Philly played hooky on Saturday afternoon. I was supposed to be outside with the Mrs, our recovering cat, and the dog on a picture postcard Southern California day. But as Philly was wrapping up her dailies and preparing to log off, she got a whisper from a guildie. "You dps or heals?"
Uh, why are you asking? was my first thought. Then I realized that it was 3pm and that Philly had signed up as "tentative" for a 3pm ICC 25 run. The run had been canceled for the past two Saturdays due to lack of participation, and the week before that (which Wild had been part of) had started two hours late. Well, it was still early, Philly reasoned, and most likely the run would be called off anyway, so . . . Philly whispered back, "my main is shadow spec but offspec is disc, prefer dps but ok with healing."
A few minutes later Philly was invited into the raid as a ranged dps. The first thing Philly did once she was in the raid was to fly to Icecrown Citadel and enter the instance. I was still under the impression that Philly had to complete the three ICC5 dungeons to be able to enter ICC 10/25 (which she still hasn't done). I figured that if she couldn't get in then I would bring Wild instead. Philly entered ICC with no problem. Woot!
We managed to get 17 guildies to join the raid, and then filled in with a few non-guildie friends and even a couple of PUGs. Even so, it was 3:55pm before we got started, and we went with 23 instead of 25 raiders. Philly was not the worst geared, but she was far from being among the better geared. This would be a great opportunity for her. Cr, Wild's healing partner in ICC10, was also in the raid. We chatted a bit and Cr got a bit a confused at my "she" and "her" references (to Philly, who is a female toon). Finally she whispered Philly and said "I thought you were a guy!" After teasing her a bit (how could I resist?) and getting her more confused - "You know," she whispered, "I don't think I've ever heard your voice in vent" - I relented and told her "I'm a guy. I also never speak in vent." I let that sink in and then told her, "So if you want to pull someone else's chain you can start a rumor by wondering about that."
Cr played her own tricks on me, demanding that I switch to healing (and claiming she'd passed that on to the raid leader) and telling me she was going to out roll Philly on all priest loot. Cr is a lot of fun to fool around with. I learned that she is in the central time zone and lives in a small town two hours from "civilization" in her words. As I've mentioned before she has a strong accent that I took for British, but I'm probably wrong about that. Will have to ask her about that sometime.
Anyway, there was a raid in there somewhere, an important one for Philly, who was seeing ICC for the very first time.
Shadow priests use a set of spells that is part rotation and part priorities. It starts with a rotation of five spells: Vampiric Touch (VT), Mind Blast (MB), Mind Flay (MF), Shadow Word: Pain (SWP), and Devouring Plague (DP). That set of spells, in that order, triggers two things - shadoweaving, a damage bonus that must be maintained to do the highest level of damage, and an automatic refreshment of SWP. VT, SWP, and DP are all DoTs that MUST be kept ticking at all times. DoTs are where a shadow priest gets most of her damage. So after the initial rotation, Philly's first priority is to refresh VT and DP whenever their timer expires. Her second priority is to cast MB whenever it is not on cooldown. And her third priority is to spam MF when she has met her other two priorities. Taking all that into account while having to move around, taking damage, switching targets, etc, is still new and challenging to Philly.
Finally, we were ready to start on the trash mobs of ICC25. The tank pulled the first group of mobs. The first thing Philly saw was the Tank List covering the center of the screen. Ack! I can't see! Never mind that, just target the mob that the tank is targeting and start shooting! You can tell that Philly doesn't raid much, and her raid addons (which included the tank list) needed adjusting. No time for that now. For trash mobs Philly doesn't strictly follow the spell rotation/priorities described above. Mostly Philly used her three DoTs and when the two tanks had good aggro she would spam Mind Sear, which is a channeled AoE spell that hits multiple targets.
We had our first real test of the raid when two traps were triggered, bringing some big nasties into the fight. We adjusted quickly, the tanks picked up the mobs and the DPS laid into them. Philly took some hits, and that reminded her to keep up her own Shield to reduce the damage and spare healer mana. Cr had teased Philly that she wasn't going to heal Philly, but from the recount logs it was clear she was looking after me.
I was a little surprised that we had so little problem with the trash mobs and Philly quickly found herself standing in front of Lord Marrowgar. Wild had told her all about this boss, but seeing the multi-limbed and multi-headed beast was still an exciting sight. Philly was going to be tackling her first ICC boss! We began.
Philly rushed in along with the rest of the raid as the tanks wrestled Marrowgar to the door, positioning the boss with it's back to us. Philly crowded in close to avoid the lines of white flame that would quickly kill her. Then she loaded up her spells and let fly. Raiders started getting hit with Bone Spike. As a healer, Wild would immediately toss some heals on the Spiked raider; as a DPS, Philly was supposed to drop some DPS on the Spike in order to get it off the raider. Hunters handled most of that, but other ranged DPS were asked to help out. Philly wasn't very good at that, though. She could tell from the raid frame who had been Spiked and could easily target the raider, but she constantly found herself facing the wrong way. Healers can heal even if their back is to their target. DPSers have to be facing their target or their attack will fail.
