Friday (15 Apr) - Bastion of Twilight Rewind

Friday (15 Apr) - Bastion of Twilight Rewind

Wild got into two raids this week, the first week that has happened in quite some time. In a "back to the future" moment, Wild joined an MM2 guild raid full of members that had departed the MM guild, most of whom had previously departed the FS guild. This cabal of friends of Wild are a fun bunch and love raiding, but as Wild has noted many times that fun loving approach includes a certain ambivalence to being on time. On the Thursday night MM2 raid, we were 15 minutes late starting invites, which for this group would be considered pretty good. Our "6pm" raid got started at about 7pm, which was also par for the course. We didn't make out first pull until close to 7:30pm, two hours after Wild had logged in and 90 minutes after the official raid start time. No knock on the raid, it's just how things work, and the raid itself was a joy to be a part of.

For the MM Friday raid we are nearly always spot on in both starting invites and starting on time. In fact, last week we had more guildies wanting to raid than we had spots for, which made starting on time even easier. On this particular Friday night, though, we didn't quite live up to our normal timeliness.

At the 5:45pm start time invites went out as expected. We had nine guildies signed up for the raid, with eight of us in game when invites went out. The ninth raider had already let the raid leader know his RL job schedule had changed and that he could be late. There were no excess of guildies wanting to raid, either. The eight of us made up the list of every guildie in game. Well, our ninth raider wasn't that late, logging in at 6pm. We canvassed our friends list to find a tenth raider, but did not turn up anyone who was available. So, at 6:30pm we went looking for a PUG. We were after a ranged DPS, and came up with a mage with i355 gear. He said that he often PUGed because his guild rarely had room for him on their two raid groups. You never know what you are getting with a stranger, but he would do well in the raid, including offering his own experience and ideas without appearing pushy or superior.

Despite the delays, we still made our first pull by 6:45pm, one hour after raid invites and 45 minutes late in getting started. The Horde did not have Tol Barad this night, so we bypassed Baradin Hold and went straight to Bastion of Twilight.

We made up for some of our lost time by burning through the trash mobs in BT. It took us no time at all to reach the Halfus encounter. The trio of dragons that waited was a fairly easy set (Scion, Time Warden, Slate), especially compared with the group the raid had to face last week. We needed only the first attempt to bring Halfus down. There was another quick jaunt through more trash mobs (the raid leader letting the visiting mage know that we cleared all the mobs in order to pick up the epic drops - which the mage heartily endorsed).

At 7:10pm we faced the Twilight Enclave and the two dragons, Valiona and Therelion. The visiting mage said he'd done this fight before. All of our own group had been here last week so we knew what strategy we were following. We were ready.

I have to admit that for our first three attempts we looked pretty bad. Wild wasn't playing well. In part I was having some mouse issues, but it was also Wild having a hard time getting up to raiding speed for some reason. Wild wasn't the only one having trouble, either.

We pulled things together on our fourth pull, getting past the first phase and bringing the dragons down to 45% before wiping. It was our best attempt ever, and that stoked us up. On our 5th and 6th attempts we did even better, achieving matching progress at 34%. We seemed to have a handle on all of the mechanics except for the strafing run one of the dragons do that blankets a third of the room with fire. Too many of us were getting killed by that.

We didn't know it at the time, but we had reached our peak for the night. We kept going, making five more attempts, but we got sloppy again. It was never one thing, but on every attempt something went wrong. If there were a common issue, though, it would be how to handle the spell Blackout. Wild has talked about it before; yet after many, many, attempts we were still not quite sure how to best handle it. Done badly, raiders take a lot more damage than they should, and end up out of position, and that causes even more damage. Healers were not exempt from making those same snafus, but we also had to try to heal through all that extra damage.

We were tired and disappointed with the way the night ended, but we could take solace in the fact that we made more progress than we ever have on this encounter. We'd never gotten this pair of dragons down to even half health before, and we'd gotten them to 34% on this night.

Wild was happy with his overall healing. With the help of the new Dark Mending staff Wild was matching the pally healer's output heal for heal. However, that bump up in pure output had come with some sacrifice in mana regen. This was Wild's first real chance to compare results from last week's BT to this week's. On the longer attempts Wild was getting down to mana fumes, even after an innervate and mana pot, and even with Wild's mana pool being at it's highest level ever. I can make some adjustments as far as when Wild casts Innervate, in order to be able to get a second one in. It might be that that will correct things. But it was very obvious that Wild was regening mana much slower than before, and that may require some reforging stats on some of his gear. Wild loves the higher heals he can achieve with the extra mastery stats he was trying out, too, but the lower mana regen is a real concern. Wild passed on a necklace that has dropped two weeks in a row because they were ilevel upgrades for others. Since that necklace has +spi on it and Wild's current necklace does not, he will likely roll for it the next time it drops.

It's been a busy real life week and the rest of the Wild family has seen very little action. That has not only made Java and Sista restless, it has JB wondering if she's ever going to get the chance to reach her level 85 goal. It's affected Wild, too, who had to buy flasks and food buffs for the Friday raid because he'd not given himself time to fish or time for JB to make the flasks. Hopefully, this will change over the weekend. But we'll see.