Tuesday (13 Sep) - One Step out of the Box

Tuesday (13 Sep) - One Step out of the Box

Tuesday Afternoon -

Happy was busy at the Auction House Tuesday afternoon. He always keeps an eye on Trade chat in case something interesting turned up. Interesting things on Trade chat is a rarity. Today a post caught Happy's attention: "LF raiders, 25m BWD, Tues night 730pm start, i346 min, will explain each encounter, send PST or check guild website for details."

I took a look at their website and in the Armory. Decent looking guild, level 19, who (per their website) got tired of 10m raiding and has been having some success with 25m. They have some good resto druids, too, although only one was better geared than Wild. Happy responded, gave Wild's details, waited long enough to feel like the poster actually checked Wild out, and got a response back. "An in game calendar invite has been sent. Start time is promptly at 7:30pm. Please read our Raid and Loot rules on our website. Welcome."

This was looking more and more promising. I pulled up their website again and went through their rules. Raid rules were like every other I've seen; nothing to worry about there. Then I read the loot rules. Again, everything was as expected until it came to Tier gear - their guild had a special designation for their top raiders, and those raiders had priority on Tier gear. Wild understands such policies, and guilds can distribute loot any way they want to. However, I had two reasons to raid with this guild - one, because 25m raiding is FUN, and two, because I was after a helm, which included the Tier helm, which if it dropped Wild would not be allowed to compete for.

Happy gave way to Wild so I could have a direct conversation with the guy. It was a pleasant, informative conversation, and he tried to recruit Wild - twice. He wasn't about to make an exception to his loot rules, though. They also run 10m Firelands, but that raid isn't open to non-guildies. They have downed Shannox and Beth'tilac.

In the end Wild declined the invite, but on good terms. The guild offer remained open. Wild would have had to back out of his guild raid to attend their raid, which I would have done if the loot rules had not excluded the one item Wild cared the most about getting.

Home in his own guild, Wild is expecting to see Firelands Tuesday night; so said our raid leader at the end of Monday's BWD run. There's that one step, though ...

Tuesday Night -

We almost didn't have a raid Tuesday night, which would really have been annoying since Wild could have been raiding in a 25 man BWD raid. But we did get a raid. Our 6pm raid made it into the Firelands at 7:20pm. Wild used the time in between wisely, fishing. Lavascale catfish and fathom eel were needed for the Seafood Magnifique recipe.

We had eight guildies and two others from a guild we often coordinate with. One of them, Mzp, was a pally tank who had some experience with Firelands, although her guild had yet to actually kill a Firelands boss, no more than we had. We got lucky on the first set of trash by getting a BoE tank trinket that our tank won. We burned some more trash, and two guildies reached Revered rep with Firelands and got their nice cloaks. If nothing else, we improved some gear for raiders.

We made our first attempt on Shannox. Wild had been assigned to heal Mzp, who was tanking Shannox. Wild knows this fight, knows to avoid the traps, and the lines of fire, and the spear, but there wasn't anything Wild could do about Rageface when the dog decided to chomp on Wild. Let Wild read to you what Rageface does: "Rageface cannot be controlled, and darts about from enemy to enemy, changing targets periodically. Rageface leaps at a random player, stunning and knocking them to the ground. Rageface begins to viciously maul the player, inflicting 6000 Physical damage every 0.5 sec. and the damage dealt increases over time. While Rageface mauls the player, he is 1000% more susceptible to critical strikes. Rageface will continue the mauling until his target is dead, or he receives a single attack that deals at least 30000 damage. " While Rageface was having his fun, Wild was stunned and unable to heal or to move. It takes very few seconds to die. Wild died as the DPS was not able to deal the needed blow.

With Wild down we still had two healers up, one healing the tank on Riplimb and the other raid healing. The shaman raid healer was not able to keep Mzp up and she died. We wiped soon after that.

After the wipe Wild and Mzp had a bit of a difference of opinion. "Who's healing me?" she wanted to know, even though that had been assigned prior to the pull. "Wildshard," said the raid leader. "Yep," Wild said in raid chat, while she was still talking. "Is he in vent? Is he miked?" she continued. "in vent, no mike" Wild chatted helpfully. If she coulda she woulda stamped her foot. "What happened?" she kept on with the questions. "Rageface ate me," and I almost added, "at least that's what recount tells me happened," but I decided not to be too cute, she sounded pretty annoyed.

"Not that I'm accusing anyone of anything, but anyone who gets targeted by Rageface should call out in vent so DPS can target him," was her advice and council. Not having a mike is definitely bad, was her unspoken assessment. Yes, Wild would agree that it would be helpful to do that. But Wild also offered that the DPS should be focused on Rageface anyway, since the plan is to target that dog first, and it ought to be obvious the dog had taken someone down, and irrelevant in regard to who is at the bottom of the dog pile. No shouting is really necessary. Wild would find himself in that situation three times (Rageface has a special fondness for beef), and those last two times I hollered "Rageface on Wildshard" into my non-mike and by the time the last syllable in the name "Wildshard" was uttered, Wild was already dead. Maybe I'm wrong about this, though - Was Wild a bad boy?

Wild did his best to keep Mzp alive through the five attempts we made on Shannox. We did have one pretty good shot by getting Rageface to 2% and Riplimb to 25%. We were trying to bring them down together. Two strats to this fight - one where the dogs die at the same time and the other where Rageface is killed first (which buffs Shannox DPS).

I also need to back up a bit. After the first wipe on Shannox, the other non-guildie in the raid went offline and never came back. While we were waiting to replace him, we moved up into the path which leads to another boss, Beth'tilac. By this time Mzp was getting pretty free with her advice. We arrived at the first set of mobs - the large molten lord being eaten by the spider with a lot of little spiders all around. The Bd raid Wild usually raided with has successfully cleared this path all the way to the Boss in the past, but once we got past that first set of trash no one in the current raid had seen the rest of the mobs - except Wild. It was very satisfying helping explain how "our group" handled those mobs. The nine of us had no trouble clearing as far as where the Shielded mobs were. By then we had our tenth and headed back for the rest of the attempts on Shannox.

The good news is that we got in some practice and I think we are capable of getting those dogs down. Whether we can survive Shannox after that I'm not sure. We won't get another shot until next week. Wild did 45% of all the healing, the rest shared among the other two healers. Wild didn't have his usual pally healer partner - she had been pressed into service as DPS.

Oh, Tuesday night is also Lady Hunter's raid night. She was headed into Heroic BWD 10 man. She got started around 7pm, twenty minutes before we did even though her raid start time is a half hour later than ours. I forgot to ask how she did. Will have to check on that. Maybe she'll have a spot available for Wild on Wednesday night.