Monday (8 Aug) - Banging Around the Firelands

Monday (8 Aug) - Banging Around the Firelands

We were off to one our quickest starts on Monday night, being "only" thirty minutes late when we got started on Firelands trash. Wild had his recount up tracking his healing as I always do, and after a couple of trash pulls I was surprised to see that we had four players who were healing! It is truly weird that we have so many healers and so few DPS raiding. The raid leader hadn't noticed it. He rarely uses the raid setting that requires raiders to state what their role is which I wish he would use. We don't always have the same raiders and even Wild has trouble figuring out who is doing what sometimes. We really only needed two healers for Firelands trash, but we could only move one of our four to DPS.

Our march through the Firelands trash was uneven but entertaining. Our main tank raced in front of us, often pulling out of range of the healers, who were staggering after him, not to mention the DPS lagging behind the healers. We still don't have a specific route to follow, yet, so I'm never quite sure what direction we are going to head off into next. Sometimes the second tank pulls first without letting us healers know, so we always have to be ready to heal whoever decides to pull. Our pally healer, Odie, and Wild whisper each other often, trying to keep track of our tanks. Ready checks are non-existent. Be on your toes. We had taken a short break, and Odie had stepped away from the game. The main tank slipped away and pulled a molten lord with no one within 25 yards of him. Wild saw us enter combat and raced after him, leaving my own tank behind. I didn't get there in time to save him. Odie whispered me when she returned and saw we had wiped. "What did you do, try to two heal it?" No, I told her, there was just little old me healing and I wasn't able to catch up with him in time. We could only laugh and move on.

We did a mostly full clear, but apparently hadn't killed enough to get Shannox to show up. So we swept around again, finding a couple more mobs we had missed, and Shannox and his two dogs made their appearance.

We made three attempts on Shannox, and while we seemed to get worse with each attempt, I think we are actually improving, as we are trying different things to find something that works for us. Right now our key issue is getting the right distance between Shannox and the dog riplimb. As I understand it we want him far enough away that Shannox can't throw his spear but close enough so that the dog doesn't enrage. Or something like that. Wild's tank is our usual main tank on Shannox, and we started that way on our first attempt. I was pretty happy with my healing as I was able to keep him up and avoid the traps until the rest of the raid unraveled. The tanks then decided to switch off and Wild's tank took riplimb. As long as riplimb doesn't enrage Wild had a fairly easy time healing the tank and the mage that went with him to keep the dog slowed down. Each time, though, I think we got too far away and riplimb enraged, and there was no way Wild could keep the tank alive once that happened.

We spent some time marking out our battle zone to try and keep the distances correct, but we ran out of time for a fourth attempt. We are going back to Firelands Tuesday night to take some more shots at Shannox.