Lo-Quality WoW

Since we hadn’t done an ICC raid for a few days, it gave me a little time to go and fish for the ingredients for Fish Feasts.  Usually I stock up enough to get two full stacks of feasts.  This time, I actually got a little more and went into ICC with 56 feasts sitting in my bags.  My bags are probably going to smell funny for weeks…

For once I was slightly later than normal and my guildmate got to experience the questioning of “so is he logging on tonight?” that I usually get concerning him.  So we start gathering and someone double checked to see how much fish we had on hand.  And of course one of the other guys mentions that we’re low on stock since we were putting down two at a time last week.  Ah well.

We are always trying to improve, so we decide to start off in heroic mode again.  We had most of the people who were there when we cleared everything on the lower spire but Saurfang.  Clearing mobs was fine.  We didn’t spring any traps.  Then we face Lord Marrowgar.

And got our heads handed to us.  And again.  And again.  While our basic tactics were the same, we didn’t quite have our grouping correct.  More often than not, someone would get spiked away from the group (and it wasn’t either of us hunters) and then we’d either not make it to them in time or people were getting killed trying to get to them. 

So we altered tactics a bit.  We actually ended up single tankin on one try because the off-tank got disconnected.  But we felt we handled it fine, so we did some single-tanking for awhile while the other tank added to our dps.  But even then, while we got closer, we would still get to the point where someone, usually a healer or two, would go down and then it would cascade fail from there.

We tried switching to a four healer configuration, but that also didn’t quite work.  We tried an alternate moving strategy.  We tried to all group up in one place during bone storm.  Nothing seemed to be working and I actually had to pop another  Flask of Endless Rage because we had been at it for an hour.  I got good at pulling my pet off Marrowgar to attack the spikes to give us that little extra dps to get those people down as fast as possible.

Now, each and every time we wiped I’d drop another Fish Feast.  But my supply was dropping at an alarming rate.  They even gave me extra feasts but we were running through them really quick.  I was starting to wonder if I should have fished even more.

Somehow, we do finally take Marrowgar out, but I think it was a bit of luck since I believe we were single-healing by that point with a couple of dps down as well.  I know when we finished I couldn’ t even see a shred of green in my health bar.  But at least we took him out.

Conversly, Lady Deathwhisper was rather straightforward and easy.  We one-shot her with relative ease, and that was even with us still slightly screwing up our timing transfering between phase 1 and phase 2.  The raid weekly was also the one involving her but we decided against trying it since we were already pretty frazzled by that point.

The airship battle was also pretty easy.  We’ve actually gotten to our point that are dps output was high enough, we managed to take out all the axe-throwers and the first group of enemy boarding mobs.  We actually had to stand around for a few seconds with not a single target within range of any of us.  That was kind of nice actually. 

I did have one heartattack moment in the fight though.  I was about to rocket pack across to the other ship when a rocket landed too close to me and I was actually thrown from the ship!  Fortunately, since my finger was already hovering over the rocket pack button that I was able to hit it and still make my way to the other ship.

Then came Saurfang again.  We had switched to a two-healer configuration, which might have been a mistake.  We did a pretty good job of handling the Blood Beasts and dpsing Saurfang.  I think we even got him pretty close to 30% or less, I’m not entirely sure since I was focused on other issues.  But we would always lose someone to the Mark of the Fallen Champion and that would pretty much lead to a wipe. 

In this case, I’m not sure if healers were running out of mana or something else would slip and cause us to lose that person.  I know the other hunter died by a Blood Beast getting too close to him.  And at least twice, I did a Disengage to get me away but since I was slowed, it took me a few seconds to get back within attack range and resume my dps.

We eventually called an evening.  We all were getting tired and we figured starting fresh the next night would be best.  I know I was tired.  Tired enough that I screwed up and actually winged Saurfang with a Distracting Shot by accident.  Fortunately, nobody got too pissed off at me for it.  Like I said, we all were tired.

So tonight I’m guessing we’ll take a couple more cracks at it and if we can’t do it, we’ll switch to regular and get to clearing the place out.  I still want my crack at the Lich King himself.  Should be interesting.