Tuesday (9 Aug) - Just Hangin' Out

Tuesday (9 Aug) - Just Hangin' Out

In California where I live, there is always a group of men hanging out around the Home Depot looking for work. This week (and it's only Tuesday) Wild is like those folks outside the Home Depot. Wild's official raid nights are Thurs/Fri. They are run by Bd, our raid leader and guild leader. He is back from his vacation - but I guess not all the way back because he has not been around and there is no sign up for the Thurs/Fri raid.

So on Monday Wild hung out in Org around raid time for Mf's Mon/Tues BWD raid. Wild had his sign ready - Out of work Healer, will raid for Food Buffs.

Mf took me into his raid, which turned out to be the Firelands. Wild covered that in yesterday's post.

Wild decided that this was good, and so Wild hung out again on Tuesday night holding his sign. The Mrs hadn't missed me yet (maybe I should worry a little at that?), but on this night Mf did not have any work for Wild. He had only four raiders sign up and he was tired of spending an hour just trying to fill his raid. He said he was shutting down his raid for the time being and planned to do some recruiting before restarting his raid.

There were a lot of cars going by that Home Depot on Tuesday night - well, I mean, guilds and PUG groups wanting players for their various raids. Since Mf had canceled his raid, Wild was free to see what else there was to offer. Wild wanted to keep his options open for BoT on Thursday, so a BoT PUG was out. There was a 25 man BH that needed healers. Wild offered to come to that one, but they didn't want any more druids. Racists! I should call the ACLU. There were some Firelands runs forming, a couple of which looked promising. Meanwhile, Wild had been hoping to see Lady Hunter in game, since Tuesday is supposed to be the first night of her raid group. She still hadn't showed by 6:30pm, and Fn, one of her tanks, started invites without her. Sooooo, there was a raid planned tonight. But think of this - out of our three raid groups, one raid leader canceled his raid, a second never showed for a scheduled raid, and a third was missing. That's our guild. Wild waited around to see how Fn's invites went. After about 15 minutes Fn put a call out on guild chat - need healers and DPS for BWD. Wild waved his Home Depot sign at Fn, and Wild got an invite. In fact, they were ecstatic to get Wild into their raid. Wild started looking for the catch, which was that there were only five of us so far. We got to eight guildies and stalled. Mf and his canceled raid then came back in game and he joined us on his shadow priest. The tenth raider we PUGed, but by chance the PUG we got was in our former guild, MM, and well known to us. We were set.

I don't know what Wednesday will bring, but I think Hunter Fortress might have to wait as Wild will be holding out his sign one more time.

Uh ...

Oh, yea, there was a raid Tuesday night. Lady Hunter's group had saved the raid from the week before. They had just reached Nefarian and had barely got him to Phase 2 (of three phases) before they had to end their night. So now we would be heading straight to Nefarian with the whole evening ahead of us (well, what was left of it after patching together a raid) to get real cozy with the dragon. In case I forgot to mention it, Nefarian is the final boss in BWD.

The first thing Wild learned is that we don't start with Nefarian. We start with a muscled up Onyxia (another dragon we have seen in various prior incarnations). We entered BWD and took the big, evil elevator down a floor (yes, that elevator is evil; it kills people. Not Wild. Not yet). Make a right turn and go down the steps and there she is - Onyxia, preening herself on a little podium thing. Wild followed some raiders past her and up the other stairs, but our rogue stopped to say hi. Fn happened by and managed to keep the rogue alive when a ruffled Onyxia did some ruffling of her own. I suppose that is necessary to the fight, as Onyxia then flew down another level and perched herself in the middle of a chamber with three round, raised stanchions located around the room. So far this has all been pretty cool. We separated into three groups. One group on Onyxia, one on Nefarian when he showed up, and another to deal with the mobs that form, which involves kiting. Wild's healing duty seemed simple enough - keep the tank that was on Nefarian alive. If only that was all there was to it. And by the way, we have to jump down into the chamber to start the fight, and it's a long way down! And does some damage.

