Thursday (20 Jan) - The Bastion of Twilight

Thursday (20 Jan) - The Bastion of Twilight

Wow - I forgot all about this post!

On Thursday afternoon the raid leader for G2 decided to make Wed/Thurs the G2 raid nights each week. He put up a calendar event for the same day, which Wild was lucky enough to see and sign up for. Not many others did, though. When Wild logged in at about 5:50pm there were only six guildies signed up for the run.

It was closer to 7pm than 6pm when we finally got a full raid together. We had Wild as the main healer backed by two healers with below recommended gear scores. One was Ch, the priest denied a spot in the BH raid the night before but pressed into service for tonight's run. She was ecstatic. The other healer was a druid, Sb, I haven't run with before. She has a bubbly personality and if she raids regularly is going to add a lot of flare to our already eccentric group of raiders. Her gear score was even lower than Ch's.

Gear score didn't matter so much, since the plan was to see how we did against trash mobs, not bosses. The destination was the Bastion of Twilight (BT) in Uldum. Bd assured us that there were a lot of trash mobs, and that they sometimes dropped BOE gear (i359 gear!). The longest wait was to find a second tank. When Fn popped in game "for just a moment" he was ninja invited into our raid. He didn't mind.

Wild was teleported directly into BT by the warlock in the raid, but I would learn that the instance portal for BT is at the very top of a very high, slender tower.

Our first view of the inside of the place was the main chamber, which was large enough to host a major league baseball game. In front of us stood five mobs guarding against further intrusion. Behind that phalanx of mobs - 4 level 85 elites and a massive level 87 elite - were three more ranks of marching mobs. To the left and to the right were two additional raised platforms (4 total), each of which were surrounded by eight more elites. The mobs at the platforms were channeling into a fiery ball that floated in the air at the middle of each platform. Our group was stunned into silence. Wild thought about the Blackwing Descent raid we attempted last week, and couldn't survive two trash mobs. And we are going to take on this army? For any army is what it was.

The raid leader assigned crowd control - we had a mage, a hunter, and a shadow priest, so Wild wasn't needed for cc. We had to wait for the marching ranks of mobs to be on the farther side of the chamber before we started the pull.

When we pulled the hunter trap didn't trip and we had three mobs on us instead of two. The big level 87 was Iced, though, as was one of the casters. At least we thought it was a caster - we weren't sure. It was a spirited fight. When it was over two raiders were dead, but so were all five mobs. "Hey, we got this!" someone said, relief in his voice.

The next pull was a lot trickier. The three marching rows of mobs stopped and turned at different times and most of the time we could not pull without aggroing at least two rows. Ten mobs seemed a little out of our league, so we just stood and studied the pattern of movement for a few minutes. Sure enough, a pattern emerged and we saw that there were short moments when we could pull a single group of five.

That pull self destructed when the three CCers miss-timed the pull and we got two rows of mobs.

"Out! Out!" called the raid leader. Wild didn't wait for the second "Out!" Wild shifted to cat form, hit Dash, and raced out of the instance, just ahead of a small armada of angry trash mobs. Four raiders died.

We rezzed, buffed, and then watched the pattern some more. There are only a very few seconds to engage when only one row of mobs are in aggro range. The CCers were ordered forward, and this time only one group of mobs aggroed. We brought all five down this time without a death. A BOE agility dagger dropped. Someone got a nice prize.

We had another "run away" pull when we successfully pulled one marching group, but also aggroed the nearest platform (with the 8 additional mobs) on our left. Nobody had to be told a second time to evac and all escaped out of the instance that time. So we had a "Hmmm" moment, reassessed, and decided to pull the platform mobs first, since the marching mobs came too close to the platform.

To set up the platform pull, I have to explain that our warlock, Es, is a crazy fellow who enjoys tempting death and often gets exactly that. He'd already fallen off a platform into a lava pit - just to see if he could survive it. He didn't. He pushed the limits of closeness to mobs to understand when they would aggro. He discovered that if he got too close to a platform the fiery ball over that platform would nail him with an arching beam of fire. That beam stayed on him until he got all the way back to the raid. He survived it, so in between attempts he would literally play with the beam, engaging it and then escaping it. He never died doing it, either.

So, for our platform pull we had the lock run up to the targeted platform and pull all eight mobs back to us. It worked. There was a scary moment to think - 8 mobs! But the mobs were all casters and fairly squishy. They went down so fast no cc was necessary.

Now that we had the measure of the trash mobs, we made short work of the rest of the mobs in the chamber. This wasn't so bad after all. We moved to the opposite side of the main chamber, made a right turn, and got our first look at an even larger open air platform. The boss here is Halfus Wyrmbreaker, an ettin whose job is to enslave dragons. He has his own dragon companion, and three additional dragons with special abilities that we have some control over how they are engaged.

We weren't planning on doing a raid boss, but since we're here ... after more than ten minutes of reading and discussing, we still had only the vaguest idea how to do this fight. At a very low level of understanding, the concept of a strat was to tank Halfus and his pet dragon. Talk to one of the three other dragons to gain special abilities (and add some abilities to Halfus). Then kill the dragon. Move on to another dragon. Then . . . well, who cares? We never got past the "talk to one of the three other dragons." We wiped six times in less than 45 seconds each and every time. Our "best" attempt, which I use loosely, was to get the one dragon we talked to down to 74% health. We had raid wide damage from a Halfus Roar of more than 28k damage that included a knockback. Halfus Roared every second. Yes, it could be interrupted, but not easily. Bottom line - we couldn't stop the Roar consistently, so we consistently died.

Welcome once again to Cata raiding. We'll be killing ourselves twice weekly now. And of course Wild loved every minute.

As an after thought, Wild is having to reassess how he views the recount healing meters in raids.

In Baradin Hold the three healers were all decently geared, although Wild was less geared than the other two. Wild finished third in healing, which could be expected, but I wasn't just third; Wild lagged quite far behind the other two in hps and total healing. In talking with the tank Bd about it (he has a level 85 druid alt), he saw no problems with Wild's healing. "You kept me alive all the way to the enrage timer, right?" Right. "You were able to heal through the big boss AoE when it hit, right?" Right. "So, no problems." Yes, he was right that Wild healed sufficiently and efficiently. It's hard not to look at the numbers, though.

In the BT raid Wild clearly had the best healing gear. The dungeon finder would have denied both Ch and Sb access to heroics, much less a raid. The numbers told a different story. Wild and Sb had far higher healing numbers than Ch. So, maybe that's a class difference as well as a gear difference. Yet Sb, she of the ilevel 319 gear score, had a healthy lead over Wild. How could that be?

Wild compared spell usage between Wild and Sb. The reason was obvious. Sb was spamming rejuv across the raid, a raid that was taking constant and massive damage. I won't say she was ignoring the tank she was responsible for, but she certainly used a lot of GCDs raid healing that could have been used to prolong her tank's life. Ch was the raid healer, not Sb. Wild's tank, Bd, survived longer with Wild making him his first priority. This is not a good example to use since we were all in emergency healing mode from the instant we started a pull. But it does show that how you heal is more important that how much you heal. That was not really true in WotLK, but it is absolutely true in Cata.