Wednesday (18 Apr) - I'd Rather Be Pvping

Wednesday (18 Apr) - I'd Rather Be Pvping

[Note: As in the week before last Wednesday. For some reason it is just now making it into the blog. The reason for the delay should be apparent in the post following this catch up one].

The Wednesday night RG2 raid group was largely a bust. Every time it starts to look like our raid is coming together, we fritter away that progress. Raid leader Bd was out this week. The assistant raid leader, Sb, announced at the beginning of the raid that he was retiring from RG2 after this week because he was getting burned out. He will continue with G1 and running the G3 raid, cutting his raid nights down from 6 to 4 per week. I can certainly understand that, but it's not good news for RG2. Lady Hunter was back and will likely take back some of the raid leader role, providing she has time to make the raids. Like Bd, many real life issues get in the way of her raiding more often than not.

The one thing that has been consistent was our trio of healers, but even that took a pass on Wednesday night. Wild was the only regular available, and we brought in two new holy priests making their debuts in the raid. Both are alts and both were new to raid healing Dragon Soul. Lady Hunter had login problems in addition to the raid being short one DPS raider, and we got started 45 minutes late.

The first boss, Morchok, posed no problems. Normally, the second boss, Yor'sahj, would need no introduction, either, but we took time to go over the fight and determine the strategy, as well as to bring the new healers up to speed. In past weeks we had reached a point where we could one tank this fight and keep a DPSer full time on the boss to speed up the kill. Neither tank felt they could single tank the fight, though, and the raid leader wasn't confident we could kill incoming oozes fast enough if a DPSer were put full time on Yor. We took the safest path and two-tanked Yor with all DPSers handling the oozes. We downed Yor on our first try, but we burned up a lot of time. Wild, who needs only four things in Dragon Soul (i397 chest and helm tier pieces, and upgrades to both trinkets) had a moment of hope when Yor dropped an i397 +int trinket. It would have been a vast improvement, but it turned out to be a DPS caster trinket (the on use proc was a damage proc), and it went to a mage.

We pretty much unraveled on the third boss, Warlord Zon'ozz. The healing assignments set by the raid leader at the beginning of the night had the two priests tank healing and Wild on the raid. No big deal on the first two bosses; Wild can raid heal and still give plenty of help to the tanks. With Warlord, though, specific healing roles and duties are necessary and critical. Wild tried in the past to take the role of setting healing assignments, but more often than not had them countermanded by the raid leaders. I can't read the raid leader's mind, and stopped trying. If the raid leader asks Wild to set up the healing, I'm happy to do so. Wild wasn't asked, but we got mixed signals from the raid leader's instructions and further instructions from Lady Hunter. Wild, who hadn't been told his assignment to raid heal had changed, knew that would be trouble. Wild weighed in, asking specifically to tank heal, as the new holy priests had no idea of the kind of damage they'd be facing. This is a single tank fight, and the damage is murderously high. Wild finally got the attention of the raid leader, and got his assignment to tank heal.

We wiped on our first two attempts. Lady Hunter was leading the ranged group movement and was doing a good job of that; unfortunately, some of the ranged still got out of position, straying too close to the melee and escalating the damage from the bouncing ball. The melee healer was having a hard time, too, trying to heal the melee and dispel. Wild helped out when he could, but I didn't realize she was missing dispels until the tank died on the second attempt despite Wild blowing every cooldown and burning down half my health.

As we set up for the third attempt, Lady Hunter reminded the melee and ranged dispellers to make dispelling their first priority because of the massive, stacking damage it did. She then stunned Wild by reassigning Wild to the ranged group. The melee group healer became the tank healer, but kept her melee dispelling role, which should have gone to the new melee healer. The newly assigned melee healer would continue to dispel the ranged group. Wild was thoroughly confused and frustrated.

The third attempt was another bust, followed by wipes on our fourth and fifth attempts. Wild had no problems healing the ranged group and kept Hots up on the tank, but the priest tank healer couldn't keep up and was in constant danger of dying herself. Wild focused a lot of healing on the tank healer, but was out of range a good part of the time.

Here is the healing numbers with Wild tank healing Warlord:
#1: Wild, 20.6k hps, 42.4% of all healing
#2: priest 1, 13.0k/26.9%
#3: priest 2, 14.2k/25.6%

Here are the numbers after Wild was moved to ranged healing:
#1: Wild, 18.0k hps, 40.8%
#2: priest 1, 13.8k/31.8% (tank healer)
#3: priest 2, 11.4k/24.0%

We lost nearly 7k hps in tank healing by swapping out Wild. Wild is going to make that case on the second night, whether he's asked or not.

More fun will be had by all Thursday night, I'm sure.

It was a relief to bring in Philly and go kill alliance. Earlier in the day Philly had banged her way through two Eyes and single AB, AV, and Conquest battles, going from 66% to 92% of the way to level 84. Her honor points rose to 3218. Philly had also taken DB's advice and trashed her pvp gear in favor of better pve gear. Her mana regen went up considerably, enabling her to heal longer before running out of mana. She didn't seem to die any faster or any more often, so on the whole that has worked out well.

After the raid, Philly was back at it. She lost her first BG in Arathi Basin, but still picked up two percentage points, getting to 94%. She then ran head on into two Conquest battles. Philly dislikes this battleground. There doesn't seem to be a coherent strategy, and even if their were nobody pays any attention to it. The horde and alliance both rush out of our keeps to what is essentially the mid (where the vehicles are built) and kill each other. Every time Philly has been in a Conquest BG the horde have won that mid-field fight and taken control of the vehicle area. Then the horde all charge off to the alliance keep, where we generally get slaughtered by the heavy guns on the walls of the alliance base. Philly had gotten bored with that in an earlier Conquest battle, and had wandered over the whole area. It's much larger than Philly had thought. She had no idea there were places like the oil refinery or the quarry. They were generally deserted, but now and then those areas were held by horde or alliance. They seemed bored, and who controlled those areas didn't seem to mean that much.

Eventually, the two sides coalesced at the other's keep to try and kill the boss, similar to Altarac Valley.

Philly got lucky. In her last two BGs of the night, the horde won both of the Conquest battles by killing the alliance boss.

Philly now has 3452 honor points. And Philly DINGED to level 84.