Pre-Fight View - That's Onyxia down on the floor below

On our first attempt Wild was sure he'd been told to help heal the Onyxia group as she was kited by her tank to the right side of the room. She has a nasty lightning storm among other things, but that was the main thing to watch for. It came from her sides (she breathed fire in front and tail swiped at her rear - despite the tail swipe raiders were told to get very comfy up under her tail if they wanted to survive the lightning. Ugh, what a smell! Wild was to move to heal the Nefarian tank once Nefarian showed up - which happened a lot faster than I expected. Wild was halfway to my tank (Nefarian is kited, of course, to the other side of the room from Onyxia) when Onyxia cast her lightning storm - Wild was too far from Onyxia to hide under her tail but not yet not far enough away to avoid the lightning. Dumb cow. Dead cow.

Wild died on our second attempt when he tried to survive Electrocute at less than full health. Electrocute can't be avoided as it is a raid-wide AoE, but at full health it can be survived. Another lesson learned, and we did get a little farther into the fight.

I don't remember what killed Wild on the third attempt. I think Wild was still groggy from the first two deaths.

On our fourth attempt Phase 1 came into focus for Wild and went smoothly. Phase 2 engaged, the dragons went airborne, and the whole chamber was instantly filled with lava right up to the height of the pillars. Wild had his instructions - jump up onto your designated pillar to get out of the nasty lava, where a nice little mob will try to knock you off the pillar back into the lava which was quickly fatal. Wild's little group on the pillar was Wild, his tank, and the rogue. The tank, a pally, was interrupting the mob's casting to stop it from knocking us off, but missed one and the rogue went flying into the lava and died. The other groups on the other pillars killed their mobs, and it was just the tank and Wild trying - slowly - to kill that third mob so we could go into Phase 3. Wild was having some serious mana trouble by that time, and when the other raiders started chanting at Wild to DPS the mob to speed things up, the tank said NO! I wants da heals!

We did eventually kill the mob and we did get into phase 3, which is an all out DPS assault. We were pretty beat up by then and only got Nef down to 72%. But we made it to phase 3, at least, a lot further than their attempts last week.

We made FIVE more attempts, with out best getting Nef to 25%. We even switched up the start a little, moving the druid tank to Nef and letting the pally tank handle the mobs in phase 3. Wild got to chase his tank around the room while he kited the mobs around and that was the attempt that got us to 25%. That was our 8th attempt and we went overtime to get in one more shot. Wild sabotaged that last attempt, unfortunately, when the klutzy cow missed his jump onto the pillar for phase 2, panicked, and killed himself in the lava.

Recovering after Our Best Attempt

If Wild were in GoH I'm sure he'd be getting a visit from a guild officer offering some sage advice: Get out of the lava. Don't stand where the lightning will hit you. Be at full health for the electrocute. Don't be a klutz. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Yes, uh, no ma'am.

We'll see if Wild learned his lessons on Wednesday night.

Monday (8 Aug) - Banging Around the Firelands

Monday (8 Aug) - Banging Around the Firelands

We were off to one our quickest starts on Monday night, being "only" thirty minutes late when we got started on Firelands trash. Wild had his recount up tracking his healing as I always do, and after a couple of trash pulls I was surprised to see that we had four players who were healing! It is truly weird that we have so many healers and so few DPS raiding. The raid leader hadn't noticed it. He rarely uses the raid setting that requires raiders to state what their role is which I wish he would use. We don't always have the same raiders and even Wild has trouble figuring out who is doing what sometimes. We really only needed two healers for Firelands trash, but we could only move one of our four to DPS.

Our march through the Firelands trash was uneven but entertaining. Our main tank raced in front of us, often pulling out of range of the healers, who were staggering after him, not to mention the DPS lagging behind the healers. We still don't have a specific route to follow, yet, so I'm never quite sure what direction we are going to head off into next. Sometimes the second tank pulls first without letting us healers know, so we always have to be ready to heal whoever decides to pull. Our pally healer, Odie, and Wild whisper each other often, trying to keep track of our tanks. Ready checks are non-existent. Be on your toes. We had taken a short break, and Odie had stepped away from the game. The main tank slipped away and pulled a molten lord with no one within 25 yards of him. Wild saw us enter combat and raced after him, leaving my own tank behind. I didn't get there in time to save him. Odie whispered me when she returned and saw we had wiped. "What did you do, try to two heal it?" No, I told her, there was just little old me healing and I wasn't able to catch up with him in time. We could only laugh and move on.

