Wednesday (6 Oct) - Hitting on all Cylinders

Wednesday (6 Oct) - Hitting on all Cylinders

Wildshard intended to beg off on the G2 ICC10 run Wednesday night. It was just another farming run, as expected. There were guildies signed up that were still wearing ilevel 200 gear. Wild was the only healer that had signed up for the run. This was not going to be good. So Wild sent Philly in his stead.

Philly logged in game about 6:15pm just in time for invites. But the raid leader wasn't in game yet. Raiders trickled in. At 6:26pm things started looking very strange, and then the game tilted, froze, and Philly was disconnected. DC's have been happening more and more often, not just with Wild's toons, but other players as well. Increasing DC's are a preview of what is going to be a rough ride through the Patch and Cata releases. Philly attempted to log back in and could not. Last week there had been a conflict with the Blizzard login program and the Avast! anti-virus program. So I thought that might be the problem again, and used the fix from last week. That didn't work, either. I wound up rebooting the system. That worked, but it was 6:46pm when Philly finally got back in game. They had waited for me, holding my spot in the raid open. Well, they waited for Wild, anyway. The first thing said when Philly logged in was, "you're on the wrong toon, Honey," from the raid leader. I made a half-hearted attempt at getting Philly into the raid, but ... I rounded up Wild, tearing him away from the craps table or a bath and massage or whatever else it was he had planned for the evening. Wild told himself "They need you, and they waited for you. Get your furry butt in there." Furry butt, aye.

Again this week we were going to run with two healers. While Philly/Wild was trying to log back in game, Pl and her partner Gv had also been having login trouble and had only recently gotten logged in. Pl is one of our regular priest healers. We had our two regular tanks and a third tank, Bd, was playing DPS until/if needed to tank. Where it had looked like we might have as many as three new players in the raid, by the time we filled the raid we had only one new face.

We were ready to go. The main tank set a fast pace. He jettisoned our usual three ready checks with five minutes of fooling around between combat. We got one ready check. If all said Yes, he started the assault immediately. Wild, who was trying to log his healing numbers, got caught flat footed a couple of times and nearly got the tank killed. Nearly. Wild recovered quickly, and paid closer attention.

Lord Marrowgar never knew what hit him. When he fell into a heap of shattered bones someone quipped, "He's dead already?" We massacred Deathwhisper and sunk the Gunship in record time. The one new face in the raid, a shaman alt of someone, had already picked up two very nice pieces of gear, gear that Philly would definitely have rolled on. Oh well.

Saurfang went down next, although we did get a little sloppy with raiders not paying attention to staying at the proper range away from each other. The battle went longer than it should, but Saurfang still died long before the enrage timer became an issue. Our raid leader was having issues with her computer so we took a five minute break. "Don't lose focus," we were told. "We are tearing this place apart tonight."

If we slacked off at all during the Festergut fight, no one noticed. Our shaman was the only death, immediately battle rezzed. We rolled into the more difficult Rotface fight and when he died we still had 80 minutes left in raiding time despite starting 20 minutes late. We were just a little stunned. Why haven't we been doing this before?

Ok, that was fun. Professor Putricide, for all his joking around, isn't very fun. He was next, right? Nope, the raid leader had other ideas. She wanted Valithria Dreamwalker.

We only had two healers, and three are a must for the Dreamwalker fight. Bd, on his warrior, offered to switch to his druid, who could heal. Wow, Bd was willing to lock both of his toons to this one raid. It also set up a showdown between Bd and Wild on who would do better healing the dragon and sacking orbs in the portal. Druids are considered the best class for this fight, and tonight it was a pair of druids responsible for saving Dreamwalker.

Pl, who often heals the raiders outside the portal, again had that duty. We didn't spend a lot of time talking about the fight. We seemed to do better not thinking too much, but focusing on the battle and getting out there!

I'll admit Wild was very focused, not wanting to screw up while competing with his good friend, and good healer, Bd. It was very much a friendly competition, with both of us encouraging each other and wanting us both to do well. Wild was so focused, I was still furiously healing the dragon when she leapt into the air, free at last. We'd beaten the Dreamwalker fight on our first attempt.

Well, we couldn't delay it any longer. Putricide was our next target. While we are still struggling with this fight, our confidence has been building. We have practiced mightily over several weeks and we are close to finding that right mix of gear, talent, and execution (with a break or two).

Wild was given the anchor job for our ranged raiders. In that role it's my responsibility to stand at the right spots, moving as required, as every ranged DPS and healer moved with me. Doing that is imperative so that we all stay clumped together when there are green slime explosions. The damage is spread out among all those close to it. If too few are close, those unlucky raiders doing the right thing usually die.

That's exactly what happened to Wild on our first attempt. We had fought Putricide into the second phase, and were dealing with a green slime attack. We had been doing well at killing the slimes after a single explosion. Raiders were returning from being thrown about during that first explosion and Wild was rallying them where the second explosion would occur if the slime was alive long enough. DPSers thought they could kill the slime before the explosion, and did not collapse around Wild's position. They didn't make it, and the slime exploded. Wild didn't make it, either, dying before his corpse slammed against the wall I'd been tossed at. We got Putricide to 48% on that attempt, still short of getting to the final phase 3.

We got very excited on our second attempt, reaching the third phase for only the second time in all our prior attempts, and getting him to 25% before wiping. It was 9:30pm, the end of our raid, but we all voted to give it one more try. We did, but we finally started to feel some burn out and only got him to 52%.

As for the healing numbers, I scribbled them down as quickly as I could, but missed some of the numbers. Here goes:

Marrowgar: Wild, 6481 hps/58% healing; Pl 4524/?
Deathwhisper: Wild, 3805/52%; Pl 3369/43%
Gunship: Wild 2708/56%; Pl 2307/39%
Saurfang: Wild 4135/50%; Pl 3534/34%
Festergut: Wild 6886/50%; 5928/41%
Rotface: Wild 4845/46%; Pl 5454/44%

Dreamwalker was a joy. Wild and Bd were near mirror images of each other and it was really nice that Wild didn't feel like I had to do twice as much to help out the priests who usually partner up with Wild on this fight. Like I said before, this fight is made for druid healing.

Bd: 14,462 hps and 43.6% total healing
Wild: 14,851 hps and 41.7% total healing

That's almost thirty thousand healing, considerably more (and achieved faster) than any combination of healers we've used before. Of course, we should be doing even better than that, but hey, it was enough.

Overall on the night, seven boss encounters beaten.

I really hope everyone from this night's raid returns for Thursday night. I'm actually excited about the chance we'll kill Putricide and do some real progression. Oh, and the sun is shining in Southern California today, too.