Thursday (26 Aug) - Shorin' Up the Ship

Thursday (26 Aug) - Shorin' Up the Ship

I thought I might have to title this post "Start Bailing" but the G2 ICC10 ship hasn't started sinking quite yet.

It was an inauspicious start to our second night of ICC10, though. We wiped on the first set of trash mobs, which left us wondering if we had completely lost our way. There were reasons (or excuses) for the wipe. That first group of mobs spawns adds that are mirrors of our own players, and we got a rogue duplicate that duplicated three times and all three healers found themselves being stunned by these rogues. The fact that the tanks couldn't pull them off and the DPS didn't kill them quickly ... well, that we couldn't explain. On our second try we goofed again and pulled two sets of mobs instead of just the one, but that time we easily killed them all. Go figure.

We'd only downed five bosses on Wednesday night, so the first target of the evening was Rotface. We have the strategy down for this fight, but Rotface can still challenge us. We were very happy to kill him on our first try.

When Wild first joined G2, Wild was clearly the best geared of the three healers. Cr was a close second, with Pl needing the most gear upgrades. By now Cr and Wild are pretty much in a dead heat gear-wise (Cr is actually slightly in the lead) and there is very little in ICC10 that we can use as healers (we both still want DPS gear, but as an offspec that gear is almost always going to main spec DPSers). That opened a lot of gear up for Pl, and she is now almost at Wild and Cr's level of gear. Evidence that we are all nearly equal showed in the numbers from the Rotface fight:

#1: Wild, 3582 hps/35.8% healing
#2: Pl, 3665/30.3%
#3: Cr, 4064/30.2%

We then worked our way to Valithria Dreamwalker, wiping on trash on the way. My opinion is that we are just getting extremely careless on trash mobs, plunging right into them without any preparation or thought to who is ready or not. Sometimes ... sometimes I think it would be worth it to open the mike and really get them to pay attention to what we're doing ... sometimes.

As you know, Dreamwalker is an interesting encounter in that the goal is to heal the dragon to 100%, not kill her. Wild and Cr are the dragon healers. Pl is the raid healer. While Wild and Cr go in and out of a portal, stacking up a healing buff to give us super healing powers, Pl and the rest of the raid have to stay outside and survive wave after wave of deadly and clever mobs. Those waves won't stop until Dreamwalker reaches 100% health, so the whole raid is dependant on Wild and Cr to make that happen as quickly as possible. The longer the fight goes, the more likely bad things will start to happen.

Last week Wild and Cr had a long discussion about holy priest healing on this fight and came up with a spell rotation approved by expert priest healers that we anticipated would push up Cr's healing on this fight. Wild, for his part, had shuffled some gear to get my +haste stat past the soft cap (something I should have done before now, but could never get the right set of gear). That would speed up Wild's heals even further and should also bring up my numbers on this fight.

On attempt #1 we had the usual settling in of the raid and the dragon healing was cut a bit short when we wiped. Wild was over 13k healing, and pretty pleased with that considering the early wipe. Cr was under 6k, less than half of what Wild was making. The numbers didn't change that much on our second attempt, another wipe. This was getting to be a concern for both of us, particularly since she was using the new rotation. It had also caught the attention of at least one raider, Gv, a hunter who is either married to or a couple with Pl. He and Pl were looking at the numbers and wondering why Cr was so much lower than Wild. Wild and Gv had a whispered conversation about that, with Wild getting him caught up on the past two weeks and what we'd been working on. I still didn't know what was wrong.

Gv decided to ask the raid leader, Lady Hunter, to switch roles between Pl and Cr to see if that would help the fight. Lady Hunter leaves all healing issues to the healers, but Wild okayed the switch as I was willing to try anything at this point. Cr was extremely unhappy with that decision, and I could understand why she would feel that her competence was being questioned. All I knew was that all my research about holy priest healing on Dreamwalker said that they should do much better than what we were getting.

Well, on our third attempt we wiped again, although we did last longer into the fight, getting Dreamwalker to 85% health. Part of that, I'm sure, was Cr's raid healing since she is still a bit better geared than Pl. However, we were all disappointed with the dragon healing once again. Pl delivered 5460 hps, which was in the same range as Cr. Wild got his hps up over 15k on that attempt.

Baffled and a little unnerved I think by the unchanging results, Pl asked to go back to raid healing and Cr definitely wanted her role back as well. I wanted the girls happy so we switched them back to their original roles.

Attempt #4: Wild kept up the 15k hps pace, and Cr got her numbers up over 7.5k, which got us even closer to bringing down Dreamwalker.

Attempt #5 failed because Wild missed a portal and I lost my stack of buffs. Cr got close to 9k and Wild dropped to around 12k. There might be a glimmer of a reason here, though. Remember that Cr asked Wild to divide up the portal area so that we weren't stealing orbs from each other - each orb increases our stack of buffs by one, so we try to get as many as we can. With Wild missing an entire portal, Cr had the field to herself during that particular portal. Cr (and even Pl, who did the portal just the one time and so wasn't very practiced at it) may just not be getting enough buffs. Wild can get over 20 buffs going after 3-4 portals; Cr says she is getting those numbers, too ... but I wonder. Either that or she's dropping her stack. I don't know what else it could be.

We saved Dreamwalker on our 6th attempt. Wild broke over 19k healing (19702 hps to be exact) with Cr getting just under 7k. Gv whispered Wild, "we owe this win to your craziness, you know" referring to Wild's crazy healing. "You are just stomping on everyone in there." Wild appreciated the pat on the back ... but I still don't know for sure why our priests are having trouble.

I am tempted to suggest another strategy the next time we face Dreamwalker. Let Wild go into the portals alone. We were able to save Dreamwalker with 26k total healing between both Wild and Cr. By himself, Wild might be able to reach 30 stacks and reach the same amount of healing as both healers did. That is a strategy used by successfully several guilds. The extra benefit is that two healers would then be available to help heal the raid; or, one of the healers could go shadow spec and we'd have an extra DPSer. I'd at least like to give it a try.

We moved on and made two "sort of" attempts on Putricide. It was supposed to be practice, but we didn't last long enough on either try to really call it productive. I guess Dreamwalker had worn us out.

After the raid we had a quick discussion about next week's raid. Lady Hunter offered to lock the raid so that we would not have to clear all the same bosses again. Everyone agreed. What that means is that next week we will start where we left off - facing Putricide. Next week will be our first real test on whether we are ready or not to face the tougher half of Icecrown Citadel - a measure of whether we have any chance at all at the Lich King.