We did a mostly full clear, but apparently hadn't killed enough to get Shannox to show up. So we swept around again, finding a couple more mobs we had missed, and Shannox and his two dogs made their appearance.

We made three attempts on Shannox, and while we seemed to get worse with each attempt, I think we are actually improving, as we are trying different things to find something that works for us. Right now our key issue is getting the right distance between Shannox and the dog riplimb. As I understand it we want him far enough away that Shannox can't throw his spear but close enough so that the dog doesn't enrage. Or something like that. Wild's tank is our usual main tank on Shannox, and we started that way on our first attempt. I was pretty happy with my healing as I was able to keep him up and avoid the traps until the rest of the raid unraveled. The tanks then decided to switch off and Wild's tank took riplimb. As long as riplimb doesn't enrage Wild had a fairly easy time healing the tank and the mage that went with him to keep the dog slowed down. Each time, though, I think we got too far away and riplimb enraged, and there was no way Wild could keep the tank alive once that happened.

We spent some time marking out our battle zone to try and keep the distances correct, but we ran out of time for a fourth attempt. We are going back to Firelands Tuesday night to take some more shots at Shannox.

Weekend (7 Aug) - Outlook Dreary

Weekend (7 Aug) - Outlook Dreary

The internet problems cleared up on Friday. I may have had some internet service interruptions, but DC's (WoW disconnects) were also an element. Raiders from Thursday night told Wild on Friday that after Wild DCed for the second time, they had several more raiders DC as well and never got to the third boss. Even friends from Boulderfist reported unusually large numbers of DCs, so it affected more than one server.

We didn't have to worry about that Friday night. There was no raid. We had seven in game ready to go at the 6:30pm start time. Our tank/raid leader was in game, but left "for a quick break." He never came back. Our other tank from Thursday was a no show and that left us with Kg, rookie tank extraordinaire. He was game, but without a second tank and no raid leader we all more or less drifted away and did other things. Wild got his Therazane Dailies done. There are seven quests and they drop a ton of reputation, so Wild will only need a day or two to get to Exalted. Then he can upgrade his shoulder enchant [Note: Wild made Exalted on Sunday - Ya!]. Wild has other factions he could level up, and since he gets guild rep for that Wild will probably keep doing dailies. Wild still hasn't gotten back to Revered in guild rep since he changed guilds.

BB was in game Saturday night and completed her Death Knight indoctrination. She's now level 58 and makes her home in Stormwind. BB got four different requests for her to join a guild while she was out working on her professions - picking flowers and breaking rocks.

Posted on Guild Website Saturday - Progression and Raid Start Times

I've had an opportunity to raid with both Mort and Bk's raid groups as well as in the combined Mort/Tala 25 man raid (awesome! by the way). One thing that I've noticed about our ten mans in recent weeks is that they never - and I mean never - start on time anymore. And it isn't just a few minutes. We are easily 30-60 minutes late getting started every raid night.

In addition, few raiders are bothering to sign up for the raids, either, and our raids are starting to feel to me like a pick up group instead of a scheduled raid. I feel bad for the raid leaders who see that only 4-6 people have signed up and have to spend precious raid time pleading for guildies to join the raid, and in the end still needing to PUG spots. It's frustrating to me to lose an hour of raid time and see just two bosses go down each week with no progression.

If the issue is that guildies just can't make it by the 6pm or 6:30pm start times, we should adjust the time accordingly. If guildies want to raid they should sign up and be on time. And with the nerfs and the improving gear we are capable of doing a lot more than we are.

I'm just asking all of us to sign up for our raids and to be in game on time. Let raid leaders know if the raids times aren't good for you. We haven't downed either Nef or Cho'gal as a guild, not because we can't, but because we never get that far.

This is just a wish, but I'd also like to lobby for a weekly 25 man. We have three ten mans now. Is there any way at all to find two nights a week for a 25 man? Given how quickly bosses went down once we engaged, that would be a huge source of gear and VP to move us forward. It actually seemed easier in 25 man than in the ten mans.

