Lo-Quality WoW

Shortly after I logged on last night, I got the expected raid invite.  It was for 25-man, so I thought we were going to finish the Ruby Sanctum from last night and flew to Wyrmrest.  Wrong.  We were heading for Icecrown Citadel.  So I flew over there and waited.

And waited.  And waited even more.  Somehow, we just couldn’t get another proper tank and we were still short a dps.  So after awhile, the 25-man was called off and we began forming up in our 10-man teams.  I knew our team was going to be short one person because my guildmate had somehow lost his authenticator.

And that’s when I found out we were doing the Ruby Sanctum 10-man.  So, it was back to Wyrmrest Temple.  However, we were now at least one Healer short, our other Hunter was already locked to another RS-10, and none of our regular off-tanks were around.  So, while our Death Knight once again offered to off-tank, we were still short people.  Which is when the Warlock we had with us disappeared.

This was an odd guild-politics thing, which, not being in their guild, I’m not exactly sure what happened.  Now the Warlock has been with us on our last couple of ICC runs.  As far as I know, he wasn’t on their main 10-man team, which is why we picked him up.  However, he had been told by the other raid leader that it was already cleared with our raid leader to have him switch to that team.

Which wasn’t the case, considering our raid leader also had no idea why the Warlock had suddenly dropped from our group.  So while there was something going on behind the scenes to get the Warlock back, the rest of us tried to find other people.  I wasn’t much help because I was the only Plush Kitty Toy on and to be frank, most of the PKTs aren’t guild for end-content instances at the moment.

Which led into a slightly different topic on where to get the extra players.  Part of the reason why Schödinger’s Cats had merged into Palidrons was because they were having issues filling out their 10-man team.  However, we generally were doing better with random PUG players than people from Palidrons.  I also believe our team has consistently progressed further in 10-man ICC than the pure Palidron’s team.  Which may be why the Warlock was so happy when he finally returned to our team for this run.

As for the rest, we picked up a Paladin healer our shadow Priest knew.  We also pugged a DK dpser.  So our finally raid composition was our Paladin and DK as tanks, two holy Priests and a Paladin as heals, myself, the Warlock, the DK, our shadow Priest and our Shaman as dps. 

Since we had no Druid, one of the Priest’s and myself took turns pretending to be one with the Drums of the Wild.  And actually, for the mobs, our DK tank acted as dps instead, especially since our Paladin tank felt that the mobs “hit like girls.”  He’s from Australia and I’m starting to develop a healthy fear of women from there if getting a 20k attack is like being hit by them. 

The mini bosses were pretty straightforward.  Baltharus the Warborn went down quickly, although we lost our DK dps from that whirlwind type attack he does.  Saviana Ragefire I had to pay attention to since I was the only Hunter, it meant I was on Tranquilizing Shot duty.  The funny part was that someone started saying “oh yeah, she enrages so…” and our raid leader interrupting them, “Don’t worry, Key’s on it.”  Nice warm and fuzzy from the raid leader.

General Zarithrian we weren’t sure on if it was one add from each side or two adds from one side.  We fudged it by having out main tank take one side.  Although we didn’t quite discuss it, myself and I believe our shadow Priest would turn and take out the “back” add, before returning to the boss and the “front” add.  Either way, the rotation worked and was a lot easier than the 25-man “sprinkler” action I had been doing. 

Then came the Halion fight.  We knew phase 1 would be cake and phase 2 would be the key fight.  To start off, we would all jump in to the portal during phase 2 and then in phase 3, our DK tank, Paladin healer, the DK dps and myself would hop out to the physical realm.  So we went at it.

As expected, phase 1 we cruised through.  Phase 2 was where things go interesting.  For the most part, our tank was keeping Halion parallel to the laser beam.  And as such, I hopped to the left side of Halion, so that I’d just be rotating slightly behind the tank.  The problem was, everyone else was on the other side of Halion, including the heals.  Which left me out of range of the general heals and when the Consumption debuff hit me, it pretty much wiped me out.  I know they pushed to phase 3 but the rest wiped shortly after.

Ironically, although I was made fun of because I was the first to die, in our discussion, we figured that the left side, where I’d been, would make things easier for people running around in the fight.  Second try, it went much better although we lost our Shaman in phase 2 this time.

Now, this time I was around for phase 3.  And when I heard the “okay, who else is coming out here to deal with this guy?” I figured I needed to hop the portal.  Where Halion immediately aggroed on me and I just barely managed to Feign Death in time.  “Not you Key, I was referring to the tank”. 

So we started into it and this is where I screwed up.  Normally in these types of fights, I can range pretty far around but the area we had to play in was a bit bigger than usual.  Plus, we only had one healer around, whereas usually we have a couple of healers running around and I’m usually in range of one of them.  So when I got hit by the Combustion debuff, I immediately ran towards the nearest edge without thinking about it, which just happened to be away from our healer.  And quite naturally I died. 

And since the Paladin tried chasing after me to heal me, the tank died and the physical team wiped.  I apologized and on the next attempt, I was much better at staying relatively near the healer.  Since the other dps was the DK, who was pretty much in close to Halion, he was pretty much already in range of the healer who was focused on the tank, and it wasn’t an issue with him.

What did become an issue on the next attempt was balance.  Our assistant raid leader was calling out warnings on the corporality of Halion, but because both warning messages are similar, he acidentally told physical dps to stop when the twilight team was already ahead on dps.  And since our DK tank wasn’t as hearty as the Paladin, he quickly went down and then the rest of us.

Actually, that happened on the next try as well, although this time when he said “physical side stop dps”, I responded with “no”.  We were doing fine until our Paladin had to cleanse me (this time I hadn’t run far away) but in the second it took him to switch, cleanse, then switch back, the tank died and we wiped again.

We talked about it and we decided that placing either a dps who could cleanse or another healer entirely on the physical side would be best.  However, are raid leader was reluctant to switch dps because melee worked best in the physical side and myself as a survival Hunter would lose my bonus from Sniper Training if I was running around in the twilight side.   

So we instead had our Shaman switch over to the physical side as a healer, where he could also toss some dps every so often.  That left the Paladin free to do the cleanse.  And it worked out.  We managed to maintain balance pretty well, never going beyond a 10% difference (40-60%) at any given time. 

It was actually kind of interesting.  I thought that since our high dps people were on the twilight side, they’d be constantly pushing the physical side dps, but a couple of times we had to slow it down a bit as well.  I never really completely stopped, usually I just restricted myself to Auto Shot until we went back to 50%, where I immediately ramped up my other shots. 

Wouldn’t that just push Halion back into the twilight side?  Not really.  As an SV, a lot of my damage sort of depends on various other things linking.  Like the Sniper Training I mentioned before.  So it takes awhile before all my buffs and stuff are applied and I start doing real damage.  (Which is why I tend to be good at single target dps and not aoe). 

So Halion went down, we got our The Twilight Destroyer (10 player) achievement and whatever badges from the quest it was involved with.   Definitely a fun, interesting fight.  Now that we have a pseudo-plan for it, it may become part of our raid rotation.  Some of the loot is really nice.  Otherwise, it’ll be back to the Lich King tonight.  Hopefully my guildmate will have found his authenticator!