Thursday Night (16 Feb) - Call it a Learning Experience

Thursday Night (16 Feb) - Call it a Learning Experience

We didn't kill Warlord Zon'ozz on Thursday night. We tried awfully hard - 12 attempts.

There were some challenges. We had a rogue who couldn't do 10k dps. His first time in the raid. But we didn't come close enough to killing Ozz for it to matter.

We had some very strange starts. Twice healers aggroed the boss at the start of the fight, having cast nothing but HoTs on the tank. It happened to Bd (who was on his druid) and to Wild. Wild routinely pre-HoTs tanks and has never pulled aggro. Never. Very weird. We also had Ozz aggro on a bloodworm of all things (tank was a DK), and the ranged raiders had to run halfway across the chamber to intercept the ball. That was actually one of our better attempts, because we were able to recover from it.

We had three druids for healing. One of those druids were baffling Bd and Wild over some really terribad numbers while in Tree form. I know Silver would go nuts over this, but we discovered that she didn't know she could cast lifebloom on more than one target when in tree form. It's hard to even imagine not knowing that with a raiding player.

The melee DPSers with the tank struggled mightily with gauging when to get out of the way of the ball at the appropriate points, despite plenty of warnings in vent. There was some cautious optimism among us faithful, though, when the raider calling it threatened to name the individuals that were screwing it up if they failed to listen.

Wild started out as the ranged healer, with Bd healing melee and Vl on the tank. After a half dozen attempts Vl asked to go back to raid healing, saying she just couldn't keep range on the tank. Wild switched over to tank healing. Wild likes that job best, anyway. Wild was in his element, healing the tank, tossing AoE heals on the raid, helping with the dispels, shifting left or right to intercept the incoming energy ball, and charging to the tank and popping Tree Form during the dark phases.

I know the above may sound like a miserable night, but it wasn't. We may not be very good, but we are earnest, and by the latter attempts we were doing a lot more right than wrong.

I almost titled this post "Signs of Seriousness" and it would have been appropriate. For every one thing that falls apart for us week by week, two things come together.

We didn't get any boss drops, obviously, but we hit the jackpot on trash drops, getting three crafting plans, a plate piece that our DK loved, and a very nice bow for a hunter.

The three druids (overall healing)
We had some numbers pop over 20k hps on some attempts when the Tranquilities and Tree Form healing was really blanketing the raid. Overall, though, the healing shook out like this:

#1: Bd, 14.7k hps, 34.5%
#2: Wild, 13.6k hps, 32.1%
#3: Vl, 9.9k hps, 20.4%