Friday (4 Mar) - I Want to Buy a Raid

Friday (4 Mar) - I Want to Buy a Raid

Friday morning brought the news that three MM raid leaders had scheduled raids over the next week. Wild signed up for Friday's raid, will have to miss a Sunday raid, and then signed up for a Bd raid for next Thursday. It will be interesting to see if the shakeup has made any difference in our raid situation other than losing a bunch of 85s to MM2. The three MM raid leaders are now (1) Bd, long time friend and raid leader from both FS and MM; he's been out due to RL issues but believes he will be able to run raids again now; (2) Lh started as the raid leader for the Nooners during Wrath; he still raid leads in Cata, although the days and times that he schedules raids usually don't match Wild's schedule and I don't think Wild has ever been in one of his raids; and (3) Fn stepped forward to become a raid leader when we lost a raid leader (Lady Hunter) and two assistant raid leaders to the newly formed MM2 guild. Fn scheduled his first raid as a cata raid leader for Friday night. He's a very good paladin tank and I've raided with him many times. He also still leads the popular old school runs.

Speaking of MM2, their overall numbers went up from 54 to 75, and 85s rose from 21 to 25. I only saw one new name that I knew had regular raiding experience. MM2 is also still a level 1 guild. MM is still a level 18 guild, although the loss of players have hurt MM's guild level. Before the split MM was on the edge of reaching level 19, but lost a bubble and now has to gain that back. We will.

In other news -

Philly finally succumbed to cata gear, taking two pieces of i289 deathsilk gear that Wild made for her. Philly remains a level 80, but the pressure is building for her to get out there. JB is still pressing for game time as well. Truly, though, Philly should be the priority since the toons on her account could take advantage of Philly's level 85 BOA's as well as the MM guild heirlooms she'd have access to. JB is just more fun to level. Sigh. A more complicated approach would be to move JB to the other account and get her to 85. I'm considering that.

There was a little patch news on friday. The Firelands raid that was originally slated for patch 4.1 has been moved to patch 4.2. Blizz said that they didn't think the player base was ready for a new tier of raiding yet. In Wrath they released ToC too early, in Blizz's opinion, and that killed Ulduar before it's time (I agree with that!). They don't want to make that mistake this time (right, not with FOUR 4.0 Cata raids to deal with). The 4.1 patch is estimated to be about two months away.

Friday Night - Yes or No

The Friday night raid, to be led by Fn, had 8 guildies signed up when Wild logged in. Our 5:45pm start time was 15 minutes earlier than the 6pm Wild was used to, but what Wild was really interested in finding out was whether we would even run, and if so, when would we actually get started. Wild's last raid was on 9 Feb, 5 days short of a month ago.

Fn was in game already and, unlike several aborted raids, was not already occupied with a dungeon run or anything else that would force a delay on our start time. At 5:40pm Wild got a whisper from Fn. "This is my first time as raid leader for a cata raid, so I want to get a feel for each of the raiders that signed up. Please let me know what your specs are and gear level." Fair enough. Wild sent back "resto main and preferred, moonkin offspec, i346 gear level." I checked FN's gear level - i349. Wild was in the ballpark.

At about 5:50pm invites went out and all eight of us that signed up were in game, immediately available, and invited. It's hard to recall the last time that happened. It's hard to recall the last time we had as many as eight sign up. We were still two short, though. "We have a hunter coming," Fn told us in raid chat, "and I'm working on a tenth." Wild asked if we were going to start with Baradin Hold (optimist that I am) since I'd noted that Horde held Tol Barad. "Yep," Fn replied, "everybody start heading to BH."

Another hard to believe - at 6:05pm we had a full ten raiders and were starting on the trash mobs inside Baradin Hold. No 30-45 minutes of hanging around? Whoa, now that's awesome!

Fn decided to go with two healers instead of three. Wild was healing, of course, and we had a paladin healer that Fn knew from another guild - the paladin was our tenth raider. Ok, so we were going with two healers because, well, we only HAD two healers. Ok, this should be interesting.

BH has a few trash mobs, and only one boss - Argaloth. The MM guild has attempted him several times but killed him just once according to Fn. I thought the guild might have killed him one other time, but I'm not sure. Nine of us had at least seen this fight before, but none of us had been in on a kill.

