Soloing Don Carlos as an Enhancement Shaman
Don Carlos is a mini-boss in Heroic Durholde who has a 100% chance of dropping Don Carlos' Famous Hat — which makes sense, because he's very clearly wearing it! Of course, given the number of raptors running around without eyes, not to mention humans without skulls, I guess we can't exactly take that kind of logic for granted ...
Anyway, Don Carlos' hat is an absolute must-have for any self-respecting shaman — not only because it's pretty damn sexy in its own right, but because the "incorporeal coyote spirit" summoned by its on-use effect looks exactly like our Ghost Wolf form. I missed the zeppelin the first time it sailed, because Lil started as a lowly alt; by the time she was leveled to 70 and attuned to the Caverns of Time, all of my friends had already farmed Old Hillsbrad dry and were pretty burnt out on it.
Fortunately, it's relatively easy to solo at level 80.
Here's how I did it (and believe me, if I can do it, anyone can!):
1. Spec Enhancement. I don't think this is necessary, per se, but it's fun. After a long week of healbotting friendly things and boring unfriendly things to death, a girl has to get her Windfury on.
2. Port to Orgrimmar.
3. Remember that there's a portal directly to the Caverns to Time in the Dalaran's Violet Citadel.
4. /sigh.
5. Astral Recall to Dalaran.
6. Wonder if anyone's started a QQ thread about Shamans being cheated in 3.1 by a 30 minute Hearthstone cooldown ...
7. Be amazed to find that cooler heads do occasionally prevail!
(What were we doing again? Oh, right...)
8. Port to the Caverns of Time.
9. Run a couple of laps around the central cavern, trying to remember which instance is Old Hillsbrad. (For the record, it's the one that looks like an Alliance outpost, but not actually an Alliance town. If there's a lot of buildings, its Old Stratholme. If there are only a few buildings, it's Durnholde. Trees and swampy things mean you're on your way to Mount Hyjal or Black Morass.)
10. Old Hillsbrad is an outdoor instance, so don't forget to mount up or shift into Ghost Wolf form. I recommend Ghost Wolf. You're doing this for fun!, after all, and nothing says fun! more than romping around naked while scratching yourself and howling. (Just ask the man in your life.)
11. NO! Don't take the dragon! He's all gung-ho to rescue some hapless orcs, or something. Save that for some sightseeing Children of Wrath; you're on a mission, here.
12. Run up the road. No, the other up! I mean down. I mean— ...
Why the hell are you asking me for directions? Did you miss the post in which I confessed to getting lost in the Dalaran bank? Just ... run around, howling and scratching, until you stumble across Don Carlos and his faithful Coyote Spirit. That's what I did, and it didn't take long.
13. Scamper ahead of the dashing don, and drop some totems. I went with Windfury, Mana Stream, Earth Elemental and Magma Totem.
13. CHAIN LIGHTNING!
14. ... Remember belatedly — and vaguely, from doing this on your level 70 'lock — that Don Carlos is ranged, so you while you definitely succeeded in making him angry, he's still dancing out of range, shooting you with arrows, and (insult to injury!) his pet puppy is chewing on your furry Tauren tail ass. (Almost forgot; Old Hillsbrad makes you human. /shudder)
15. Panic.
16. Heal yourself. (Ah, familiar ground! Flash of Lesser Healing Light works well here, because you will be getting pushback. Just don't do what I did, and waste precious seconds troubleshooting your Riptide keybind. You specced out of it, dummy.)
17. Run up to him, taking the long way because (damn it!) there's a fence in the way ...
18. Push some buttons. If they include anything that procs Windfury, you win! If they don't, heal yourself and try again.
(Okay, okay. I'll try to be helpful. "Some buttons" actually means Stormstrike, Earth Shock and Lava Lash, in that order. Every time Maelstrom Weapon stacks to five, use Chain Lightning or Lightning Bolt for DPS or Healing Wave for a clutch self-heal. Imbue your main-hand weapon with Windfury on your off-hand with Flametongue. Also, due to some bizarre math thing I don't quite understand, the Torch of Holy Fire is currently the best enhancement main-hand in the game ... so if you're fortunate enough to have one, don't bother equipping that level 75 Northrend blue that you've been carrying around in your off-spec set. Just use the pretty healing mace, and you're g2g.)
