Monday (7 Nov) - There Really Was A Raid

Monday (7 Nov) - There Really Was A Raid

Wild almost missed the raid on Monday night. My car battery died on me. Fortunately, it happened in my driveway, so the only place I was stuck was at home. I am the world's worst mechanic. I have absolutely no skills in that department, but my neighbor across the street used to build his own race cars and he loves it when I come over and ask him to teach me something. It was late in the afternoon and I wanted to get it fixed before my neighbor settled in for Monday night football.

I can and have changed out our RV engine battery before, but in my car the battery is buried under the fuse box and the chassis frame. That was more taking apart of stuff than I was comfortable taking on by myself. Plus, my neighbor has a garage full of cool tools we can use. I borrowed the Mrs car and went off to buy a new battery while my neighbor gathered up his toys. The job shouldn't have taken very long, but then sometimes the simplest things can get complicated.

We had a hard time getting the fuse box out of the way so that we could unbolt a section of the frame to get at the battery. Once we had that taken apart, and removed the piece of frame in the way, we were able to pull the old battery out. The trouble started after we dropped the new battery in and started screwing in the bolt that holds the battery to the frame. The under bolt, which is held in place by a heavy plastic pad, failed when the bolt was tightened down. We then had to remove the plastic pad to get at the under bolt. The plastic around the bolt had broken and we could not anchor down the battery.

My neighbor doesn't let such things bother him. Me, I would have called Pep Boys or someone and tried to buy a new pad for the battery. Instead, my neighbor carted the bolts and pad back to his garage. First we retooled both the under bolt and the top bolt because the parts had been stripped ("we" because I was standing next to him while he did it). He had tools to clean and re-groove the bolts. That took some time, and all the while my neighbor was explaining what each tool was called and how it was used. It was all very fascinating, but I knew I wouldn't remember any of it.

After retooling the bolts, we tackled the thick plastic pad. My neighbor found some pieces of plastic, charged up his torch, and with my help (holding the plastic pieces with a pair of pliers) we melted that plastic around the broken areas so that the under bolt wouldn't turn when we tightened it down. That took awhile, too, when you consider I managed to break the half repaired pad before it had cooled enough to harden. So we had to do it twice.

By the time we were ready to go back to the car it was starting to get dark - and it was pretty cold, too. I was still in shorts and sandals. We worked by flashlight and the time was getting close to the raid invite of 6pm. We got the pad back into place, dropped the new battery back in again, and after some twisting and turning we got the battery anchored to the frame. The melted plastic "fix" worked just fine. It was even harder to get the fuse box back where it belonged than it had been to take it off, and we almost forgot to ratchet down the piece of frame we'd had to remove. That would have been a real bummer as we'd have had to take everything apart again. We caught ourselves in time, though. With everything back in place, I started the car and everything was fine.

I helped pack up the tools and walked back to the garage with my neighbor. I owe him a big favor. I got to my computer five minutes before the raid was scheduled to start.

Invites didn't go out until about 6:15pm for the raid, and Wild was in game by that time. The Mrs had a hot bowl of soup ready for me and that hit the spot all the way down to my frozen toes (ok, so 50 degrees isn't "frozen" but hey it's California!). We were short a couple of raiders who had signed up but never showed up. This is an ongoing issue, but raid leaders are at least starting to put pressure on guildies to meet their commitments. There have been guild website posts requiring a reading and signature of the raid rules, and raid leaders have been a lot more vocal about being on time and prepared. While we worked on finding two more raiders, we had an unexpected problem. A power outage took offline both the raid leader and his roomie. That lost us another thirty plus minutes. We were about to call the raid at 7pm when the raid leader and the roomie made it back in game. We had found takers for the other two spots while we waited for the raid leader, but then almost lost one of the raiders who had signed up. An elemental shaman said that he had to go to work early, and could only stay for another hour so he could get some sleep. Normally we would just live with that, but the raid leader read him the riot act - if you sign up you sign up for the whole raid, not part of it, the shaman was told. Yes, we are late getting started, and yes, you live in Arizona and don't get the benefit of Daylight Savings (so it's an hour later in AZ now than in CA now), but that is no excuse as you have read and signed the raid rules. The shaman agreed, and agreed to stay.

The Firelands raid went pretty well considering our pretty dismal past progress. Wild's healing partners were another druid who is still learning but getting better with every raid, and our very good regular pally healer. We had our regular tanks. Trash kills went smoothly and Shannox, the first boss, went down on our first attempt, although a couple of raiders died. We made three attempts on the spider boss, Beth'tilac, getting a really good first shot at him until the raiders up in the web started having trouble. The last two attempts were pretty forgettable.

It was a good night for gear, as not only did raiders get some nice drops from Shannox, we had two pieces drop from the trash, one of which was the i378 two-hand Scarlet Pain weapon. Wild would love to have rolled on that, but it is really a DPS caster weapon, not a healing weapon. The warlock that won it was so happy he disenchanted his old main hand and off-hand on the spot.

I haven't done healing numbers recently, so here are the night's numbers:

Overall Healing:
#1: Wild, 10.6k hps, 40.8% of all healing
#2: Gn (pally), 9.3k/29.3%
#3: Vl (druid), 5.8k/19.8%

Shannox:
#1: Wild, 16.9k/46.6%
#2: Vl, 8.0k/22.2%
#3: Gn, 8.6k/16.7%

Gn was the tank healer for Shannox and that pretty much consumed her so that may be why her numbers were down. Vl was the raid healer while Wild kept up with the dog tank as well as running back and forth to heal the raid and back up Gn. Wild actually enjoys the Shannox fight now.

Wild really loves the way his healing has ramped up with the changes made to the stats to reach the magic 2005 number for haste. Wild can keep Harmony up almost full time now with speedy Nourishes and can also use Nourish a lot more often for normal healing, saving Regrowth for OOC procs and real needs. Trash was particularly fun tonight, too, as our raid leader (also a tank) started running ahead of the group to pull new mobs - Wild caught on to what he was doing (trying to get us moving faster) so Wild started following after him, even though most of the rest of the raid initially lagged behind. Once the raid leader knew he had a healer with him, he'd pull and let the rest of the raid catch up. It was great!

Wild also got some gear, but that was after the raid. The Shannox kill got Wild enough valor points to purchase the Tier 12 chest piece. Wild's gear score moved up a notch to i369.