Thursday (17 Nov) - Spider Work

Thursday (17 Nov) - Spider Work

[Note - must be getting old, forgot to post this!]

When Bd announced that he was raising the dead - ie, his guild raid - I was curious as to who in the guild would join us. As far as I knew there was only Wild, Bd, and Lady Hunter on his short list, but I figured he would be calling in favors with many of the old guard who were still in the guild. What can still amaze me is that after two guild splits - from FateSealed to Mayhem and then from Mayhem to Meitha - it seems we still have two distinct groups in our guild. One group is led by Mf along with Pk, both of whom have at some point held at least a co-guild leader spot. I couldn't tell you whether they are still co-leaders or only officers. It isn't very clear. The second group is led by the named guild leader, Bd, and Lady Hunter. I still sense that these two groups, while not actively opposing each other, don't generally mingle. We seem to have brought all of our baggage with us each time we broke up and formed new guilds. Wow.

Back to Bd's raid and who would come to it, Wild waded through the guild roster and came up with a larger number than expected - I put the names of 12 guildies on my list, including our starting three. Most were old guard, ie, part of the "cabal" that I thought had finally dissolved with the long absences of Bd and Lady Hunter. But there were some new faces, too, those that I knew were active in the guild but not raiding with Mf's group.

On Wednesday night the raid Bd fielded included eight players I had predicted would be in the raid. The only two surprises were both newer guildies bringing an alt to the raid - resto druid Fu and mage Sen, both of whom were guildies I knew, but didn't know they had alts they wanted to raid with. 

On Thursday night, we had eight raiders from Wednesday return for the second night. Two raiders did not show and did not inform Bd they would not make it. One was our third healer, Fu, and he likely gets the benefit of the doubt as he has proven to be pretty good guildie. The other was Bf, a long time cabal member who has a long history of uneven attendance. Bf also had the highest DPS in the raid on Wednesday night.

It took us until about 7:15pm to get replacements. The healer, Pr, another cabal member and wife of one of the other raiders in the group, brought her priest. She's a good healer but the least geared even including the missing Fu. We also snitched a newer guildie who normally runs with Mf, but he had a warlock alt he could bring. This guy, Gm, has like four raid level toons and is pretty good.

The focus of the night was on Beth'tilac, and I'd like to say that we killed her, but ...

But ... we didn't have the DPS to take her out on Wednesday, and our overall DPS dropped on Thursday. We did go back to the normal strategy of sending raiders up into the web. Bd, who was obviously a bit rusty still, struggled up in the web and some of our attempts fell short due to mistakes up in the web. Overall, the ground troops have this thing down, but we just can't deal enough damage. We did improve, though. On Wednesday we got Beth down to 40%. On Thursday we moved the bar to 33%, making ten attempts. Wild and Fu pretty much matched up heal for heal on Wednesday, but Pr (as good as she is) didn't have the AoE throughput Fu had. On average Wild doled out 15.8k hps with Pl at 11k and Pr at 9.5k. It wasn't the healing that sunk us, though. No DPSer reached 14k DPS on the night.

Next week is Thanksgiving. Bd plans to set raid nights for Wednesday and Friday, but ... you know how holiday periods are. And Wild will miss the following week as well. It's likely going to be December before Wild sees his next raid.

There is a little news about Patch 4.3. MMO Champions are predicting that 4.3 will drop in two weeks, and they are usually a pretty good predictor. That would mean that I'll be out of town when it happens. That, more than anything, tells me that 4.3 will arrive on 6 Dec 2011. Count on it.  :-)