19. Repeat step 18 until Don Carlos dies. Then do it again to his puppy (which doesn't despawn, for some reason).
20. /cheer! — and pose for the camera, of course!
Tagged! What's in a name?
Fulguralis is curious about what's in a name? (And I was tagged on the ground floor of a new meme! How cool is that?)
Confession? Elleiras isn't actually my main's name — or, rather, my main alt's name (since my warlock has been retired from active duty, confusing the living Hellfire out of anyone who stumbles across a shaman's blog after Googling 'locky things like Affliction Spec, DoT Rotation or 101 Ways to Make a Gnome Mage Cry.)
No, Elleiras is a level 58 Blood Elf Death Knight who has been permanently parked in the Thrallmar inn. She exists solely so I could experience the Death Knight starting chain on Live and claim the name I blog under on my home server. (I guess that would be dually, not solely, but ... I'm still crying over Amber's Tribute For Great Justice. ;.; Lemme alone.)
Elleiras is also my warlock's name, spelled backwards, which is in turn a corruption (get it?) of Sarelle — the name of a minor character in a book I happened to be reading at the time I created her. I'll admit, I didn't put much that thought into it. I was very hastily rerolling 'lock, because after all of two quests as an Undead mage, I knew I hated the class. Besides, I was fiercely jealous of my sister's imp. ("You get a pet? That shoots fireballs? Your pet is cooler than my character? No fair!")
My short-lived mage was Ihlana, a name I made up more or less out of thin air for a character — an ice mage, actually, whose fraternal twin was a fire mage named Caethor — in a text-based, freeform roleplaying game I played once upon a time (i.e., high school). (Does anyone else remember RhyDin on AOL, back when AOL was still cool and only hardcore geeks used IRC?)
(How's that for parenthetical asides, by the way?)
Ihlana has long-since been deleted, but her name lives on in the form of my level 51 feral druid.
My shaman's name, Liluye, is (supposedly) a Miwok name meaning "singing chicken hawk that soars." I tend to scour the Internet for Native American names for my many Tauren alts, since that seems to be the trend in-game. Case in point: there's an NPC in Thunderbluff whose name, Kuruk, is Pawnee for "bear."
My level 70 hunter, Fahalle, was actually named by Asara. I have no idea how to pronounce it (I tend to refer to her as "Falafel" >.>), but I love the shape of the letters together. It's a very pretty name for a very tough Orc.
That encompasses all of my significant characters, I think. I have a baby shadow priest named Malice (which I couldn't believe wasn't taken!), a tiny hunter named Villanie (if the mohawk fits...), and a bank alt named Mychelle (my name is Michelle; hi! *wave*), but none of them see significant playtime these days and I tend to forget they exist until the server crashes and I'm forced to stare longingly at the character selection screen ...
So, that's it for me! I'm supposed to tag three more bloggers, but I prefer to leave these things open-ended for anyone who wants to participate. It's a cop-out, I know, but it's one designed to spread the warm-and-fuzzies — so I hope you'll forgive me. 
"Casual" is not a four-letter word
Blogger's Note: I intended for this to be a relatively short post, inspired by the fact that one of my guild's Casual Raiders recently asked me to change the name of her rank since the word "casual" has negative connotations in the WoW community. It ended up being a lot longer than I anticipated, so I'm going to break it into parts. I realize the theme has been done to death, but it's become an issue again in my guild (there was a /gquit last night, and I'm expecting at least one more to come), so it's very much on my mind.
* * *
My guild has two raiding ranks: Core Raider and — until recently — Casual Raider.
Core does not refer to "hardcore"; no one I play with is serious enough about raiding to want or deserve that particular distinction! Even the members of the (thankfully defunct) Cool Kid's Club are pretty casual in terms of actual playtime. The ret paladin has season tickets and would rather miss a raid than a game. The mage-turned-resto-druid-turned-mage-again is two hours ahead of the server and has a firm bedtime. Even our single-highest attendance raider, who likes to boast that he's the most "hardcore" among us, took three months off in the middle of our T5/T6 progression to concentrate on school.
