Monday (1 Aug) - A Tale of Two Raids

Monday (1 Aug) - A Tale of Two Raids

Wild was asked to join a Firelands trash/rep run on Sunday by his old guild leader from the MM guild. Wild has helped out with his raid a couple of times before, and didn't mind helping out again. Maybe he'd get a lucky drop, but if not Wild would still pick up some Avenger's of Hyjal faction rep, even though he was already at Honored rep.

Wild has done enough runs through the Firelands trash that I was really not anticipating any trouble, even though we were running with only nine raiders and two healers. The second healer was a shaman and he struggled some, which kept Wild busy trying to care for both tanks and part of the raid, too. We had some deaths, but mobs were going down and if it wasn't a big deal to be short a DPS, and not a big deal to bring an under geared healer, then it shouldn't be a big deal if a raider died now and then.

Well, it was apparently a big deal to the second tank, who began complaining about the healing in vent. Wild has run with him many times while Wild was still with MM, and he is a hothead. I don't get mad at stupid stuff like that, and just ignored it. The raid leader made no effort, at least that I heard, to get the tank to tone it down, and that did annoy me. It also reminded me of some of the problems we were having that led to the split in the guild in the first place. This player had been right in the middle of that fray. I stayed to complete one round. By that time the tank had declared that he was going to switch to his healer alt, which I guess he'd have to as Wild said his goodbyes and left.

On Monday night we ran our first officially scheduled Firelands ten man. Wild made a special effort to make this run to help out flagging attendance with this raid group, and see what a guild run could do in Firelands. The 6pm raid took a long time to fill, and we finally had to pull in two DPS PUGs to fill it out. I was half convinced they would change it up and decide to go to BWD instead. But we made our Firelands date. It was past 7pm when we got started.

Wild had made a couple of gear adjustments since the Sunday night raid. I was just not comfortable with the mana regen I was getting, and decided to reforge some +haste into +spirit. I had also been studying the gear and stat choices of some of the other resto druids I knew. I came across an i365 necklace that I had not seen before. Sometimes I make things harder than they are. The saying, "going around your elbow to get to your thumb" comes to mind. The necklace was associated with a Molten Front quest, and I crossed that back to a vendor I didn't remember seeing, and I started back tracking through the entire quest series . . . that's when Wild stepped in, ported into the Molten Front and tracked down the vendor inside the cave where all of the horde leaders were hiding ... uh, I mean discussing strategy.

Wild shook down the vendor and what do you know, he sells that very necklace. I could have had that necklace after Wild turned in his first 20 Marks. Tea is probably much smarter than Wild, and already has it, I bet. Wild is pretty slow on the uptake, sometimes. Oh, Tea wants to know what it's called? Nightweaver's Amulet.

Back to the raid, we did a lot a killing, and did it pretty well I would have to say. We even got a drop of the i378 dagger that sells for 30k plus gold on the AH. Wild rolled for it, but the priest healer won it. This wasn't just a trash/rep run, though, we intended to tackle a boss. Just as a reminder, once inside the instance portal, the "dungeon" is outdoors. It's quite a large area, too, with rocks and gullies and hills. Not once in all the trash runs Wild has been on have I ever seen a boss and wouldn't even know where to look. After much killing (many more mobs than the usual "run") it's my understanding that the boss Shannox becomes "activated" and begins to patrol the area with two hell hounds. We took so long on the trash I think we forgot about him and we almost walked right into him. He moves pretty fast, too. We managed to get out of his way in time.

I'm not even going to try to explain this fight until I've had another chance at it, and after going over what I saw and then re-reading the strats. Wild was healing the main tank on Shannox. Our priest healer took the tank on the hell hound Riplimb, and we had a shaman healer for raid healing. The tanks really have their work cut out for them. We made five attempts, and Wild learned something new each time about different kinds of traps, about the dogs that periodically tried to chew Wild in half, Spear chucking by Shannox (which a dog would go fetch and bring back), and a TON of damage to the tank Wild was single-mindedly trying to keep alive. I do think we managed to kill one of the dogs (Rageface) a time or two, but we mostly just died.

I'm excited to finally get a shot at a Firelands, boss, though! I don't think the fight is out of our league, either. There were a couple of attempts where Wild really felt we were starting to get on top of this fight, if we could get all the pieces to fall into place.

Wild was pleased with the gear adjustments, too. Mana regen was back to where my casting decisions feel natural again (instead of me mentally wringing my hands over whether to cast a spell), and it didn't seem to hurt my overall healing output. In fact, Wild's healing output went up, both on the trash kills and on the boss attempts.

I hope we start banging away at Shannox each week. That's assuming we can get ten guildies to show up. Which brings me to Tuesday night - two weeks ago the guild announced they were going to bring two raid groups together and attempt a BWD 25 man run. Wild is signed up for that. I really have no idea if we'll pull that off or not.