The guild leader responded to Wild's post the same day. He discussed a number of things. Regarding ten man raiding the summary was that he agreed that attendance and timeliness has been an ebb and flow thing - sometimes good and sometimes not, but also said that it was time again to put some emphasis on that.

In regard to 25 man raiding, I got an answer that surprised me, but probably shouldn't have. The answer was, and I quote: "There's a number of reasons for this, but to keep it short: Past precedent has shown that if a regularly scheduled 25man is hosted more than 1-2x a month it will fall apart, and worse, all 10mans will also suffer for the next few weeks. Add into that the fact that a substantial chunk of the core Raiders are clear about not wanting to do 25mans (an anti-25man interest, you could say) and the result is we're not going to be coordinating 25man raids in the near future."

When I thought about that, I had to consider the fact that the core raiders in MM2 came from MM, who came from FS, and frankly, we've had trouble fielding 25 mans since Wrath. Never has 25 mans been so accessible (and profitable) as now, but even that doesn't seem to matter to our raiders. They just don't like 25 mans. My response to that below:

Thanks for the feedback, Bd.

I can't say that I understand "why" Meitha guildies don't like 25 mans, so I'll probably be asking around just so I'll understand that better.

Here's my take:

The 25 man raid engages more of the guild, including players that may have trouble getting the best gear or who feel that they can't contribute enough to a ten man. As you said, 25 man in Cata is a little more forgiving of mistakes and gear. The fights are almost identical, so the learning curve is small, experienced raiders can help tutor the newcomers, and we can ALL progress faster. In the 25 BWD we had a whole party of healers and carried on our own separate conversation throughout the raid. It was great and it showed with some amazing healing.

An even bigger advantage of 25 man raiding is gear. With 25 raiders, more of the drops will find raiders who need them and there are a lot fewer DEs like we get with 10 mans. In comparing the 10 man and 25 man BWD from last week, both groups killed three bosses: there were 6 gear drops in 10 man (3 of which were upgrades for someone if I recall) and 13 drops from 25 man (almost all of which were awarded to raiders as upgrades). The difference is huge.

For those who don't care about gear, 25 man raids are a lot more lively in vent and chat. It's MORE FUN with a large group! I've learned a lot of "interesting" words not in the English dictionary - or in ANY dictionary, just listening in lol.

I hope Meitha comes around to the idea. :)

One positive element of this is that MM2 raid leaders would be happy to organize and run 25 mans if there was enough interest, so that is not the issue. Wild will have to do some checking with other raiders to get at what the real issues are.

Thursday - A Failure to Communicate

If it's not one thing, it's another. The problems with my computer have been an ongoing issue for weeks. So far the latest fix has been working. So the computer gods had to come up with something new.

On Thursday Wild created a new toon, an alliance gnome named BruiserBabe (BB for short). BB is a death knight, and was born on the pvp server Boulderfist. Both the DER and Sis families of Silvermoon have relatives on Boulderfist, so, not to be left behind, the Wild family had to sow some seeds there as well.

Raising a death knight is a bit different than other races, as they begin life at level 55. There is a special starter zone for all death knights in the skies above the Plaguelands, and they must undergo rigorous and bloody tutoring before being allowed into the world at large. BB had just begun her training when strange things began happening around her. The world tilted and ...

My internet connection went down. I did the usual shut down, reboot, and reset process with computer, modem, and router, and about fifteen minutes later the connection came back up. Most probably it was some hitch with my Internet service. I got distracted by other things away from the computer and didn't get back until raid time Thursday night.

Our BoT raid leader has been on vacation, but he was back this week and, we thought, ready to rock again. But he abandoned us on Thursday night because he had - a date. Imagine, leaving his team for a woman! Couldn't he schedule a date on a non-raid night? Where are his priorities? What right ... oh, hello, Mrs Wild, what am I grumbling about? Uh, nothing dear.

Of course, the raid leader had given plenty of notice that he would be away Thursday night, and the backup raid leader had no problem getting our raid filled. We did have an interesting conundrum for a bit, though. We had too many healers. Five of the guildies invited into the raid had healers as their mains. It's a very unusual situation, but as readers have probably noticed, we are always scrambling to find DPSers to join the raid. It's just weird. So several guildies had to switch to alts in order to get a good grouping of players. There was also a player, Kg, that Wild and the cabal ran with way back in days of Karazahn who had recently come back to the game. Formerly a druid, he was now a paladin, and was on the healing team for the BWD 25 man earlier in the week, but otherwise had just been doing Heroics. With our raid leader out (who was also our main tank), we needed a second tank, and Kg was pressed into service.