Yes. Hardcore. Likes a Maltipoo on a fox hunt.
No, in this context, "core" means exactly that: the dozen or so raiders who form the core of my raiding team. These are the players I know I can count on to attend more raids than they miss and always keep me in the loop when their plans and priorities change. Most of them have my cell phone number; the few who don't live in other countries*, but can still reach me via MSN or G-mail.
I use a two-tiered rank system to differentiate these Core Raiders from our much larger pool of Casual Raiders: players who can't commit to a set raid schedule — often because of school, work or family commitments — but are welcome and encouraged to sign up for those raids they can attend. I can't promise them spots in every raid, because I won't displace a Core Raider for a Casual Raider, but our roster is such that I need at least some of my Casual Raiders to show up for each raid in order to get it off the ground.
As a whole, I depend on my Casual Raiders every bit as much as I depend on my Core Raiders. I just can't depend on them individually, but such is the nature of their membership in the guild. They may or may not be available on any given raid night, and I may or may not have spots for them when they are.
Flexibility for flexibility.
It's a fair arrangement, but it comes with its share of frustrations — for both sides, but especially for me: the one person in the guild charged with the task of reconciling everyone's individual needs with the raid's overarching one.
The Casual Perspective
If I can only raid one day a week, then I want to raid - not ride the bench. It isn't my fault that I can't raid as often as everyone else; I shouldn't be penalized for having a life. After all, I work just as hard on my gear as everyone else ... sometimes even harder, because I can't count on farming Naxx for all of my upgrades. I've been a member of the guild forever, contribute to the community in immeasurable ways and am always, always willing to help other guildmembers outside of raids, even when it cuts into my limited playtime.
I understand this; believe me, I do! If I had only a few hours a week to raid, then I imagine I would want to spend them raiding too, and could easily become resentful of those who are able to do more in-game simply by virtue of the fact that they have a seemingly unlimited amount of time in which to do it.
I also think there's some merit to the thought that casual raiders (by my guild's definition) have to put some extra effort into keeping their gear up-to-date. For those of us who attend every raid, gearing up becomes a group effort; the guild even provides gems and enchanting materials for most main-spec upgrades. In contrast, those who are only able to step in for a few bosses each week are often handicapped by our EPGP system (which rewards time as well as effort) and at the mercy of the RNG. There is an abundance of gear available outside of 25-man raids — crafted epics, BoE's, badge and reputation rewards and even Heroic and 10-man drops — but very little of it comes easily, or cheaply, to someone with a limited amount of time to invest in farming.
Because my guild is first and foremost a community, I value the contributions that my casual players make even, and especially, outside of raids. Guild chat is seldom quiet, and is often LOL-funny ... not the kind of "lol" you type at the end of a snarky sentence to take the sting out of it, but the kind that makes the dog bark because you find yourself suddenly choking on your Mountain Dew.
The point that I'm trying to make (in my typical, long-winded, replete-with-irreverent-parenthetical-asides fashion) is that our casuals may not come to every progression raid, but they are as much a presence in the guild as our core raiders are. Far from finding them a burden, I want to accommodate them as much as possible — in part I feel obligated to live up to my end of the bargain, but also because I genuinely enjoy raiding with them. As I've said many times before, the people make the game for me.
Perfect example: We have an ultra-casual rogue who works on an oil rig and can be out of commission for days and even weeks at a time. He logs on from a laptop to keep in touch, but doesn't have a stable enough connection to raid; I think he's come to three or four runs since Wrath was released. But on those rare occasions he is able to join us for a few bosses in Heroic Naxx, he comes armed with enough Comfortable Insoles for the entire raid. Why? Because they're comfortable, of course! (At one point, he had half of us convinced that they actually decreased durability damage. Quite a few people dove off the cliffs in Mount Hyjal just to test it out. Tyrande was furious.)
I can't imagine a guild without Testybones or his Comfortable Insoles. I'm sure they exist, and do quite well ... but I wouldn't want to be a part of one.
Next: The Core Perspective
Gonna Go When The Volcano Blows!
