When Hunter Fortress is in full force it is a murderous team that is very hard to stop. When we are at less than full strength we remain dangerous, but more vulnerable, particularly from healing supported enemies. As an option, I wonder if having a healer available would be worth considering. I even have a volunteer. Jocelyne is a level 23 paladin. She agreed to respec from Retribuition to Holy and back up the Fortress with healing when needed. Her Holy gear is still somewhat lacking, given that she selected retribution gear for the first 23 levels of her life. But that gear is coming along, and with a little effort I think she can be very effective. Just a thought.
Well, this has been a week of just hanging around for Wild. Wild did not sign up for the Mon/Tues Blackwing Descent raids, but ended up downing four BWD bosses on Tuesday night in a scratched together guild raid. As late as Thursday afternoon there was no sign up for the Thurs/Fri Bastion of Twilight raid, and the raid leader/main tank was confirmed as "on vacation" and not available to raid. Still, Wild "hung around" on Thursday evening, waiting to see what would come up. Around 6:30pm a few guildies asked if there was going to be a raid. One guildie counted noses and determined that there were at least enough bodies for a raid. Do we have healers? another guildie asked. Wild raised his hand. The pally healer, Fl, from our regular BoT raid group was on and raised his hand as well. We'd just need a third. Then one of our guild officers said he could come on his shaman alt as the third healer, and if no one objected he'd lead the effort to get a raid going. We quickly had one tank offer to come, but neither of our regular raid tanks were in game. The now raid leader asked for volunteers for DPS, and we got three right away. But two other guildies had just entered Zul'Gurub and that would take an hour or more. Apparently the other DPS players in game couldn't or didn't want to come. Another 15 minutes went by and we scraped up another DPS, a friend of the guild, and a little later that friend of the guild convinced another of his guildies to come. We then filled the raid with a death knight guildie who logged in and was ninjaed into our raid as the second tank. I'm sure he's an alt of someone, I just don't know who. I love his name - cathair.
It was a bit of a rabble, particularly with the DPS. We had a solid main tank and a second tank with good gear but no BoT experience. We had two DPSers making their first trip to BoT as well. Two of the three healers were vets of BoT, so that helped. Our raid leader, who most of us had not raided with before (at least with him as the raid leader) assured us that he new the fights and that he would lay out the strats for the newcomers.
We had less than two hours of raid time given the time it took to get everyone together. And instead of going over the blow by blow of each encounter, I thought I'd mention only the out of the ordinary stuff.
First, the initial set of multiple trash mob pulls was flat easy. I mean, Wild had time to scrape, mold, and shine his hooves during the fight so little healing was needed. I'd say that guild raiders are reaching a gear level where the trash, at least, is insignificant. Even with something of a pick up guild raid.
We got one of the more difficult sets of dragons for the Halfus fight, but Halfus and the dragons went down without a fuss. Wild didn't even need to shift into Tree form at all. Smooth as butter.
Things went sideways on the trash mobs right after the gauntlet. We followed our normal pull scenario, intending to clear through the center, leaving the mobs to either side alone. A mistake was made on the pull, and we drew far more mobs than we expected. It wasn't a complete wipe, but most of us died. That left us with one solo ogre mob still standing, and farther back, the next mob group. No big deal. The death knight tank pulled the single ogre - and the group behind the ogre came with him. What!? No crowd control had been set on that other group and they should never have aggroed. This time we did wipe. That darn ogre survived, too, standing all by his lonesome. Still not sure what had happened, we had our hunter misdirect the ogre to the tank - and again we had mobs from all over the place descent on us. Another wipe. This was getting pretty frustrating, but at least this time we made sure to kill that ogre.
We moved forward to set crowd control for that next mob group, and we noticed something very odd. I took a screenshot (below). Not only were there the expected mob group, there was another mob group standing right next to them! We'd never seen this before. Blizzard must have been dickering with BoT in the latest maintenance and mucked up the trash mobs. Or maybe it was just our instance that had come unglued.
Note the two ogres and the dragonid to the right of the center group of mobs. They shouldn't be there.
So, it was with some trepidation we marked and pulled that group of mobs, wondering if it we would pull the others, too. Strangely enough, only the marked group of mobs aggroed on the pull, and we killed them easily. We still weren't too sure about this other group, which was slightly off to the side and quite close to the large group of mobs that we usually leave alone. We tried to simply stroll past them. And it worked. The mobs never moved. Weird.
The Twins behaved themselves, and we downed them without any trouble - except that Wild died. I had an excuse, though. We were down to the last 5% on the boss when Wild got Engulfing flames (which means get away from other raiders) and at the same time the raid was hit with Blackout. Wild needed to collapse on the tank with everyone else for the Blackout, but if Wild did that his Flames buff would add more damage to the raid over and above Blackout. Wild was the dispeller. With the raid so close to taking down the Twins, Wild decided not to collapse on the tank. As soon as everyone else had collapsed together, Wild cleared Blackout and of course Wild was instantly killed. The rest of the raid was saved. The Twins went down, and we had our kill.
We only had time for two attempts on the Ascendant Council, and we nearly got them on our second try, but too many raiders weren't familiar with this fight and we came up a little short.
I have to say, though, that despite the pug-like group and some new raiders, BoT seemed noticeably easier than in the past. There has been no new nerf (at least none announced), so I'd have to say it's more a matter of gear progression catching up with the raid difficulty. I know that Wild's gear is markedly improved from just a couple of weeks ago.
Everyone in the raid said they could come Friday night for another round of BoT. I hope so. I'd really like to see Cho'gal go down so we could officially complete a guild clear of BoT.
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