Lo-Quality WoW

Well it was time for our 10-man weekly, and I knew our raid leader wasn’t going to be on, so the assistant raid leader was in charge.  The main problem was that our raid leader is also our best tank.  In fact, of the tanks we normally use, none of them were available.  I also knew there were a few others who were saying their availability may be bad this week.  So I wasn’t even sure how we’d do.

Fortunately we were set with heals.  Our two main healers are my guildmate and his Druid and a holy Priest.  Our usual third healer was our Shaman.  Last week when our regular Priest had been unavailable, we ran with another holy Priest, a buddy of our shadow Priest, the assistant raid-leader.   Since both holy Priest’s were available, that allowed us to use are Shaman for a dps on this run.

As for tanks, one of our dps, our Death Knight, was in his tanking setup.  However, even he admitted that his tanking gear wasn’t the best.  For our other tank, we were using a Warrior tank who I hadn’t run with before.  And judging by the amount of time the raid leader spent going over the fights with him, he might not have been familiar with the later fights. 

Of course for dps, there was myself and my usual Hunter counterpart.  Of course our shadow Priest and Shaman.  To round it out, we picked up a ret Paladin.  So in essence, we were solid on heals, had mostly known quantities at dps, it was our tanking that was a bit more dubious.

We were sure we’d have some problems so our raid leader for the week decided that we’d give it a try or two on Heroic for each boss but we wouldn’t spent all too much time on them.  And thus we went to Marrowgar, the one that usually kicks are butt on Heroic.  Or at least that was the plan.

We managed to end up wiping on the trash on the way to Marrowgar!  It was a combination of the tanks not doing the normal Line of Sight pulls we usually do and accidentally triggering the traps that activated the Deathbound Wards.   Wards, plural, because we managed to trigger three of them at practically the same time.  Very ugly.  But once we took them on one at a time, we easily cleared the way to Marrowgar himself.   

Normally, going into the very first Bone Storm, we lose at least one person.  We actually made it all the way into the third Bone Storm before we lost anyone.  Since we were doing so well, we decided to try it again and we actually downed Marrowgar on Heroic. 

Which actually wasn’t that surprising when we thought about it.  It’s never been a tanking issue for us, it’s mainly people dying during the Bone Storm, where tanks aren’t an issue.  And in this case, we had good coverage on our heals which helped.  For instance, when one of our guys got spiked, I was the only dps really in position to shoot the spike.  So while I was focused on that, I saw Marrowgar coming near and I ended up just inside his aoe, which usually would have meant both myself and the spike target would be dead.  But our healers kept us both up while I took out the spike by myself. 

Not that it was perfect.  I know one person got spiked really far out, and I’m not entirely sure what they were doing over there.  And with again only one real melee dps, that meant the ranged dps had generally good coverage and positioning to hit spikes (except for the instance I mentioned above). 

Now when we got to Deathwhisper, it ended up being the raid weekly inside.  We debated for a bit but we decided it was better to take Deathwhisper out on heroic than it was to get the extra Emblems of Frost.  Again, we got pretty far into phase 2 before we wiped.  And that was mainly because our shadow Priest hadn’t mediated his threat enough and pulled aggro off the tanks.  One of the tanks got it back, but the confusion was enough that the other tank went down and we couldn’t recover at that point.

For the most part, because Deathwhisper is untauntable, and the Touch of Insignificance debuff on whichever tank has her attention, you have to have two tanks up, otherwise she’ll start rampaging through the raid.  Which actually makes Hunters really useful on this fight.  We can use Misdirection on the off-tank to make sure their threat is high and Feign Death allows us to just focus dps on Deathwhisper without worrying about “dumping” theat on the adds. 

So on the next try we cleared her and moved on to the Gunship battle.  Which is pretty much a cruise if you’re even halfway decently geared and know the fight.  About the only thing of note was that I wasn’t paying attention when the Horde gunship was taken out and had just jumped over.  Fortunately, I just teleported to the landing point but it was still a brief “oh crap” moment for me.

Saurfang, although we were almost positive here we wouldn’t be able to do it, we did one try on Heroic.  On this one, it was actually the tank’s inexperience which caused a big problem.  For Heroic, our strategy is for a Hunter on each side using Distracting Shot on the Blood Beasts and generally acting as bait.  Except this time, I saw my shot hit, the Blood Beast, it briefly target me, then immediately turn back to the tank.  And with an 8 second cooldown, it meant the Blood Beast was able to wham on the tank for a bit.

Now, if I hadn’t seen the Beast briefly target me after my Distracting Shot, I would have thought I had either missed or it resisted.  But even after that, normally dps damage is enough to pull the aggro to one of the dps.  The fact that it didn’t told me that the tank had taunted the Blood Beast!  And when it happened the second time, well, the Mark of the Fallen Champion came out when he was only down 10% of his hp. 

I think in this case, it was just our tanks not being able to adjust their tanking rotations to remove their multi-target abilities.  And while this disappointed our Warrior tank who wanted a full sweep to get the Heroic: Storming the Citadel achievement, we switched back to normal mode.  At least then, when the tank managed to taunt the Blood Beast again, and one of them did, we had the dps to kill it before it spent too much time hitting the tank.

We then proceeded to Frostwing Hall.  Even our normal group has yet to clear either Dreamwalker or Sindragosa on Heroic, so we figured we clear that side out and then spend a little more time doing Heroic modes of the Plagueworks and Crimson Halls.  Plus, one of our regular tanks is expected to be on, which would allow our Death Knight to be back on dps, where he’s most comfortable.

Dreamwalker was pretty simple on normal, although our Warrior tank didn’t know that he should tank the adds on his side towards the middle.  But in general, we put out enough dps that there are several pauses in the battle when there’s just nothing up to attack.  I even briefly considered slapping a bandage on Dreamwalker but I couldn’t remember where I kept my Heavy Frostweave Bandages…

Since we had somewhat of a slow start, that’s where we called it.  We just didn’t have time to work on Sindragosa.  The Warrior tank hadn’t even seen that fight and our DK was also sketchy on the details of tanking that encounter. 

So in all, it was a pretty good run.  Three bosses down in Heroic, two on normal, without any of our normal tanks?  And of course, our newer Druid/Priest/Priest healing trio seemed to be pretty effective as well.  Since I have an evening engagement, I’m not even sure I’ll make it in time for tonights run.  If I don’t make it, I guess it’s another xbox 360 night for me!