Fn was the main tank, and Rs, Wild's long time druid friend, was the off tank. Fn initially assigned Wild as main healer, but Rs lobbied for Wild. "Wild ALWAYS heals for me!" he exclaimed. Which was true for many long months when we ran with Lady Hunter's raid, and mostly true in Bd's raids, although Wild healed for Bd many times, too. Anyway, Fn gave in and Rs got Wild as his healer. By the way, Rs was the only raider who had not been in BH before.

We started in on a single trash mob, and Rs died. We still brought the mob down. "Oops," said Fn afterward. "I guess that was my fault." He had forgotten to tell Rs that even trash mobs in BH will one shot tanks if you get too far away from the mob. Which is what happened.

We cleared the remaining trash mobs and prepped for Argaloth. Wild has made many attempts on this boss, but never with only two healers. The strategy is straightforward. We broke into two groups, one on the left and one on the right, each with a tank, a healer, and three DPS. Argaloth puts a very nasty DoT on three players periodically throughout the fight. It is the assigned dispellers job - and top priority - to clean that DoT off immediately - like drop whatever you're doing and do it now, because it kills raiders in seconds. The main tank healers usually don't do the dispelling here, because it takes healing time away from the tanks. But we only had two healers, so each healer would have to dispel DoTs for our own group. And heal the tank. And heal the massive damage the rest of the raiders in the groups take. Did I say this was fun? You bet it is.

We started. Each group followed their respective tank into melee range with Argaloth. We stacked up on our tank as it was imperative that we stay close together for this part of the fight. Wild laid on all his HoTs on the tank, and then started AoE healing the incoming damage on the rest of the raid. Fn was tanking first, so the first meteor storm hit their group. The storm damage gets divided up between everyone in range, and they survived that first blast. Rs then taunted Argaloth off of Fn and took over tanking. Wild was busy cleaning off Dots and had to scramble to get heals on Rs. My DPSers were already suffering and Wild knew he had to get heals on them before we got hit with our own meteor storm. I didn't quite make it and two DPS died. The tanks made another switch and three raiders died on Fn's side, including the healer. We struggled on, getting in some practice, but soon wiped. We got Argaloth to 80% health.

Fn was very happy with our first attempt. It was his first raid as the leader, and it was the first time this collection of raiders had worked together. What really made him happy, though, was that the DPSers were stunningly good. All six DPSers were over 10k dps, with the leader pulling over 16k DPS! Fn had set the bar for DPSers at 10k. They all made it - and more.

On our second attempt Wild ran out of mana. I wasn't paying close enough attention and didn't realize what had happened until my spells stopped working. Draining mana down to zero is not a good thing. Wild popped a mana potion as well as innervate, but the rest of the fight was touch and go and we wiped a second time. Wild had been using his instant rejuv spell pretty liberally, since the prior patch had reduced the mana expense of the spell. Obviously, Wild would still have to selectively use that spell to avoid mana issues. The second issue was that dispelling that DoT took a lot of mana that I could not use for healing. On the next attempt I'd need to innervate early so that I could perhaps get in a second innervate later in the fight. Not only did Wild go OOM, my healing numbers looked pretty poor up next to the paladin's. Wild was around 6k healing while she was over 9k. I checked her gear score, and it was an impressive i358. Ok, so that was part of it, but Wild never let other people's gear be an excuse. Wild had to do better.

On our third attempt we made it through the first part of the fight mostly intact. With Argaloth at 66% health, he cast rain of Fire. This is an AoE that drops multiple burning embers over something like thirty seconds on the spot where raiders are standing. The strategy for this is quite simple - get moving and keep moving, but watch the timer and make sure that you are back at the gathering spot before Argaloth drops another meteor storm. We wiped again.

On our fourth attempt we got Argaloth to 15% when things spun out of control and raiders started dying in bunches. Wild died with Argaloth at 10% and could only watch in frustration as those left kept it going -

9% ... 8% ...7% ... 6% ...

paladin healer died ... 5% ...

tank died ... 4% ...

tank died ... 3% ...

Wipe.

So close! But we were jazzed now.

On our fifth attempt ARGALOTH DIED! Wild had killed his first Cata raid boss.

We were hootin' and hollerin' and dancing around. As I've said before - there is nothing better than the first time - that first kill.

With that first success under our belts we headed for Blackwing Descent (BWD). Coming up in the next post.