Lo-Quality WoW

With scheduled 25-man raids, the Palidrons didn’t need any puggers, so I got to spend some time fishing to restock my Fish Feast supply.  Didn’t do much beyond that the past two nights.  But then last night, we started in on our regular 10-man.

The raid leader had already planned which bosses we’d tackle on Heroic, and which on normal.  The plan was to take Marrowgar, Deathwhisper and the Gunship on Heroic, do Deathbringer Saurfang on normal, then finish up with the Blood Prince Council on Heroic, and if we were lucky, Blood Queen on Heroic as well.

Our regular holy Priest wasn’t around, but our shadow Priest had a friend fill in.  We were also missing one of our regular dps, but we replaced that person with a Warlock.  Which was noteworthy primarily because we so rarely run with a Warlock. 

Marrowgar on Heroic has been our bugaboo for awhile now.  We’ve done it before but we always had issues.  Not this time.  We actually managed to one-shot him on Heroic mode.  I did die, mainly because of bad luck in being spiked right on the edge of Marrowgar’s Bone Storm.  That and the fact that a healer had just been spiked before me and his rescue took priority over mine.  Fortunately, our Druid healer was able to get me back up and I think nobody else died. 

And to be honest, I’m not sure what we did different this time.  The main differences I can think of, is that we did it with three healers, and all three healers were majorly overhealing the spiked person, and the act that we only had one melee dps.  Which meant the rest of the dps could usually focus fire on the spike with minimal effort.  It also meant that Marrowgar’s Bone Storm had less chance of parking right on top of a spiked person.  (Which tends to happen if there’s a bunch of melee standing around the spike, trying to break it.)

Lady Deathwhisper on Heroic is usually a sure thing for us.  And it was.  We had pretty good focused dps and people were quick to move away from spirits.  The only issue we sort of had was threat control, where once or twice, someone came very close to pulling the aggro off the tanks.  So that was easy, and I managed to outroll 3 other people to get my hands on a Whispering Fanged Skull, which was nice since I’ve been trying for awhile to get a new trinket to replace my Darkmoon Card: Greatness. 

The Gunship battle on Heroic is also a sure thing for us.  With only one melee dps, our other Hunter had to be on the second gun.  This fight was pretty standard, or tried to be.  A couple of people forgot to wear their Goblin Rocket Packs, which meant we were a little short on dps for the boarding party but we were able to adjust and get through it.

With us pretty much one-shoting everything, we decided to give Deathbringer Saurfang a couple of shots in Heroic mode.  Our dps output was pretty decent and we were clearly ahead of schedule.  So we did our normal setup, I was left far side, with our other Hunter opposite me.  The two tanks and one melee dps would be in close.  We were running 3 healers because we had problems with the Mark of the Fallen Champion last time, they were stationed in the center.  The other two dps were arranged next to a Hunter. 

The first try, we actually got him to the Frenzy point but we then lost someone to a Mark and had to reset.  Another try barely got started when we got a disconnect.  On the third try, again we got him to the Frenzy point but lost someone to a Mark.

At this point, we decided that we were pretty close and that’d we just go for it.  Mark’s were coming out when Saurfang was at approximately 75, 50 and 25% health, so we were doing well on dps.  We decided to switch our tactics slightly.  What we originally was doing was stunning the right side Blood Beast and concentrating fire on the Blood Beast on my side.  We decided to split dps and take out both Blood Beasts at the same time.  We also had our Shaman healer switch to his dps mode, figuring that with the extra dps, we could avoid the third mark anyway.

So we had our two highest dps, the other Hunter and our Shadow Priest, take one Beast, while myself, the Warlock and Shaman took the other.  Which for the most part worked out except when I had to Feign Death and the Warlock, the dps next to me, didn’t react fast enough when the Blood Beast went after him.  With the loss of his dps, we ran behind schedule to be the enrage timer and had to reset.  But before he went down, we saw the marks come out at 63 and 30% health, so we knew we could do it. 

The next try was the charm.  We actually managed to push the dps enough that the marks came out at 60 and 27%.  The Blood Beasts went down fast each time.  The only downside was that I popped a mana potion about 2 seconds before we killed Saurfang, which was a waste.  But he went down and we finally got out Heroic: Storming the Citadel (10 player) achievement.  We also got a tier token, which probably was even more important to us.

Our raid leader actually thought we wouldn’t have been able to take him for another month.  We’ll have to see next week if we can do it again or if we just lucked out on this try. 

So on to the Crimson Hall and the Blood Prince Council.  This is where we spent the rest of the night.  And the very first wipe was actually the fault of us Hunters.  In Hardmode, the Kinetic Bombs fall even faster.  Which wouldn’t have been a problem except we both took our pets off a Bomb to attack a new Bomb that spawned at the same time.  In the second or two it took us to realize what we had done and tried to get one of our pets back on the original Bomb, it had already landed and wiped several people.

Now, given that we were mostly ranged dps (in fact, our melee dps became our third tank for this fight) we should have been fine for the various attack abilities as well as the new Shadow Prison debuff.  That is, everyone except us Hunters.  Why?  Because of our duty on the Kinetic Bombs, it sometimes meant we had to move to a new Kinetic while our pets dealt with an older one. 

Which is how the rest of the night went.  With the added restrictions on us, it made it that much more difficult to juggle the Kinetic Bombs and do our regular dps duties.  But by then it was getting rather late so we decided to call it off rather than keep banging our heads against the fight.

So tonight we should be doing the Crimson Hall completely in Heroic mode, which should be interesting.  And given our current group makeup, Heroic Festergut and Rotface are definite possibilities.  I think we’re still undergeared for Heroic Professor Putricide though.  Guess we’ll find out.  In the meantime, I need to read up a bit more on the Heroic mode Crimson Hall fights…