Wednesday (1 Sep) - Fail

Wednesday (1 Sep) - Fail

Where to begin. Last week's ICC downed 7 bosses over two nights: Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, the Gunship, Saurfang, Festergut, Rotface, and Dreamwalker. While Rotface and Dreamwalker still require several attempts to kill, we do know we can kill them. The only other boss we have attempted, Putricide, we have yet to come close to killing. We agreed as a raid last week that we needed to spend more time on the later bosses, and we needed to do it while we were fresh, instead of at the end of the night. We agreed to lock the raid so that we would be able to start with Putricide this week.

Scroll forward to Wednesday night. We have two new raiders, one who is unfamiliar with the fights and another (a friend from FS) who had recently returned to the game who knew the fights but was playing on a toon that hadn't been in ICC yet. Before we started the evening, the raid leader wanted to take a new vote on whether we should maintain the lock on the raid or restart it at the beginning. I don't know what prompted a new vote, but I would guess that some raiders had questioned last week's decision. We had one raider offline when the vote was taken, and the vote went 5-4 in favor of maintaining the lock. Had Wild not publicly come out in favor of the lock vs two folks who supported a restart, I think the vote would have gone the other way. Those in favor of the restart are content with collecting frost badges from the first bosses and what few pieces of gear are left for them to get from those bosses. Some are likely frustrated and discouraged by our lack of progress on the rest of the bosses in ICC. Wild is frustrated, too, which is why I wanted to spend a full two nights working on fixing that.

I have to admit that it didn't work. We made four attempts on Putricide, and then gave up on him. Our best attempt got him down to 63%, which is a long way from killing him. We have yet to get past the second phase of this three phase fight. More unfortunately, I don't think we learned anything from those four attempts. We are still making the same mistakes.

After throwing in the towel against Putricide, we moved on to learn a new encounter, the Blood Prince Council, usually referred to as "the princes." There are three bosses in this fight. They share one health pool, and only one can be attacked at a time while the others must still be tanked and can do damage but can't be hit. There are a lot of things for raiders to remember and a lot of things for raiders to avoid in this fight. Wild has done this fight with ICC25 and I think it's a fun fight. I also think it's easier to learn and master than Putricide. Our raid leader, sigh, was not prepared and could do no more than read the strategy for it off the website. Frankly it may have been the first time she looked at it. As raiders we should have done more to be prepared for it too, but most of us came from G1 at one time or another and we have really gotten used to being spoon fed the strategy down to what each of us individually is required to do. That doesn't happen in G2, and if we are going to get anywhere past where we are now we are going to need help. Perhaps tragically for us, the G1 raid leader who could do that for us has been out of the game now for a couple of weeks on RL issues with no firm date of return.

I'll give us credit for making six attempts on the princes. We did change strategies midway even after saying we weren't going to do that, altering the tank strategy. We did slightly better with the new strategy in the early going, but I think ultimately it's the wrong approach as it gets harder and harder for the tanks as the fight progresses. The best I can say is that we've now seen the fight. I don't think we have a clue how to deal with it yet.

We'll be back to starting from the beginning next week. I'm strongly considering bringing Philly instead of Wild for the first night at least. That would mean having three priests in the raid, which is not really optimal. Cr, one of the priests, also has a level 80 paladin healer that has been in ICC raids. A swap there might be something to talk about.

Ideally, we need to have someone in our raid who can really run the raid and who knows how to explain the strats. Even the small suggestions I made on the guild website to improve our time management has been ignored. Our current raid leader is a master at organizing a raid and getting players to come. She just needs some help with the tactical side of keeping us moving forward during the actual raiding. I'm going to talk to the MM guild leader and see what he might suggest.