So, we had healers who went to alts to play DPSers and we were substituting our out on a date main tank with a tank who has not only not seen the inside of BoT yet, but had not done any raid tanking at all. Just our usual, competent team of professionals. :)

I have to give Kg a great deal of credit. He jumped in and played his heart out while still learning how to tank with a paladin and learning the strats in a raid he's never seen before. The other tank, a druid, is a great tank but would admit he is not the best at explaining things. Directions and guidance to Kg left a lot of room for interpretation, and that resulted in some pretty outlandish situations that had us all laughing in amazement.

We made our first trash pulls without incident, but when pulling the side groups Kg didn't kite them over to where our DPS and healers were, not being told or not remembering to do that. Wild went chasing after Kg when his health started accelerating toward zero, but all that did was make Wild the next target when the tank died. We survived the pull (even Wild), but we were already giggling at the "unorthodox" approach.

Then there was the gauntlet. The gauntlet had bugged on us last week, but that was nothing compared to this week. Our druid tank is very good, but he seemed a bit distracted on this night, maybe because he was trying so hard to help out Kg. The druid tank got himself killed not once, but twice, during the gauntlet by miss-positioning himself and getting knocked off the stairs to certain death. Every raider knows NOT to get themselves into that position. Things went very crazy for a bit, but we finally completed the gauntlet and moved forward to the next set of mobs.

Another event occurred in between the two deaths by the druid tank. Wild's internet connection went down again. Wild was also deposited at the beginning of the instance when I got back in game and I had to run all the way back to the group as they waited for Wild to get there and see what they were all standing there looking at.

What we saw caused our jaws to drop. Between us and the doorway that leads to the next encounter was the usual 3-5 mobs. But to the left AND the right of them were groups of additional mobs, all packed together. They were so close to each other there seemed no way to pull one group without pulling all of them.

But that wasn't the worst. Standing in the doorway behind that small army of mobs was - I kid you not - Cho'gal. Yes, Cho'gal, the final boss in BoT. Faced with that, what could we do? We attacked, of course. We wiped twice. After the first wipe Cho'gal did not reappear, but it took another wipe before we had killed enough mobs to finish the remainder off.

See - I wasn't lying about Cho'gal.


We went on to the Twins. The druid, perhaps a little unnerved by his problems with the gauntlet, put Kg into a trial by fire by making him the tank for the Twins. It was a very rough fight and there were a lot of mistakes, not only by our learning tank. Wild got caught in the fire from the sky and died by running in the wrong direction. Not Wild's most shining moment. Three others lay dead as well when the dragons fell. Credit the kill to the rest of the raid, improving gear, and maybe another nerf? Not sure, but given all our mistakes I couldn't believe we actually took the Twins down.

We mowed down the two mobs to get to the room full of elemental mobs that are so challenging for the two tanks. Kg was about to get another trial by fire. Wild didn't get to see it, though. My internet went down again. And this time I could not get it back. Neither could my internet service, who said it was not a problem at their end. Of course. After a lot of checking this and that, I had to make an appointment for them to come out and figure out what was wrong. That won't happen until Saturday. Sigh.

By the way, right before the my internet connection died again, our on a date raid leader came back in game. Looks like Wild's replacement had arrived right on time. And just my luck - I bet they get to Cho'gal this week. And Wild won't be there.

PS - So how is it that I posted this? The internet came up on its own this morning. I still have an appointment with the techs, which I was able to move up to this afternoon, so we'll see how things go. It's been up for about an hour now.

Wednesday (3 Aug) - My Last Gold Piece

Wednesday (3 Aug) - My Last Gold Piece

Happy swears he's given Wild the last gold piece Wild is ever going to get from him. Wild tried to explain that he "saved" Happy 17,000 gold! He should live up to his name and be Happy! Ok, so Wild bought the [Flickering Shoulderpads of the Wavecrest], i378 gear to replace Wild's pretty but dated i359 shoulders. The guy on the AH wanted 42,000 gold for it, and Wild engineered a price of "only" 27,000 gold. What a deal! Right? Someone? Anyone?

