Weekend (14 Apr) - The Girls Rock Out

Weekend (14 Apr) - The Girls Rock Out

Philly played hooky as long as she could, but truant officer DB kept tracking her down. On Saturday she was able to squeeze in three pvp battlegrounds in between doing some volunteer work. Her first foray was in Isle of Conquest. The horde lost badly, but Philly did well with her healing and moved her leveling bar a tiny fraction, from 2% to 4% of the way to level 84. Alterac Valley came later, which Philly likes. The battle is almost always the same, ending with the horde attacking the enemy boss and visa versa in a race for who gets the boss down first. Not this time, though. The alliance decided to make a stand on the long, narrow and snowy path leading to the enemy camp. There were a lot of big battles and small skirmishes and it was a blast! Neither side bothered to try and win the thing, it was too much fun slugging it out. The overall battle became one of attrition, and the horde won it. The first win of the day pushed Philly from 4% to 15% of the way to level 84. The third battle of the set was Eye of the Storm, which the horde pretty much owned the whole fight. We got to where we could kill them coming out of their graveyard and it ended with us holding three bases and the alliance none. Philly is feeling pretty good about her healing, at least as far as the basic spells go. She still needs a lot of practice working in all her other spells. Philly is 20% of the way to level 84. Philly also increased her honor points from 1681 to 2027.

Philly planned to get more battleground time Saturday night, but JB showed up and tried to waylay her. The guild's third raid, G3, runs on Saturday and Sunday. JB has never had a chance to sign up for it, but this weekend decided to see if she could get into the raid. The G3 was formed by a guildie who is an assistant raid leader for the other two guild raids, and he decided that he wanted to run his own raid as well. The G3 raid hasn't been able to get a core group in place, yet, in part because both the G1 and RG2 raids tend to poach their potential raiders during the week.

The raid sign up had 7 signed up with several more listed as tentative. JB was one of the "tentative" sign ups. Raid invites started on time, at 6:30pm, and JB got an invite. Ok, so far, so good. The raid leader, Sb, asked JB if she was dps or healer. Uh oh, this could be trouble. DPS, JB whispered back, main spec melee and off-spec ranged. Sb would be on his mage, but he had two tanks signed up; unfortunately, one of them did not show. And he only had one healer. A lot of discussion and swapping around of alts got us a second healer, but a miscount gave us one too many DPS in the raid. Knowing that JB could not be a regular because weekends are not routinely good raid nights, I offered to step out if he had too many DPS. Not a chance, Sb sent back, we'll figure something out. Stay with us. JB stayed.

We were stuck at nine raiders, missing that last healer, for quite awhile. Getting a PUG was suggested, but the raid leader said no. He's had several very bad experiences with bringing PUGs into a guild raid, and the raid leader always takes the sh--t for it, he said. It took a bit over an hour, but we did get the raid underway. JB was about to engage in a normal mode guild Dragon Soul raid for the first time. JB had no idea what she could be getting herself into.

When the evening started JB was the only shaman in the raid. Then for awhile, there were three shaman in the raid. When the raid finally came together, there were two shaman. JB was in melee spec and the other shaman in ranged spec. We would only be competing with the tier pieces.

We assembled outside Morchok's area and began to buff up. The raid leader asked for a minute to set up the healing assignments. I started to make suggestions, but JB interrupted. Uh, excuse me, but JB doesn't need a healing assignment. Oh ... yea ... ok. It felt very weird not to be included in that essential part of the raid setup.

Once we got started, we cleared through the trash with no issues, although it seemed just a bit slow. The two shaman led the charge, with JB leading all the DPS with 22.8k DPS (24%) and the elemental shaman coming in second with 15.9k dps (17%). Whoa, now that's cool. But it's just trash mobs.

Morchok has taken a beating each week as the first boss in Dragon Soul. He took a look at our group and thought he might have a chance. No way. Again, it took us a little longer to kill him than Wild was used to in RG2, but we did a solid job and Morchok went down. The elemental shaman's DPS slipped a bit and he fell to 4th. JB was surprised and delighted to be the top DPSer again against Morchok. JB did 25.3k dps with the mage coming in 2nd (22.5k dps) and a retribution pally getting 3rd (19.5k dps). After that there was a drop off down to around 15k dps. The healers were doing great, though, and we were quickly lining up for the second boss, Yor'Sahj.

JB figured this would be where her inexperience would show up in the stats. Morchok is a single boss fight, so JB did not have to do any tracking of multiple targets. Against Yor'sahj, however, JB would be helping to kill spawning oozes in addition to the boss and the adds that swarm the raid during the blackout phases. JB also forgot that DPSers had to destroy the Mana Void when it formed. As a healer, I was always anxious for the DPS to kill that void so we'd get our mana back; now JB got to repay the favor, and didn't miss any after that first one.

The fight went pretty well as far as JB could see. We were killing the targeted incoming oozes before they reached the boss and everyone was staying alive. As the raid timer started to tick down the minutes, though, it became apparent we were running behind. We had to go to Bloodlust with what looked like a still too healthy Yor'sahj. We then tried to force it by ignoring the next wave of oozes in an attempt to take Yor down before they reached the raid. We didn't make it, and we wiped. JB (20.3k dps) and the mage (18.6k dps) were the top two DPSers again, but our 4th and 5th DPSers did not break 12k dps,and that spelled our doom.

We tried a second time, came close again (Yor was at 10%), but wiped aonce more. Sb whispered JB after the second attempt: "you are rockin the house homie, top dps in every scenario." It was true, JB had come in at the top again with 21.4k dps. The bottom two DPSers continued to struggle, one improving to 14.2k dps, but the other falling under 10k dps.

Our third and last attempt showed we were getting tired. We started getting sloppy, with oozes reaching the raid and the mana voids taking longer to kill. We wiped again. The mage came close to beating out JB this time, but JB still topped the charts with 20.6k dps to the mage's 19.2k.

JB would not be leading the DPS charts in either the G1 or RG2, not even close. But that doesn't mean that JB can't crow a little at her oh so impressive showing in her first guild run Dragon Soul raid. JB is going to be back Sunday night. The performance of the DPS should be reviewed knowing that these are all alts, some of whom were coaxed into the raid even though they may have felt they weren't ready. That's ok, the G3 is really a learning raid, anyway.

JB stuck around for awhile wanting to get some elemental spec practice in the lfr, but couldn't get a fresh one to pop and finally gave up and went to bed.

Sunday Night's run is coming up ...