Remember that disaster of an "alt" OS10 run that transformed me from a mild-mannered Tauren shaman, serenely communing with the elements, into a card-carrying member of the Angry Healers Club? What I neglected to mention was that immediately after we pulled Sartharion, our sole non-alt DPS — a Death Knight who never fails to "win Recount" — committed suicide-by-lava.
I can't say that I blame him, to be honest. I was /wrists-ing at several friends in a private chat channel at the time, too.
... or, rather, I couldn't say that I blamed him ... until I realized why he did it ...
It wasn't because the tanks were inconsiderate, incompetent and, well, plural. (Why did we bring three of them, again? /boggle)
It wasn't because raid DPS was so ridiculously slow that we started asking each other if Sartharion had an enrage timer.
It wasn't even because the healers were snarling-mad (although we were).
No. He committed suicide to cheese the achievement. Apparently, the game doesn't recognize the difference between dying before you're hit by a volcano and defeating Sartharion without being hit by any volcanos at all ... provided that the other nine-tenths of the raid is able to down him, of course.
Which we did.
Eventually.
Painfully.
With much gnashing of the teeth, tearing of the hair and general QQ.
So in the end, our sole DPS main earned (/cough) his 10 achievement points, our feckless alts walked away with gear and badges, and I spent the next few days commiserating with Angry Healers everywhere. (Yay, blogfodder.)
Win-win, right?
... not if you asked the other healer in the run, the holy-turned-ret-turned-holy-again paladin who was the Light to my Lasers that night. He was absolutely furious that the Death Knight took a dive, especially since it forced the two of us work that much harder to keep the rest of the raid alive (and thus miss out on the achievement ourselves).
I understand where he was coming from, of course. I wasn't mad myself (the Death Knight announced before accepting the raid invite that he was going to die in a fire; we just kind of assumed that he was joking...) but that's probably because I was already frustrated to the verge of tears by ten other things. One more would have pushed me over the edge from angry into homicidal.
I kind of shrugged it off at the time, /pat'd the paladin on his jet-blue shoulders and wrote the entire night off as a "learning experience" (as in, I learned never to subject myself to that again!).
So why do I bring all of this up again? Am I that hard up for things to write about?
... Yes, but that's thoroughly beside the point.
You see, late, late last night — after working on Sarth 3D (Lite Edition) for an hour or so and realizing that we just didn't have the right group for it — we decided to assassinate the Twilight drakes one-by-one and then take on Sarth, which would give everyone who didn't have the achievement yet an opportunity to practice volcano-dodging in a relatively stress-free environment. (Because, believe me, a lava wall and some fire elementals are a nice walk in the Sepulcher compared to all of The Bad® that Sarth 3D has going on!)
So, no Of The Nightfall for me this week.
But no volcano-spew, either!
Without throwing myself into the jaws of the dragon — or letting any of my precious little Grid-boxlets go out! — Gonna Go When The Volcano Blows is one more Glory of the Raider achievement checked off my list.
/flex
The hands-down best part was that the Angry Paladin got it too, which inspired him to forgive the Death Knight (it's easy to forgive someone when you can feel superior to them — such as for earning an achievement legitimately that they had to exploit). I never have to listen to him cry in /officer chat about it again!
... Still, the entire incident has me thinking about Tarsus's excellent No Faith in Achievements post in a whole new light. I don't necessarily agree that achievements are pointless, although I certainly wish they were: their only real value comes from keeping my guildmembers interested in the game at a time that we're all bored out of our minds. If the raids themselves presented more of a challenge, then the gimmicky raid achievements wouldn't feel like such a necessary evil.
I'm not ususally one to /pout about loot …
... but awarding Angry Dread to an undergeared rogue on his very first Naxx-25 — when I've been scrambling to put together an enhancement set before 3.1, and still have Crimson Cranium Crusher for a Main Hand — may have broken my heart a little bit tonight. I lost Crimson Steel to him last week too, in that disaster of an alt OS10 PuG.
QQ.
Delusional bear is … delusional.
My boyfriend is not the most stable druid I have ever met. As often as he teases me about drinking the "shaman water," the truth is that he is the one who suffers from delusions. Foremost among them is the idea (which he absolutely believes) that he is not a Hordeling at all, but rather a Night Elf druid who has somehow mastered the art of "Tauren form."