It's really Happy's fault, ya know. Happy would never let Wild spend 42k gold on ANYTHING, much less a single piece of un-gemmed, un-enchanted gear. So Wild took matters into his own hands, talking to the seller directly when I was able to catch him in game. He told Wild he was selling the gear for his guild; since it wasn't for himself, he said he was open to negotiations. How could I know he would agree to a killer price? And just Wild's luck that he and Wild were both standing around in Orgrimmar with nothing much to do but a little haggling? It wasn't my fault, I tell you! PS - Don't mention to Happy the price, ok? I told him it was 28k (I figured I'd better get some walking around money for the gems and enchants before Happy shut Wild down completely).

The Hunter Fortress is on a small hiatus this week and next. Bean did get in some solid questing with new Hunter Fortress member, Jocelyne, a paladin healer. We took the Org zep to the Undercity and then flew to Hillsbrad Foothills. We started with murloc slaughter, added some spider feeding, and hunted down Mr. Whitestead and Citizen Wilkes. Wilkes was tricky to find, but easy to kill once we nabbed him. Working in a group with a healer was a new experience for Bean and Jocelyne both. Jocy had to remember not to get too wrapped up in DPS to heal, and Bean had to remember not to run out of range of her healer. We had a good time! Bean raised her level from 21 to 23, and Jocy bumped up from 24 to 26. Jocy will take a break, now, until more of the Hunter Fortress reaches level 25. Shevils is still 24 so there may yet be some 20-24 bracket pvp before we all reach the new bracket.

Tuesday (2 Aug) - Sweet Serenite

Tuesday (2 Aug) - Sweet Serenite

It was quite amazing to see our guild blossom into a 25 man Blackwing Descent raid on Tuesday night. One ten man raid that runs on Mon/Tues plus one ten man raid that runs on Tues/Wed, both working BWD, made up the core of the raid. There were raiders from the Thurs/Fri raid that also signed on, such as Wild. There were friends from another guild that typically raid with one group or another of ours joining us. And there was Lady Serenite, one time guild leader of FS, long time online friend from the earliest days of FS, and until lately long retired from the game. She had been ill, and had restarted her WoW account to have something to do while she recovered. More than a few of her many friends asked her to come join us for the raid if a spot came open. She and Wild chatted for quite awhile and Wild kept her informed on how invites were going. She got her invite, but got lost trying to find the entrance to BWD at Blackrock Mountain. Wild guided her in.

Lady Hunter, who led the Tues/Wed raid group, was in the raid of course, and Wild felt doubly blessed being in the raid with two of his favorite Ladys.

Raid start time was 6:30pm, and actually getting started at 7pm was pretty much on time for us. Lady Ser had asked Wild when the raid was to start and I told her that it would be at least 30-60 minutes later than when it was scheduled. She laughed, noting that nothing really changed with this group of characters.

The banter between raiders while we assembled was lively and got so risque players were packing their kids off to bed to get them out of speaker range. Lady Ser made some comment about "boobies" and got a "dirty whore!" line back at her, followed by "er ... I mean you wild woman" which Wild followed up with "you mean Wild's woman don't you?" Emotes were flung back and forth, another friend from long ago raids regaling the group with Wild's more memorable (or more forgettable from Wild's view) times I got lost in Karazahn. In the press of getting everyone invited and assembled, a baffled guildie found himself ninjaed into the raid the moment he logged in and quickly Summoned to Blackrock Mountain. "Uh, guys, what am I doing here?" he asked. BWD! Several raiders hollered to him. "LOL. I'm not even 85 yet!" Oops. We even made the classic mistake of entering the raid in 10 man mode, not 25 man. Wild was actually able to enter, but a second later was summarily booted out and I ended up somewhere in the Blasted Lands. The raid leader made fun of himself for the gaffe and switched us to 25 man mode.

