Thursday (23 Jun) - The Lady Hunter Effect

Thursday (23 Jun) - The Lady Hunter Effect

Ok, the title is really unfair to Lady Hunter. She is a fine raider and a master at putting a raid together. Her raids, however, have a reputation for trying raider's patience with delays, waits, side projects, meanderings, and all manner of unexpected needs which turn into raiders standing around doing nothing. During those delays can also be some of the most hilarious conversations Wild has ever listened in on, and eye popping shenanigans on the scale of Saturday Night Live. That is the outcome of the Lady Hunter Effect, although it has little to do with Lady Hunter herself now. She has even been trying to get away from the "Lady" title, but Wild continues to nurture and foster it. She objects but I think she is still secretly pleased.

Lady Hunter was not organizing or leading the MM2 raid on Thursday night, so none of the time sink on this night could be attributed to her. She was in the raid, ready and prepared to raid, with no delays. But delays there were, as raid leader Bd struggled to fill the ten man raid.

Wild was in game before 6pm for the 6:30pm raid start. The raid target was Bastion of Twilight (BoT). Wild has raided BoT with MM, but this would be his first BoT raid with MM2. The guild trials of MM and MM2 have been discussed previously, but from a raiding perspective the result from Wild's point of view was that there were a lot of new names. Some of those names were likely alts moved up to mains of raiders Wild probably knew, but figuring that out took time.

Wild got his raid invite at 6:35pm, and had been chatting with Bd even before the invite. As raiders were invited in, Wild added the unfamiliar names to his Friends list so that I could track them for future raids. There were some friends as well - Bd and Lady Hunter of course, but also the husband/wife hunter/priest pair Gv and Pl. One of us three druids in the raid (we had almost the whole spec this night, with Wild healing, a tank druid, and a cat druid. All that was missing was a moonkin) Wild learned was really a friend all the way back to FS days. He was a mage back then. Now he was a tank.

When our ranks got up to eight we stalled. We eventually found a ninth raider, an MM2 guildie warrior and tank, so Bd (who has four raid ready level 85s) switched from his warrior toon to his newest 85, a shaman healer. He invited an MM guildie who happened to login (for most of the night the MM guild list on in game players listed only Wild - MM is like a ghost guild most of the time Wild is on). That player had vent problems, though, and eventually decided not to come. Finally, two hours after Wild logged on, 90 minutes late, we had ten raiders when one more MM2 guildie logged in.

Once we were ready the raid moved forward briskly and Bd was his usual sterling self in handing out assignments, explaining fight specifics, and in general masterfully running the raid.

BoT has a lot of trash mobs just inside the entrance as well as two more large pockets of mobs that can be engaged or bypassed. Doing BoT with MM, we always cleared every mob because they occasionally dropped nice gear. With MM2, we only cleared the mobs we needed to in order to get to the first raid Boss, Halfus. Wild used the trash mob fights wisely, brushing off the cobwebs and settling into raid healing mode.

Wild was familiar with the Halfus fight, and Bd's strategy was very similar to the strat MM used. Wild was assigned as the tank healer for the less experienced tank, while Pl tank healed the druid. Bd was the raid healer. The Halfus battle involves defeating three drakes (dragons) and then Halfus himself. The three drakes we faced this night (it varies) included both of the AoE heavy drakes, which meant that raid and tank damage would be very high, putting pressure on the healers. It was also a combination that Wild had not faced before. Bd asked Wild to go into Tree Form early and often during the first phase of the fight.

We made a very good first attempt, then struggled on our next two tries. On our fourth attempt we killed two of the drakes but still fell short of getting Halfus past 50% and into the easier phase 2. Our fifth attempt was forgettable, and since we had such a late start that was all we had time for.

As for healing, Wild assessed himself as adequate since despite some good healing numbers he did struggle a bit in keeping his tank alive and as usual was a bit slow in ramping up to raid speed.

Still, Wild topped 8k healing per second (hps) on individual Halfus fights. Counting the trash and all the attempts on Halfus, the final healing numbers came out:

#1: Wild, 5812 hps/32% total healing
#2: Pl, 5385/29%
#3: Bd, 5317/28%

Wild could have hoped for a better outcome of his first raid in a month, but overall it was a lot of fun. We will be back at Halfus on Friday night with hopefully a full three hours to hammer away at BoT.