... and yet, for someone who is supposedly "infiltrating" the Horde (/air quotes) he has made no secret whatsoever of where his true allegiance lies.
He openly praises Elune.
He begins every new boss-fight with a heartfelt "For the Alliance!"
He steadfastly refuses to raise a paw against any Alliance adventurers he encounters out and about in the world, except in self defense (or, to his credit, my defense).
He even /cheered when we wiped suffered a temporary setback in the Battle of Mount Hyjal, and were forced to watch Thrall fall in a blaze of Orcish glory after forgetting the Number #1 rule of raiding: don't stand in The Bad®. (Thrall tried to tank Azgalor in a Rain of Fire after our warrior died to an unfortunate silence. Smart Warchief is ... not so smart. >.>)
I love my pet tank — in no small part because he doubles as a furry bear rug on those cold, Northrend nights.
But there's no denying it: he's kind of crazy.
So, really, it shouldn't have come as a surprise to me — when we decided to roll a pair of super-secret Alliance alts on a far-flung server — that he decided to play a Draenei shaman who ... (wait for it) doesn't believe he's a Draenei shaman.
Oh, no. "Kiirk" thinks he's the captain of a spaceship. He speaks in broken monologues. And he can't figure out exactly why this lavendar-skinned, purple-haired Vulcan is following him around with a perpetually concerned look on her face, occasionally transforming into a long-eared shelat to protect him from mobs aliens when he becomes too preoccupied with his totems crew to cast a lightning bolt arm a phaser in his own defense.
... It's going to be an interesting 80 levels ...
Tremendously amused …
... by the fact that Scarlett O'Hara and roulette wheel are in my top 5 searches!
I'm in training-the-new-guy mode at work, so I haven't been able to keep up with updates, comments or even my feedreader, let alone experiment with Twitter. I'm semi-/afk this week. (But giggling! Personally, I would have pictured Scarlett as a mage.)
That's a fun game to play at work, by the way. If the new guy were a WoW character, what would he be? I'm leaning towards Troll priest at the moment.
Ahhh, he's back. **Elleiras gains vanish!**
I'm becoming an angry healer :(
I came to this realization last night, after snarling through an "alt run" of OS10 (on my main, of course; both healers were on mains, although one was an off-spec retadin).
The main tank was the warrior alt of our holy-turned-shadow priest. He is a damned good healer ... and a god-awful tank. Still, it wasn't his tanking that had me all riled up ("on the warpath," as one slightly wary-of-me hunter put it; they really aren't used to seeing me rage in /guild chat!). No, it was the fact that the entire group — 100% melee, by the way, and 40% Death Knight — would stand around at half health after each trash pull.
Not eating.
Not bandaging.
Just standing there, waiting none-too-patiently for me to heal them up to full.
So the healadin and I would look at each other and /sigh, and top them off ... and EVERY SINGLE TIME, without fail, the main tank would charge ahead to the next pull (or drake!) when we were still at half mana from healing the entire 10-man raid while out of combat.
You'd think that someone who raided on a healer throughout the entire Burning Crusade and much of the current expansion would know how utterly impolite (and foolish) this is ... but, no. Even when the paladin and I /afk'd the readycheck before Sartharion (we were healing! and drinking!), the warrior didn't take the hint.
"Why aren't you ready? Come on."
...
So I'm becoming an angry healer. You know, the kind who hates tanks. And hates DPS. And writes scathing blogposts to vent her frustrations after "alt runs" she should never have joined in the first place.
Is there a support group for this?
Reflections of a Twilight Vanquisher
If you read Matticus through a feedreader, like I do, then you're probably familiar with the quote in his security footer:
You miss 100% of the shots you never take. — Wayne Gretzky
I like the quote, and I agree with it ... but more in passing than upon reflection, if that makes any sense? Until this weekend, I never gave it much more than a moment's thought. Now, though — now, it rings so poignantly true that it almost brought me to tears this morning, when I opened my beloved Google® Reader to learn more than I ever needed to know about Lifebloom and five (more) reasons that the PTR sucks.