We didn't so much settle down carry the excitement right into Blackwing Descent. We had what seemed to me an overabundance of healers in the raid - seven in all. I don't really know what the right numbers are anymore since I never see 25 man raids. We had two paladins, a shaman, a priest, and three (three!) druids. The pallies got tank healing duty, with Wild and another druid backing them up and raid healing. We had four raiders seeing BWD for the first time, one of whom had never even raided before! Most of the raid, however, was very familiar with 10 man BWD, and the fights in 10 and 25 man are considered to be very similar, just scaled for the number of raiders.

Normally we would start with Magmaw, but one of our rogues was yammerin' for Omnotron (apparently he desperately wanted a drop from that encounter). Since it didn't much matter which fight we started with, we went after Omnotron. That battle played out smoothly and we set down all four of the robots in order. Just like that we had a 25 man kill! One of the great things about doing 25 man is that the number of boss kill drops is much higher. Normally 2 items drop in 10 man. When Omnotron went down in 25 man four items dropped. There are very few gear slots left where Wild could use an i359 item, though, but one of them is rings. Both of Wild's rings are pvp rings (i365 and i358). Wild won the ring, replacing the i358.

It was then on to Magmaw. That battle almost got away from us when one of the raiders doing the lava worm wrangling struggled to get his chains and then managed to fall off. That was somehow straightened out and Magmaw went down.

Maloriak was our next target. It may sound like we were moving right along, but that really wasn't the case. It's one thing for a raider or two to dally or need a short "brb" in a 10 man; it becomes unwieldy in 25 man, and we just weren't practiced enough at it to have the additional rigor and press needed to keep a large raid focused. There were delays and discussions, side conversations and question and answer moments, and general milling about every moment we weren't actually engaged in combat. Nobody really minded any of that, though - we were all having a blast together.

We wiped on our first attempt on Maloriak. The DPS was confused over when to DPS the boss and when to DPS the adds, and that slowed everything down. We were not in any trouble of wiping, and could have fought him darn near forever with the amount of healing we were packing, but there was one small thing we didn't think about - the Berserk timer, which is what got us wiped.

It was a straightforward fix, though, and Maloriak went down on our second attempt. We had hoped to get to another boss, but time ran out on us.

For the wrap up, the first thing that should be noted is that this is the first - the FIRST - 25 man the MM2 guild has done since the formation of the guild. If Wild had his way we would be doing 25 man every week! But that is not the plan. The time and effort to get a 25 man together is just not something our guild is prepared to take on every week, so a once per month schedule is being considered. It can only be one night, though, as we just don't have enough raiders that can be available twice in one week.

In 10 man we would have gotten six drops from the three bosses we downed. In 25 man we got 13 drops. About two-thirds of the drops found willing raiders who needed them, so it was a powerful night for gearing up raiders.

Wild did fine, finishing 3rd overall in healing on the night:

#1: pally - 10111 hps, 18.8% of all healing
#2: druid - 9320, 16.8%
#3: Wild - 8683, 15.4%
#4: priest - 6635, 12.0%
#5: druid - 7099, 11.6%
#6: pally - 7687, 11.2%
#7: shaman - 5745, 7.3%

The DPS - Our top DPSer was a hunter at 16.9k DPS who did 7.6% of all damage.

DPS # of raiders at that level
16k+ - 1 DPS
15k+ - 1 DPS
14k+ - 5 DPS
13k+ - 3 DPS
12k+ - 1 DPS
11k+ - 1 DPS
10k+ - 2 DPS
9k+ - 1 DPS

We had one DPSer who barely made 6k DPS, but you could guess who that was - Lady Ser, invited more for her company than for her DPS.

If only we could do this more often.

Monday (1 Aug) - A Tale of Two Raids

Monday (1 Aug) - A Tale of Two Raids

Wild was asked to join a Firelands trash/rep run on Sunday by his old guild leader from the MM guild. Wild has helped out with his raid a couple of times before, and didn't mind helping out again. Maybe he'd get a lucky drop, but if not Wild would still pick up some Avenger's of Hyjal faction rep, even though he was already at Honored rep.

Wild has done enough runs through the Firelands trash that I was really not anticipating any trouble, even though we were running with only nine raiders and two healers. The second healer was a shaman and he struggled some, which kept Wild busy trying to care for both tanks and part of the raid, too. We had some deaths, but mobs were going down and if it wasn't a big deal to be short a DPS, and not a big deal to bring an under geared healer, then it shouldn't be a big deal if a raider died now and then.

