Tuesday (26 July 2011) - Guild Updates and BWD

Tuesday (26 July 2011) - Guild Updates and BWD

[Note: With one computer out of action Bean will not be making Wednesday night. Shevils is available, though. Just wanted to check on who is going to be on for Hunter Fortress.]

Tuesday's maintenance was a full eight hours (3am - 11am) despite a half day of maintenance a couple days ago to fix errors in the Honor point system. With nothing better to do, I figured I'd see how each of Wild's current and former guilds are doing.

MM2 - Wild's current guild: max level 25, 310 members, 148 level 85s. Three 10 man raid groups. Raid accomplishments: 10/13 bosses (BH, BWD, Thrones, BoT), 0/7 Firelands

MM - Wild's former guild: max level 25, 188 members, 81 level 85s. Raid accomplishments: 4/13, 0/7 Firelands

FS - Wild's first raiding guild: level 24, 128 members, 60 level 85s. Raid accomplishments: 13/13, 2/7 Firelands

WC - FS spin off guild: level 24, 74 members, 54 level 85s. Raid accomplishments: 13/13, 1/7 Firelands

It's still a shame that MM and MM2 did not stay together as a single guild.That would have made our MM2 raid groups stronger, but the personal issues were too much to overcome. MM lost most of the raiding members to MM2, and do not seem to have recovered from that. Had Wild stayed with MM, he would have missed out on a lot of raid accomplishments. However, they are not totally out of raiding. The Firelands trash run that Wild ran with last sunday was an MM led raid, and Wild was glad to be able to help them out. The funny thing, though, is that had Wild stayed with MM he would still be geared the same as he is now. Despite downing 10 Cata bosses with MM and MM2, some of them mulitple times, not a single piece of gear has come from Cata boss kills. I find that kind of amazing.

FS was like MM2 before hard core raiders took over the guild and chased away the casual raiders to become a pure raiding guild. WC was a spin off from the FS raiding guild when the two remaining raid leaders could not work together. Their numbers are lean and their accomplishments greater due to their raiding focus - neither guild takes in casual raiders.

You're still reading? I didn't think I'd be doing anything Tuesday night, but I was surprised to find that not only was the BWD raid leader trying again to get his raid off the ground, another guildie, Lady Hunter, was forning up her own BWD raid. Wild was confused. Both raids had trouble filling. Lady Hunter filled hers first (that woman knows everyone and no one says no to her when she wants ya in her raid). Had I known she was raiding Tuesday, and had she known I was going to be available, I know where Wild would have been. As it was, though, Monday's raid leader got to Wild first. Our raid ended up pugging two players, a shadow priest and a moonkin.

Wild knows almost nothing about BWD. I've seen the first boss, Magmaw, way back in the first week of Cata. No kills, though. Then last week Wild got in on the 5th boss, Atramedes, but still got no BWD kill.

At least this time Wild was starting a fresh BWD raid. We elected to start with Magmaw, which Wild at least had seen a time or two. Wild also recalled that the pair of trash mobs in front of Magmaw were a real pain in the early days of Cata. We did actually wipe on those mobs the first time we tried, but that was because the pug moonkin attacked before the tanks had aggro and we were not able to get things back under control. The moonkin apologized, and on our second attempt we cleared the trash easily.

The magmaw fight unfolded just as Wild remembered with one exception - Magmaw died. Wild had his first BWD kill. The moonkin topped 20k DPS, so we forgave him the earlier aggro.

We moved on to the Omnotron Defense System. Wild had no clue what this fight was about, and I scrambled to read what I could from the Dungeon Guide. The Dungeon Guide is a great source of in game info about fight mechanics, adds, and abilities, but it does not cover strategy. With my main computer still in the shop, alt-tabbing back and forth to try and read up on the strats was a real pain, too. The raid leader was not the type that goes over the strat in any detail - Wild got a "very" general description of the strat, and we plowed right in.