Yes, I'm a girl. I still cry every time Bambi's mother dies, and whenever Sarah McLachlan asks for money for the SPCA.
... But why would a hockey quote, of all things, make my nose start to sting and my eyes just a little moist?
Because this weekend's Sartharion 3D kill, a first for my guild, came perilously close to not happening — not because we couldn't master the fight, but because we almost didn't try.
* * *
Scott Andrews of Wow Insider printed a letter in his column this morning that could have come from any one of my officers:
After clearing all available 25-man content and having it on farm for over a month, a line seems to have been drawn in the proverbial sand. Half of our raiders consider multiple drake Obsidian Sanctum the next step in guild progression. However, the other half seem to be content farming content that it "easy" for us and are happy not logging on when we schedule attempts.
Furthermore, when we do get enough people for a "progression" raid, we run into the same problem. After a few attempts, we inevitably get one or two raiders planting the seed of doubt ...
Don't despair, anonymous WI reader! You aren't alone.
This has been our experience exactly.
I'm sure I've written about this before: on the evening of our first scheduled Naxx-25, we had over 40 guildmembers online, leveled to 80 and ready to raid — including players I hadn't seen in months and long-since demoted to "Friends & Family." (As an ostensibly casual guild leader, I've come to accept that members will come and go. We have ridiculously low attrition, insofar that raiders very seldom leave us for other guilds, but we do tend to lose casuals to real life fairly often.)
The initial burst of energy and enthusiasm carried us through all of the content currently available. Within three weeks, we had cleared not only Naxxramas, but Obsidian Sanctum and Eye of Eternity as well.
Then ... we stalled.
You've heard all of the reasons and excuses before — certainly from the blogosphere, and perhaps within your own guild as well. The absence of Heroic attunements and abundance of BoE epics make the gearing up process trivial. Two versions of each raid instance lead players to burn out on them twice as quickly.
The content itself is "too easy," and there isn't nearly enough of it: Malygos and Sartharion can be farmed in about 30 minutes each; Naxxramas takes longer, but lacks the replayability of Karazhan. (Remember how utterly random the Prince Malchezaar fight was? Even a T6-geared raid could catch an unlucky series of infernals and wipe!)
Taken together, these things conspired against us: by the time we returned to the Obsidian Sanctum on Saturday, it had been three weeks since we had cleared Naxxramas with more than 20 people in our raid. Even more disheartening was the fact that we had been forced to either cancel or downgrade all but two of our previous Sartharion 3D attempts for lack of interest.
Right up until invite time, Saturday's raid looked to be more of the same.
Our single-highest DPS — a Death Knight — signed up as "not attending." So did our holy priest and both of our part-time resto druids. One of our rogues was called into work at the last minute, and a mage claimed the same (but was probably just boycotting the raid, since he isn't interested in any boss that doesn't drop The Turning Tide).
Several of our casuals had recently leveled to 80, so we were able to fill the most glaring holes in our raid. For the first time in almost a month, we had 25 people ready and even eager to go! ... The problem was, they weren't the right people.
We had five tanks (one more than we needed), six healers (one less than we wanted) and two brand-new DPS who had PuG'd OS a few times but never before attended drake attempts with the guild.
And, because we opened the night with Malygos-25 and PuG'd liberally from /guild chat to do it, we ended up inviting everyone who was capable of clicking "accept" — from the newly 80 holy paladin who had all of his gear enchanted with stamina patches to the beastmaster hunter who can raid once in a rare Saturday (and only then if we're desparate, since his transatlantic connection makes it almost impossible for him to dodge void zones and lava waves).
Looking over the roster at the start of the Obsidian Sanctum portion of our raid, Sartharion 3D looked impossible. Feeling more than a little trepidatious, Keaton started counting the number of "save-the-bear" cooldowns we had available to us. There were all of two: his, and a single Pain Suppression.
Was it even worth attempting Sarth 3D with this group? we asked ourselves on our private u2u channel. Or should we take the quick kill and break into 10-man groups to gear our newer members and work on our Glory of the Raider achievements?
