Tuesday - (21 Feb) Kick Me

Tuesday - (21 Feb) Kick Me

Well. JB took her elemental spec into the LFR on Tuesday. JB's gear score is i373, and her dps is admittedly still pretty low given that the minimum gear score is i372. The four bosses in the Siege of Deathwing are not too terribly difficult, though, and JB did fine. JB's luck with drops remained stinky. JB needs better rings, and the lfr was happy to oblige. Three +int rings dropped over the course of the run, but JB won none of them. The only piece she did win was the T13 gloves. She already has T13 gloves for BOTH elemental and enhancement specs. Now she had a third pair. JB offered to trade the gloves for a ring, but nobody wanted them. JB wound up bringing them home. She exchanged the token for the T13 healing gloves and dropped them in the bank. Maybe one day she'll respec to healing.

The second half lfr, Fall of Deathwing, really sucked. First of all, JB had to wait twenty minutes in the queue to get a raid. Second, the raid had already downed the first boss, Ultraxion. JB didn't want to wait another 20 minutes for another group, so she accepted the invite.

The second encounter was the battle on the ship, and that went fine. JB's dps was low - well, it was at the bottom, at around 15k dps. JB was doing the best she could, though.

It was the third encounter, on the Spine of Deathwing, where things went very bad. JB has done this fight several times as melee. Target changes occur often in this fight, and JB always has a little trouble with that. Worse, dps targets are often not the same target that the tank is on, which further confuses JB. As melee, though, she managed to be hitting the right target most of the time, ran away when required, and otherwise stayed close to the main body of the raid.

JB the elemental has had to work at it to stay back and attack at range. That was on her mind as the battle on the Spine began. Everything seemed to be going fine, and then it wasn't going well at all. I don't know what I did wrong, frankly, but it was pretty clear that JB was the cause of our wipe,  when the raid leader makes the comment, "I can't believe that shaman single-handedly caused us to wipe."  That was followed by "everyone vote yes to kick jezzi." 

Somebody gets kicked in almost every lfr. It happens, sometimes with good reason and sometimes not. It was certainly justified this time, I suspect. JB felt a little naughty about seeing her name in raid chat in that context. I wiped a whole raid by myself?

After being dumped from the raid, I went to check on the strategy for the fight. I read three versions, and I'm sorry to say I still don't understand what is happening and what JB should be doing.

One strategy says to Mark one tentacle to be killed. Another strategy says to Mark one tentacle NOT to be killed. Frankly, in the lfr nothing gets Marked for anything. There are things called amalgamations that spawn from dead tentacles. These you apparently don't kill until they reach nine stacks of something. There are bloods (I'm guessing that those are the oozes that clamber around). Then there are tendons, which I'm not sure if that is a special tentacle or something completely different. Then there is barrel rolls and puddles and plates and ...

I'm really confused. I thought dps was pretty simple. Just tell me what I should be killing and when. I have been re-reading the strategies to try and get a better sense of what is going on, and how to quickly target the many different mobs that spawn, and when to kill them and when not to and where to stand, etc... sigh. Wild never had a problem healing this fight. DPS is a lot harder than I thought.