As best I recall this encounter has four robots, of which a max of two are active at any given time, and the robots activate and deactivate randomly. Each robot has it's own set of abilities. In general, Wild has seen enough boss fights to react almost instinctively to most things - get away from things that hurt, collapse into a pile when he sees others doing that, and of course, heal! We had some trouble with DPSers attacking robots when they were shielded (I learned that was a very bad no no). Wild was never told to stand in Arcanotron's "puddle," so Wild avoided it as something potentially bad. It would have helped Wild's mana regen (I learned later) but Wild did without. The four robots fell on our first attempt, and Wild now had two encounters down.

Maloriak was to be our next boss fight, but two players, a tank and a healer, went offline as we were setting up for the fight. They lived in the same area and had let us know that the weather was bad and often knocked out their internet connection. Obviously that had happened. There was a long delay waiting for them to -hopefully - come back. I was a little surprised that the two pugs stayed with us. But they did. The shadow priest (our only cloth wearer in the raid, which when I thought about that was pretty odd) had already won one item, so maybe he hoped for more.

We finally got our raid back together and started on Maloriak. The raid leader did set up color beacons so that we knew where to stand at each part of the fight. There is a lot going on in this fight, but a lot of the activity belongs to the tanks. From Wild's perspective as a healer, this was a pretty simple encounter. We wiped on our first attempt when the tank went down instantly just a few seconds into the fight. We thought that maybe the raid was not positioned correctly at the red beacon. We wiped a second time - same thing. The main tank did a little checking. He then told us that he usually tanks the adds in this fight and it was his first time as main tank. He had been turning the boss away from the raid - and taking the full brunt of whatever ability was getting him killed. On our third atetmpt he turned the boss toward the raid so that we would share the damage, and now that we had that down we killed Maloriak. Three bosses down.

Chimaeron was the fourth boss on our plate, the one Wild had actually prepared for last week and then was thrown off track by finding out they were doing Atramedes instead. So, Wild was up to speed on this boss. However, and it's a big however, this fight is unlike any other fight. Frankly - I hated it.

The fight is simple enough on the surface. There are three phases, and Wild need only move between two points during the course of the battle. The gimmick of this fight is that for most of the first two phases, our health bar is forced down to 1%, and healers have to keep raising that, but only to about 10%. Anything much above 10% is wasted mana that healers will wish they had back at the other end of the fight. Do you know how hard it is for a healer NOT to heal someone, particularly someone down to 10% health? It's torture!

Wild's healing spells aren't the best for this encounter, either. The instant rejuv tics too slowly, and while it "usually" is good enough, Wild lost a raider or two at times when they got hit too soon. Nourish, another low mana cost spell, provides plenty of health, but it takes two seconds to cast. I couldn't find a happy medium, and Wild's attention span was so wholely focused on keeping my group above 10% Wild missed movement periods - and was killed instantly. I really hate this fight.

Wild managed to die on all of our first three attempts. I did sort of get my act together on the fourth attempt, but even though we reached the third phase we had too many dead. Even with Wild helping on DPS, we wiped at 2%.

The third phase is the only fun phase for Wild. Reaching that phase essentially shuts down all healing, and the whole raid DPSes the boss in a kill the boss before the boss kills us scenario. On our fifth attempt we again reached the third phase with an already once resurrected Wild still in the fight. Wild blasted away with everyone else - and Chimaeron fell. I still hate this fight. Four bosses down.

We were out of time. Wild got no drops. The shadow priest got three. What was funny and weird is that his rolls for the items had no competition (being the only cloth wearer) and went like this:
1st piece: Rolled 18
2nd piece: Rolled 19
3rd piece: Rolled 20

It doesn't get any luckier than that.

Wild did get a good look at his mana regen over the course of the four boss fights. Taken objectively, Wild never needed his innervate and never saw his mana fall below 50% (except against Chimaeron, which is part of the fight mechanic and can't be helped). Wild's 1,897 spirit seems to be "good enough" so far. However, I did feel like I was holding back on the healing a little out of worry that I might have mana trouble. It never affected the fight, and Wild still led the other two healers (pally and shaman) in both hps and total healing (again, minus Chimaeron, where "normal" healing doesn't apply). Even so, I'm considering reforging out of a little haste and mastery to get up to 2,000 spirit. The "right amount" of mana regen is very dependant on healing style, and Wild is not fully comfortable yet.