Well, it was apparently a big deal to the second tank, who began complaining about the healing in vent. Wild has run with him many times while Wild was still with MM, and he is a hothead. I don't get mad at stupid stuff like that, and just ignored it. The raid leader made no effort, at least that I heard, to get the tank to tone it down, and that did annoy me. It also reminded me of some of the problems we were having that led to the split in the guild in the first place. This player had been right in the middle of that fray. I stayed to complete one round. By that time the tank had declared that he was going to switch to his healer alt, which I guess he'd have to as Wild said his goodbyes and left.

On Monday night we ran our first officially scheduled Firelands ten man. Wild made a special effort to make this run to help out flagging attendance with this raid group, and see what a guild run could do in Firelands. The 6pm raid took a long time to fill, and we finally had to pull in two DPS PUGs to fill it out. I was half convinced they would change it up and decide to go to BWD instead. But we made our Firelands date. It was past 7pm when we got started.

Wild had made a couple of gear adjustments since the Sunday night raid. I was just not comfortable with the mana regen I was getting, and decided to reforge some +haste into +spirit. I had also been studying the gear and stat choices of some of the other resto druids I knew. I came across an i365 necklace that I had not seen before. Sometimes I make things harder than they are. The saying, "going around your elbow to get to your thumb" comes to mind. The necklace was associated with a Molten Front quest, and I crossed that back to a vendor I didn't remember seeing, and I started back tracking through the entire quest series . . . that's when Wild stepped in, ported into the Molten Front and tracked down the vendor inside the cave where all of the horde leaders were hiding ... uh, I mean discussing strategy.

Wild shook down the vendor and what do you know, he sells that very necklace. I could have had that necklace after Wild turned in his first 20 Marks. Tea is probably much smarter than Wild, and already has it, I bet. Wild is pretty slow on the uptake, sometimes. Oh, Tea wants to know what it's called? Nightweaver's Amulet.

Back to the raid, we did a lot a killing, and did it pretty well I would have to say. We even got a drop of the i378 dagger that sells for 30k plus gold on the AH. Wild rolled for it, but the priest healer won it. This wasn't just a trash/rep run, though, we intended to tackle a boss. Just as a reminder, once inside the instance portal, the "dungeon" is outdoors. It's quite a large area, too, with rocks and gullies and hills. Not once in all the trash runs Wild has been on have I ever seen a boss and wouldn't even know where to look. After much killing (many more mobs than the usual "run") it's my understanding that the boss Shannox becomes "activated" and begins to patrol the area with two hell hounds. We took so long on the trash I think we forgot about him and we almost walked right into him. He moves pretty fast, too. We managed to get out of his way in time.

I'm not even going to try to explain this fight until I've had another chance at it, and after going over what I saw and then re-reading the strats. Wild was healing the main tank on Shannox. Our priest healer took the tank on the hell hound Riplimb, and we had a shaman healer for raid healing. The tanks really have their work cut out for them. We made five attempts, and Wild learned something new each time about different kinds of traps, about the dogs that periodically tried to chew Wild in half, Spear chucking by Shannox (which a dog would go fetch and bring back), and a TON of damage to the tank Wild was single-mindedly trying to keep alive. I do think we managed to kill one of the dogs (Rageface) a time or two, but we mostly just died.

I'm excited to finally get a shot at a Firelands, boss, though! I don't think the fight is out of our league, either. There were a couple of attempts where Wild really felt we were starting to get on top of this fight, if we could get all the pieces to fall into place.

Wild was pleased with the gear adjustments, too. Mana regen was back to where my casting decisions feel natural again (instead of me mentally wringing my hands over whether to cast a spell), and it didn't seem to hurt my overall healing output. In fact, Wild's healing output went up, both on the trash kills and on the boss attempts.

I hope we start banging away at Shannox each week. That's assuming we can get ten guildies to show up. Which brings me to Tuesday night - two weeks ago the guild announced they were going to bring two raid groups together and attempt a BWD 25 man run. Wild is signed up for that. I really have no idea if we'll pull that off or not.