Wild has been pretty dedicated in getting the nine daily quests done for the Firelands progression. It's a long slog, but the rewards are very significant. Where his luck has failed is in getting into a Firelands raid to farm trash mobs for reputation and a chance for ilevel 378 drops. Not only would Wild love to get his hands on that i378 weapon (unlikely), but there are two (TWO!) leather healing items that are BoE which Wild would dearly love to have (shoulders and bracers). Both are for sale on the AH (at excruciatingly high prices), but Wild knows that he has a decent chance at getting them for free - if he can get into the rep/BoE raids. The guild has yet to actually schedule the raids, and it's been Wild's bad luck to have been logged out the three or four times the guild as done an impromptu run. I'd like to do one run with the guild to get some familiarity with Firelands before jumping into PUGs, but Wild may not have that luxury if getting a guild run takes much longer.
On the Bastion of Twilight raiding front, we made further progress on Thursday night. Honestly, I wish our pace was faster and that we made better progress, but I shouldn't complain. The raids are fun and Wild is running with in game friends I've been with for quite awhile. We're certainly not elite raiders, but we make the most of what we have.
On Thursday we wiped once on Halfus when our whelps tank got a little confused. The second attempt went smoothly and Halfus went down with little fuss. This fight is not quite on farm, yet, but it's getting close.
The Twins were next. Last week, it took us three attempts to take down the Twins for the first time. On this night the two dragons fell - on our very first attempt. We were a bit stunned at our sudden good fortune, but we danced on their corpses and then pushed on through the trash to the next encounter. Wild has yet to see any drops off of bosses that could be used by a druid healer, and that dry spell continued. But others were getting upgrades, including our priest and pally healers, and that was helping the raid overall.
The third encounter is the Ascendant Council. Before we started, the raid leader went through a lengthy discussion of the fight mechanics. Our raid leader's explanation of fights is one of the things we all love about him. Nobody ever goes into a battle without knowing what they are up against and what their role and responsibilities are. That said, he does have a tendency to reach a point where our heads are about to explode and we just want to start killing stuff.
He was going over some specific tips with the melee raiders when the off-tank, a druid, called the other druids over to the center of the room to compare bear fur coloring. There were three druids in the raid, and we lined up in bear form, sat down, and discussed the various shades of fur, lamenting that we didn't have a troll druid (which has very distinctive markings different from other bears). We all munched on some candy, enjoying a little bear picnic while the raid leader droned on ... uh, gave us fight directions.
Wild decided to float his balloon. Now don't get the wrong idea, I'm talking about balloons here - real balloons. Balloons are something new that started showing up in raids when we got back from our trip. I believe it started with Patch 4.2 but I can't be sure. Anyway, there is a young urchin in Orgrimmar's Valley of Wisdom that holds a quest. There is no quest mark over his head, but he is pretty easy to find. His name escapes me at the moment. Talking to the little fellow grants a quest to go find some wayward balloons. Return with the balloons, and the boy delightfully floats away with his handful of balloons, but not before bestowing a special balloon as a reward. The balloon is a companion pet, and can be called just like any other non-combat pet. When called, an admittedly dull colored balloon forms and floats around, held in place by a string. Ok, big deal - but it's THE THING TO HAVE at the moment. Everyone has to have one.
The raid leader, though, has no love of balloons, poor fellow. They drive him batty in a fun sort of way. When the raid leader finally finished his earnest discussion with the melee, he looked up from his notes and saw a sea of balloons floating in his raid. Seven of us had balloons, and we all had them out. "WTF is with all these balloons!" cried our dismayed raid leader. We refused to tuck them away until he was finished with his instructions and let us have some real action. The raid leader hastily wrapped things up and we got down to business. We were still giggling when we opened up on Ig and Fel.
We made four attempts before our time ran out, getting the first pair of bosses down to 50% on our best attempt. It was progress, but remember, there are three phases to the fight and this is only the first phase. We have a ways to go yet. The good news is that we have the whole night to work on Ascendant Council Friday night.
Wild was very pleased with his healing on Thursday night. The pally healer, Gn, is getting stronger each week and is keeping Wild on his toes. She formally joined the guild last night and is now a regular. The priest, Pl, is a very solid raid healer and steps it up when needed. She is able to do a number of things that don't really help her healing stats but certainly help the raid. I really like the healing combination of druid, paladin, and priest.
Wild is also considering reforging some of his spirit stats into mastery. Wild has not had to use Innervate much on the first two fights, so his mana regeneration could be reduced to get the extra tank heals that mastery would give Wild. I'm still not fully sold on the mastery stat, though, so we'll see.
Anyway, here is what the healing looked like on the evening:
Halfus Healing
Twins Healing
Overall Healing
Finally, I wanted to show what the healers can do when we are going all out trying to keep the raid alive with four elemental trash mobs terrorizing the raid (these are the mobs between us and the Ascendant Council).
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