for healing per second, getting 19543 hps. Cr was well behind at 10035 hps, enough to give us the victory, but we've got to find a way for her to increase that number. Wild did some research, and passed along some suggestion to her for next week.

After Dreamwalker, we headed back to get Rotface, which we had failed to kill on Wednesday. It took us two tries, but we got him. Cr got the better of Wild on healing on Rotface:

Cr: 3633 hps/33.5% heaing
Wild: 2811/32.2%
Pl: 3016/29.6%

We were now back to our record of seven boss kills out of twelve. It was time to take on the talkative Professor Putricide again.

We've been struggling with our strategy for this fight. We've tried several things but haven't really settled on one approach. After four attempts on Putricide on this night, I think we are set on what strategy to use. Now all we need is practice. We did show promise, getting him to phase 2 on three of our attempts. Of course, there are three phases, so we aren't there yet, but we were improving and I wished we'd had more time. On Friday morning Wild posted some suggestions on the guild forums that I feel would improve the flow of the raid and gain back considerable lost time. The guild website is not used much, but Wild intends to let the raid leader know it's been posted and to pass that along to the rest of the raid. I think many will agree; the crux of the matter will be whether everyone will abide by them and whether it would be enforced.

In other guild news, the raid leader for FS posted on the FS website (which Wild is still a member of) a sizable discussion about leveling and raiding once Cataclysm arrives. As expected, it was a very organized and precise assessment of who and how fast guildies would get to level 85, and how that would affect establishing first five man dungeon teams and then raid groups. It's hard to tell how many raiders are left in FS (with so many alts), but it is definitely less than the 20-25 raiders available for the two ICC10 groups that were running before the other FS raid leader left (with perhaps a half dozen others) to form their own guild. It's pretty certain, though, that they'll have one high performing, near hardcore ten man ready to go not too long after Cataclysm arrives.

The future of 25 man raiding in Cat is somewhat fuzzy because of the change in raiding loot. Currently there is different loot in 10 and 25 man raids, with the 25 man offering better loot. In Cat, the loot in the 10/25 man raids will be the same, the only difference being that more of that loot will drop in 25 man. In may happen that the 10 mans will be used to learn the fights and gear up the core raiders, and that the 25 man will be used to farm loot. Heroic/hard modes of the raids will still offer the best loot.