Shortly after I logged on last night, I got the expected raid invite.\u00c2\u00a0 It was for 25-man, so I thought we were going to finish the Ruby Sanctum from last night and flew to Wyrmrest.\u00c2\u00a0 Wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 We were heading for Icecrown Citadel.\u00c2\u00a0 So I flew over there and waited.<\/p>\n
And waited.\u00c2\u00a0 And waited even more.\u00c2\u00a0 Somehow, we just couldn’t get another proper tank and we were still short a dps.\u00c2\u00a0 So after awhile, the 25-man was called off and we began forming up in our 10-man teams.\u00c2\u00a0 I knew our team was going to be short one person because my guildmate had somehow lost his authenticator.<\/p>\n
And that’s when I found out we were doing the Ruby Sanctum 10-man.\u00c2\u00a0 So, it was back to Wyrmrest Temple.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 So, while our Death Knight once again offered to off-tank, we were still short people.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is when the Warlock we had with us disappeared.<\/p>\n
This was an odd guild-politics thing, which, not being in their guild, I’m not exactly sure what happened.\u00c2\u00a0 Now the Warlock has been with us on our last couple of ICC runs.\u00c2\u00a0 As far as I know, he wasn’t on their main 10-man team, which is why we picked him up.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Which wasn’t the case, considering our raid leader also had no idea why the Warlock had suddenly dropped from our group.\u00c2\u00a0 So while there was something going on behind the scenes to get the Warlock back, the rest of us tried to find other people.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Which led into a slightly different topic on where to get the extra players.\u00c2\u00a0 Part of the reason why Sch\u00c3\u00b6dinger’s Cats had merged into Palidrons was because they were having issues filling out their 10-man team.\u00c2\u00a0 However, we generally were doing better with random PUG players than people from Palidrons.\u00c2\u00a0 I also believe our team has consistently progressed further in 10-man ICC than the pure Palidron’s team.\u00c2\u00a0 Which may be why the Warlock was so happy when he finally returned to our team for this run.<\/p>\n
As for the rest, we picked up a Paladin healer our shadow Priest knew.\u00c2\u00a0 We also pugged a DK dpser.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Since we had no Druid, one of the Priest’s and myself took turns pretending to be one with the Drums of the Wild<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 And actually, for the mobs, our DK tank acted as dps instead, especially since our Paladin tank felt that the mobs “hit like girls.”\u00c2\u00a0 He’s from Australia and I’m starting to develop a healthy fear of women from there if getting a 20k\u00c2\u00a0attack is like being hit by them.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n The mini bosses were pretty straightforward.\u00c2\u00a0 Baltharus the Warborn went down quickly, although we lost our DK dps from that whirlwind type attack he does.\u00c2\u00a0 Saviana Ragefire I had to pay attention to since I was the only Hunter, it meant I was on Tranquilizing Shot<\/a> duty.\u00c2\u00a0 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.”\u00c2\u00a0 Nice warm and fuzzy from the raid leader.<\/p>\n General Zarithrian we weren’t sure on if it was one add from each side or two adds from one side.\u00c2\u00a0 We fudged it by having out main tank take one side.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Either way, the rotation worked and was a lot easier than the 25-man “sprinkler” action I had been doing.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n Then came the Halion fight.\u00c2\u00a0 We knew phase 1 would be cake and phase 2 would be the key fight.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 So we went at it.<\/p>\n As expected, phase 1 we cruised through.\u00c2\u00a0 Phase 2 was where things go interesting.\u00c2\u00a0 For the most part, our tank was\u00c2\u00a0keeping Halion parallel to the laser beam.\u00c2\u00a0 And as such, I hopped to the left side of Halion, so that I’d just be rotating slightly behind the tank.\u00c2\u00a0 The problem was, everyone else was on the other side of Halion, including the heals.\u00c2\u00a0 Which left me out of range of the general heals and when the Consumption debuff hit me, it pretty much wiped me out.\u00c2\u00a0 I know they pushed to phase 3 but the rest wiped shortly after.<\/p>\n 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Second try, it went much better although we lost our Shaman in phase 2 this time.<\/p>\n Now, this time I was around for phase 3.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Where Halion immediately aggroed on me and I just barely managed to Feign Death<\/a> in time.\u00c2\u00a0 “Not you Key, I was referring to the tank”.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n So we started into it and this is where I screwed up.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 And quite naturally I died.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n And since the Paladin tried chasing after me to heal me, the tank died and the physical team wiped.\u00c2\u00a0 I apologized and on the next attempt, I was much better at staying relatively near the healer.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n What did become an issue on the next attempt was balance.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 And since our DK tank wasn’t as hearty as the Paladin, he quickly went down and then the rest of us.<\/p>\n Actually, that happened on the next try as well, although this time when he said “physical side stop dps”, I responded with “no”.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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<\/a> if I was running around in the twilight side.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00c2\u00a0 That left the Paladin free to do the cleanse.\u00c2\u00a0 And it worked out.\u00c2\u00a0 We managed to maintain balance pretty well, never going beyond a 10% difference (40-60%) at any given time.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n It was actually kind of interesting.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I never really completely stopped, usually I just restricted myself to Auto Shot<\/a> until we went back to 50%, where I immediately ramped up my other shots.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n Wouldn’t that just push Halion back into the twilight side?\u00c2\u00a0 Not really.\u00c2\u00a0 As an SV, a lot of my damage sort of depends on various other things linking.\u00c2\u00a0 Like the Sniper Training I mentioned before.\u00c2\u00a0 So it takes awhile before all my buffs and stuff are applied and I start doing real damage.\u00c2\u00a0 (Which is why I tend to be good at single target dps and not aoe).\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n