During Bone Storm (when Marrowgar runs around the chamber attacking everything near him) Wild could just stand and cast heals, moving only to avoid the lines of fire. Philly had to modify that because she still had to attack Marrowgar, and so had to follow him to stay in range as well as avoid those lines of fire. Philly handled that pretty well. We killed Marrowgar!
Your target is Dead
The "Boned 25" banner is an achievement where every Spike was destroyed in 8 seconds of less.
Philly didn't win any loot. We had 16 DPSers in the raid. Against Lord Marrowgar Philly finished 11th in dealing damage at 5672 DPS and 4.7% of the damage. Philly didn't suck. She'd survived an ICC boss. What more could she ask for?
Lady Deathwhisper gave Philly a new challenge in her DPS role. The mobs which spawn several times during the fight are peculiar in that the melee mobs are immune to ranged attacks and the ranged mobs are immune to melee attacks. Philly had to know which mobs were melee, because those were the only mobs she would be able to hit. To make that a little easier, groupings were set up and specific tanks assigned for melee and ranged mobs. As a ranged DPSer, Philly was assigned to that group along with a tank who would only be tanking melee mobs. Philly was worried about her targeting, but it wasn't as hard as she thought it would be. Philly was able to target the right mobs (most of the time - once in awhile she'd get an IMMUNE warning and that tipped her off to change targets). Philly kept all her DoTs on Deathwhisper as well and DPSed her hard whenever there were no mobs to deal with. Philly got mind controlled once and lashed out at the raid with several of Philly's nastier spells, but Philly was soon subdued and the mind control released. Philly negotiated the death knight pools of death and the un-killable ghosts while keeping her feet and her health, even as other raiders started to die. Deathwhisper went down. Philly had her second boss kill.
Lady Deathwhisper dropped [Nibelung]. This is a DPS caster two-handed staff that has a unique feature. Doing damage with it can sometimes cause a Val'kyr (flying mob) to be summoned and fight alongside it's owner. There were six rolls for the staff. Philly rolled a 93 out of 100. She TIED for the top roll with another raider not in the guild. The two of us rolled again. Philly's 82 on the second roll won her Nibelung. Philly's current staff, Perdition, is ilevel 232. Nibelung is i264, a massive upgrade for Philly. By the way, she finished 11th again with 4939 DPS and 4.9% damage. A second by the way - Wild was also a Nibelung winner some time ago and for awhile it was his main weapon in moonkin form.
After Deathwhisper we completed the weekly ICC quest as well, so Philly picked up an extra 5 frost badges, and then we defeated the Gunship encounter. In ICC25 generally only melee DPS is sent over to the enemy ship, so Philly got to stay on our ship and just kill mobs that swarmed over to our side. A very easy fight.
The raid was holding together well, and despite a couple of delays we had been pushing steadily forward. Now we faced Saurfang, a level of difficulty higher than the prior bosses. On this fight ranged DPS is responsible for stopping the beasts that spawn at certain points in the fight. Philly held a whispered conversation with Cr to find out how priests do that. But even though Cr has a shadow offspec, she had never done this fight in that spec. We decided that spamming Mind Flay, which slows down it's target, was the best spell to use on the beasts, and it worked well.
The Saurfang fight turned out to be the most fun for Philly. She'd pound away with her spells on the boss and then switch to the beasts when they spawned. Her attack often pulled the beasts toward her, and she'd strafe away a few feet and then launch another attack. Philly was often able to get damage on as many as three targets on each round. A bit past the halfway point Philly got Marked. Given Philly's low position on the damage meter, I figured the healers would just let Philly die, but instead Philly got some crazy healing and stayed in the fight until near the end, when one of the tanks got Marked and huge heals had to be directed his way. Philly sent her pet in to get in that last bit of damage, but forgot to hit Dispersion, which would have kept her alive a bit longer. She died, but seconds later Saurfang fell. Not only had Philly finished off a fourth ICC boss, she'd cleared the entire first wing!
By now it was just after 6pm and the raid broke up. It was an absolute blast for Philly and one she's going to want to get in on every week if she can.
Philly was generally very pleased with her performance in the raid. I discovered that Philly's Deadly Boss Mods (DBM) addon had not been active for the raid. While obviously not needed in the first wing, the raid warnings DBM provides would have been critically important against bosses like Festergut and Rotface. I made sure DBM would be turned on for the next time. Overall, Philly was 13th out of 16 DPS raiders in total damage. Comparing herself only to caster DPSers, she finished 5th out of six. The #1 caster DPSer, a mage, had 6235 DPS and 3.9% damage. Philly's overall numbers were 4915/4.0%. This included boss and trash fights.
Cr led in healing among the five healers with 4179 hps/18.4% healing. The top four healers were all over 4k hps. Only Wild's shaman friend, who was playing his rusty resto druid alt, finished out of the money with 2506 hps/10.8% healing. Philly surprised me with over 1500 hps as well, very high considering she was DPSing the whole fight. Philly has an ability called Vampiric Embrace which imparts healing buffs across the raid. But that was still a very high number. Then I remembered that Philly had been Marked in the Saurfang fight, which does crazy things with healing numbers. Sure enough, almost half of that healing came from the Mark (and it heals Saurfang, not the raid).
Oh, and I did get outside for some real life fun afterward.
No comments:
Post a Comment