We discussed our options briefly on open Vent, acknowledging that we didn't have the "ideal group composition" for progression, but expressing our willingness to continue if the rest of the raid was. Worst case scenario, I mused (while Keaton scurried off to Moonglade to respec bear), we could work on our positioning, practice the movement of the fight and perfect the healing and tanking assignments for next time.
We put it to a /readycheck vote: 22 for; 3 against.
Cleary, I raid with optimists.
* * *
On our very first attempt, we killed Tenebron before losing too many healers to uncontrolled adds and calling the wipe. By our third or fourth attempt — and to everyone's shock — we were starting to see actual progress, and what had started as a resigned, "might as well get a couple of learning wipes in" attitude became to transform into real excitement and real determination.
We started to take things seriously. Our fifth tank respecced DPS. Our undergeared paladin subbed out for a warlock (which elicited more than one raised eyebrow, because it took the total number of healers in the raid down to five). And one of our two ret paladins switched over to his Death Knight, who he retired a few weeks ago but still sufficiently outgears his current main.
Things went wrong; we fixed them — talking through our strategies on Vent, experimenting with new roles, adjusting the timing of our Bloodlusts and how we dealt with portal phases.
DPS seemed a little low; we told our high-DPS rogue not to bother with anesthetic wound poison, and put our lowest-DPSing hunter on tranquilizing shot.
Twilight Whelps were chewing up our healers; we switched tanking assignments and had our protadin handle the drakes, while our warrior took over adds. He was paired with a second prot paladin, and together they had both the snap aggro (thunderclap) and the AoE threat generation (consecrate) to keep the whelps and fire elementals under control.
A handful of players struggled with void zones; we had an elemental shaman with high-situational awareness call them out on Vent.
And so on.
One obstacle at a time, we inched closer and closer to victory. The one thing we couldn't overcome were the breaths; with all three drakes up and only two cooldowns to rely on, Sartharion could easily one-shot our main tank.
Our prot-turned-fury warrior had dinner plans, and reluctantly stepped out. We brought a holy paladin in to replace him, which brought our total number of healers up to six, but didn't help our cooldown count since he wasn't specced for Divine Guardian. "Should I respec?" he asked as he zoned in.
"No, just run with it," I /whispered in response. "We're doing really well and don't want to break our momentum. Respec after this wipe to minimize downtime."
... except, we didn't wipe. And we didn't need a single cooldown, because our DPS burst Tenebron down before Shadron even landed.
It was one of those magical, once-in-a-raiding-tier nights when everything just clicked for us, and the fight flowed together.
Tenebron fell.
Shadron fell.
Vesperon fell.
And suddenly there was just Sartharion to deal with, and our epic battle became one we've done a dozen times before. Still, I don't think I was the only one holding my breath with Sartharion finally bit the dust.
And to think ... it almost didn't happen. Because we almost didn't try.
Priestly love?
"Where did all of these priests come from?" —our shadow priest, upon noticing that we were running two shadow priests, two holy priests and a disc priest in a recent Naxx-20 clear
"Well, when a mommy priest and a daddy priest love each other ..." —our smart-ass resto shaman (who boils water like a pro!)
"... or get really, really drunk ..." —our other smart-ass resto shaman (is there any other kind?)
"We have five hunters, too. Half of the raid is priests and hunters ..." —our survival hunter, clearly feeling left out
"Do you want us to tell sexy stories about your parents, too?" —one of the shamans (I can't tell them apart anymore!)
Yep, still love my guild!
(And still working on a real post. Promise.)
Alts! I haz them.
Nerd Points!
Recent Comments
- Alexander Doetsch on This post is dedicated to Elam.
- James Greene on The Undying is not fun.
- Judy on An Update, In Pictures.
- Yarisel Cannon on Not it!
- Bob2 on An Update, In Pictures.
Recent Ramblings
- An Update, In Pictures.
- Hey, remember that warlock pet bug?
- A long over-due and rather jumbled update
- You know it’s time to end the blogging hiatus …
- So.
Less Recent Ramblings
- November 2011
- November 2010
- April 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
Surreality Blogs!
- Anea.nu
- Confessions of a Feral Druid
- My Name is Forrest…
- Shaman On Ramen
- Tahas, Not Tatas
- Tank'n'Tree
- The Argent Champion