Thursday (13 Jan) - No is Not an Answer

Thursday (13 Jan) - No is Not an Answer

Wild did not sign up for the G2 raid. Not on Wednesday, when it was canceled because the raid leader was snowed in at work. Not on Thursday, the rescheduled night for the G2 raid. Wild's gear was improving, but it was not "raid ready" as last week's raid leader clearly pointed out. I'm not going, even though only five people were signed up for the raid.

Wild planned to do at least one normal random dungeon and grind some more reputation. Wild might not even have logged in until later in the evening, but habits are hard to break. Wild logged in at about 5:45pm. Wild had barely had time to step out of the Org bank where he zoned in when he got a group invite from Bd, the raid leader for G2.

Wild sent a "Yea, wat's up?" in party chat. Bd replied, "I did invites for those who signed up first, now I'm stalking in game players for my raid." Consider Wild stalked and captured. Bd was going to raid no matter what, and he wanted Wild in his raid.

Bd worked quickly to fill the raid, and fifteen minutes after Wild was invited we had our ten raiders. Wild (i333), his shaman friend Bf (i344), and Ff (disc priest, i351) were the healers. The two tanks were Bd (i341) and Tk (i340). The numbers were interesting. While i329 is the "minimum" for Heroics, it seems an ilevel closer to i340 is really what's needed to be successful. So, here were heading into a raid, which has an even higher level of difficulty than Heroics. I would have thought our raiders were better geared given last week's snub. Wild still had the lowest ilevel among the healers and tanks in the raid, so I told Wild to just get over last week and think about this night, and this raid.

Wild grumbled but then took the time to look around. He got a new surprise - more than half the raid were guildies I'd never raided with before. There was definitely some new blood in the guild.

No destination had been set in the raid calendar, but Bd was in a bit of a hurry to pull a raid together because the Horde currently held Tol Barad (TB) and he wanted to take a crack at the "easiest" of the new Cata raids, Baradin Hold (BH). Wild, of course, has never seen BH. In fact Wild has never been to Tol Barad, either, a pair of islands off the Eastern Continent. TB is the equivalent of Wintergrasp. Both zones are pvp zones for major combat between the alliance and horde factions. Both have regularly scheduled battles to determine which faction will gain control of the zone and get access to the raid.

Wild got to TB via the portal in Orgrimmar. That portal is set a little apart from the other portals (which are all set around a circular platform). Once Wild knew there was a TB portal it wasn't that hard to find, though. Wild took the portal and zoned in to a little town, the name of which I've already forgotten. There's a flight path there, too. A good thing, since flying mounts aren't allowed in this zone.

BH is not on this island, however. Wild had to dig for the information, but there's a road from the town that partly circles the island and leads to a long bridge. Wild crossed the bridge and came to another island, at the center of which was Baradin Hold. many thanks to DER for fereting out that the name Tol Barad encompasses both islands, although the northern island is often unlabeled or even left out. The outer area of the hold has a half broken double ring of tall stone walls. The Summoning Stone is a little hard to find the first time as it's outside the walls and away from the road. The entrance to BH proper is very close to the Stone and looks like an open cellar door. The thing that surprised me the most, though, was that Wild was not automatically flagged for pvp, as players are when they enter Wintergrasp. I don't know what the rules are, but I assume that the faction that controls the zone truly has full control of it. I saw no alliance at all.

Baradin Hold is a one boss fight. Like VoA, there are additional wings in BH where new bosses will be added over time. The loot ranges from i359-i365. But I'm getting ahead of myself. There were a few trash mobs to deal with first.

Tk was the main tank on the trash mobs but we didn't assign specific healing roles. I'm not even sure whether Ff healed or went shadow and DPSed. The "plan" didn't work too well and we wiped. Wild hadn't turned on Recount so I don't know what the healing meters would have said, but I felt completely overmatched. It was only our first attempt, though. Wild asked what experience we had as a guild against BH. Bd said he led two attempts last week (all they had time for as the pvp battle was soon to start) and wiped both times.

To be honest I was pretty happy that all this was still new to everyone, not just Wild. I could feel the excitement building. I really love raiding and I especially love learning and mastering new encounters!

For our next attempt we made healing assignments. Wild was group 2 healer and I also HoTed up the main tank. We did much better the second time around, but wiped again. Wild was lowest in healing, but I was warming up to the competition. We cleared the trash on our third or fourth attempt. It wasn't easy, and Wild sucked down almost all his mana keeping "most" of the raid alive. There were deaths on every attempt. Wild again cursed at having to rely on the glacial slowness of his Nourish spell in order not to run out of mana.

The BH boss is Argolath, a demon pit lord. The strat described was pretty simple. Half the raid (with a tank and healer) sets up in the left hand corner of the room, the other half in the right hand corner. Argolath stands in the middle of a modest sized room. We had set rally points where the two groups would move to when the fight started. For the first phase the five raiders in each group would stack on our tank. Healing at this stage was pretty straightforward. Once in position Wild did not have to move at all. Just keep his tank and his group alive. The third healer was tasked with removing Consuming Darkness, a nasty debuff that hits up to three raiders. The tanks had the tricky part, as we soon found out.

We started the fight with Tk taking tanking duty first. For about ten seconds Wild had a handle on things. Then Consuming Darkness hit us. One of the raiders in my group was hit and Wild ramped up his healing. The debuff was taking HUGE chunks of health out of the affected raider, a rogue, more than Wild could keep up with. Wild paused his healing to debuff it himself, and the rogue died. On the heels of that Meteor Storm struck. This is a monster directional AoE that is aimed at the current tank but hits everyone in range (ie, ideally only the five raiders in that tank group). Wild's group damage also spiked way out of control, however, and I lost two more raiders. Two raiders on the tank group side were dead as well. After a Meteor Strike, the tanks switch off. Wild's tank, Bd, was still alive and picked up Algolath from Tk, but we were already pretty decimated. Another Consuming Darkness and a second Meteor Storm and it was a wipe.

On our second attempt the first tank, Tk, died on the first Meteor Storm. Another wipe.

We stubbornly kept to our strategy a few more times until we realized that our groups were too close together and the Meteor Storms were hitting both groups. There was a long discussion about debuffs, too. We had focused on debuffs being the problem and went full cicrle, from having a dedicated debuffer, to each healer debuffing his own group, and back to a dedicated debuffer. We had to work around the fact that Bf, our shaman healer, had not taken the talent point which would have given him the Debuff Magic ability, so only Ff and Wild could debuff. I bet Bf fixes that before he joins another raid.

We stretched out the distance between us, which helped with Meteor Storm but complicated debuffing. I whispered Bd and told him that I would only wait two tics max for a Consuming Darkness hit in our group to be debuffed, and if it wasn't I was going to do it myself because I simply can't heal through it. He agreed.

We made ten attempts. We made some modest progress. We got Algolath down to 73% health. We never saw the second phase. Oh yea, there is a second phase to the fight. Ff led in healing by a good margin, but Wild came in second with what I felt was respectable numbers. Wild could take some satisfaction in that he was able to keep his group "more alive" than the other group, and that it was usually the tank in the other group that died first. Wild didn't feel overwhelmed anymore, but we had a long way to go before we could beat this demon. And Algolath is supposed to be the easiest raid boss in Cata.

Bd wasn't finished with us, however. He wanted to take a crack at another raid, one that I hear is being avoided by guilds that have BH kills on their achievement list. That raid is Blackwing Descent (BWD). Coming up in the next post.