Wednesday (29 Feb) - Quiet before the Storm

Wednesday (29 Feb) - Quiet before the Storm

It's been a pretty quiet first half of the week. The Tuesday maintenance slapped a 5% nerf on normal Dragon Soul, which provided some modest help for the raid on Wed/Thurs.

Before that, though, JB got in both halves of the lfr DS (which doesn't get nerfed) on Wednesday. She got her 500 valor points but nothing else. JB can't remember the last time she actually won any raid loot. JB was testing out a combat log program called World of Logs (WoL), but I guess I set it up wrong. No data was created that I could find. WoL also seemed to slow the game down by quite a bit. I won't be running it for the raids this week, at least until I'm sure I'm getting data and that it won't cause in game problems.

The RG2 raid (which on the calendar is now labeled "DS Raid 2") started off a little slow. The raid leader, Vl, is out this week, with Bd filling in. We had 11 guildies signed up for the raid, although we had 13 counting Pl and Gv, who never sign up but are almost always in game for the raid. At our 6:30pm start time, however, we had only six in the raid, and one of them wasn't on the raid calendar, either. So, of 14 raiders in game or signed up, we were still short four. Six raiders that signed up to be here were not. Disappointing.

The group we finally put together was pretty solid, although our third healer would much prefer her usual retribution pally DPS role. She is a good healer, but she hates it. Wild and the priest, Pl, were the other two healers.

We plowed through Morchok and Yor'sahj on our first attempts. I think the Yor kill was our first without a wipe. In no time at all we were at our nemesis, Warlord Zon'ozz.

The best I can say is that we continued to make progress, but it was hard to tell whether that was because we were getting better or because of the 5% nerf to the health and damage dealing done to Warlord. With Bd as the raid leader, I knew he would want to set the healing assignments himself. This is a one tank fight, and Bd has been that tank each week. Tonight, though, he asked our guild leader, who was with us on his druid, to be the tank. The guild leader tanks Warlord in G1 on his warrior. Bd, in fury spec, is a great DPSer, so that sounded like a good plan. Wild started as the melee healer with the pally healer taking the tank. After four failed attempts we switched tanking back to Bd. The pally stayed as the tank healer, but Pl and Wild switched roles, with Wild taking the ranged. The ranged were a bit easier to manage and it gave Wild time to help keep the tank alive and cover any dispelling that got missed.

Our best attempt of the night came on attempt #6. We hit all our bounces pretty much on target and we did the max five bounce damage on both of the first two phases. We unraveled after that, but got Warlord to 39% health. However, we didn't improve on that in our last five attempts.

As with last week, we made a lot of changes and adjustments over the course of all those attempts, a lot of which were trying to find the optimal use of our long cooldown AoE heals. With the healer composition different than last week, we had to make changes. If we get the same group for Thursday night, and stick with one strategy, I think we have a chance at getting Warlord down.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Wild has four T13 pieces and so could be getting the four piece set bonus. For Wednesday's run Wild did not use the T13 resto gloves, because the four piece bonus isn't good enough to warrant replacing an i397 with an i384, and all the reforging that would have to done.

For Thursday night, Wild has decided to test out that set bonus. Basically, the bonus gives a 10% chance of doubling the time that Wild's rejuv and regrowth spells will tic. That could be a nice boost, or it could be worthless, depending on when the boost kicks in and whether raiders are still receiving damage over all that time. To truly make this work, though, Wild had to solve the reforging problem. That boiled down to the haste Wild lost when switching to the resto gloves. Wild has a lot of valor points right now, and very little to spend it on. So, Wild was browsing the valor vendor, not necessarily for ilevel upgrades, but gear that might have better secondary stats than what Wild had. Wild found what he was looking for. Wild had won an i397 belt from normal DS in one of the first raid kills of Morchok. That belt had mastery and crit as it's secondary stats. However, the valor vendor offered an i397 belt that had spirit and haste as it's secondary stats. The haste from that belt would make up for the loss of haste from the gloves. Even better, the valor belt had one more socket than the DS belt, and the additional +int from that almost accounted for the loss of +int of the i384 gloves.

Wild wasn't done, yet. Wild is fanatically protective of his spirit, because one can never have enough mana regen. With over 2800 spirit, though, I had to admit that Wild was being quite a bit too conservative. Wild needed more mastery, to make his spells and HoTs heal more with each cast. Bigger spells means fewer casts - hopefully. Wild's pre-T134pc spec had 14.09 mastery points. With the 4piece gear set, before the reforge, mastery dropped to 13.94. After reforging spirit down to slightly under 2500, mastery improved to 15.13. Wild will get to test out both his improved mastery, and the four piece set bonus, on Thursday night.