Hilarity and Halion

So, as it’s Tuesday, I met a friend for a late breakfast, we went to see a movie (Iron Man 2, which was definitely worth the $6.75), we wandered and chatted and then I came home to discover that, as per usual, Blizzard and I don’t agree on things and Ruby Sanctum is open.

I was asked to go heal for my new guild when I logged on to do my transmutes, but I’d just walked in and was supposed to do a few Ahunes with my brother and Majik over on Proudmoore.

Maj, my brother and I actually ended up doing the weekly (twice on two toons each) and then when I told them that Ruby Sanctum was up… that’s all they wanted to do.

I’ll get into details on the fight in a post tomorrow or something, but can I just say that it was a HILARIOUS raid, even though we didn’t down Halion?

Maj was on his DK, tanking. My brother (whom we call Fog or Foggy) was pressed into service on his rarely-used hunter because his paladin, while able to solo-tank Anub’Rekhan, would have been smushed into itty bitty little bite-sized morsels of dragon food if he had tried tanking in Ruby Sanctum. I… was on my resto shaman. My poor, neglected, rusty old resto shaman.

We pugged seven people: another resto shammy and a holy paladin (a poorly specced, not optimally geared paladin which, to be honest, made me want to cry a bit) to make three healers. We had another paladin tank (who tended to forget about Righteous Fury), a shadow priest, a mage, a warlock and a fury warrior. So five DPS, 3 healers, 2 tanks. Might have been a little conservative on our parts, but hey, we strongly suspected it might not be a faceroll kind of instance.

We went to the right first, killing trash and getting the hang of the first miniboss, Saviana Ragefire.

We wiped a few times on her, since people weren’t watching the BIG FLASHING ARROW THINGS when they had the Conflag debuff. We learned very quickly that conflag is BAD and you want to make sure those people gtfo of the raid and away from each other.

I think it was on our fourth try on Saviana Ragefire that the warrior, mage, shadow priest, warlock and paladin tank all died. And we kept going. That’s right. Three healers, the tank and one DPS — my brother.

HILARIOUS.

We got it done, too. Took something like 14 minutes, because I KNOW I used Mana Tide twice. After about 10 minutes, I realized three things:

1) I had no mana potions. At all. I actually had to trade my brother, while in combat, for the one Runic Mana Potion he had.

2) My mana regen on the shaman SUCKS.

3) Waiting about three seconds before being able to cast even Lesser Healing Wave sucks a LOT.

But we did it! It was great!

We didn’t invite the puggers to Vent, but rather me and Maj and Fog were all on my Vent together. It was so damn funny to hear Majik yelping when his health would be low or to hear him yelling at the pugs (who couldn’t hear him, obviously) to GTFO of the raid. “Run, run, RUN YOU FUCKERS, RUN!” was just one example of that. We really got into a nice rhythm that probably no one else ever should have to be in for as long as we were, but it worked out really nicely and I re-evaluated my opinion of the failish paladin because at least they knew how to run away from the rest of the raid when they have a HUGE red arrow on their HEAD.

It was somewhere around the 11 minute mark when I realized that my paladin instincts had failed me again. I didn’t have Earthliving Weapon on. Whoopsiedoodle.

But better yet, I believe that it was AFTER the fight that my brother says, on Vent, “Guys? I, uh, I might have possibly done all that without Aspect of the Dragonhawk on.”

Then we went towards Baltharus the Warborn.

This guy kicked our ass all over the Ruby Sanctum. I have no idea how many times we wiped on him. Let me see if I can glean this information from the logs.

Ouch. Seven wipes on him.

We lost the shadow priest after the fourth wipe, who “disconnected”, and replaced him with… another shadow priest. Who was much more good natured, too.

The issue was that our paladin tank wasn’t picking up the clone properly or that the blast wave right before the split was throwing a healer or a tank completely OOR. We had people die to melee hits from the clone, we had people die from being OOR or out of LOS… We also had people too close to each other so that mark thing was splashing to others. Took us 4-5 attempts to figure out it’s a lot like Boiling Blood on Saurfang. I vaguely recall being incredibly thankful that we’d gone for the mage instead of a rogue we’d been considering inviting. Apart from AB and food and stuff, the rogue would have died as frequently as the poor warrior did from AOE on the melee.

After the seventh wipe, I was like “Okay, guys. We’ve been here for a fairly long time, so we’ll give it two more attempts and then call it for the night and maybe try to set something up later this week.”

Apart from anything else, I was POOR and couldn’t afford the repairs. I was sincerely not prepared for a raid on the shammy, hahaha.

Well, we walked in and while we lost the warrior and actually lost the prot pally, we got Baltharus down. AWESOMESAUCE.

We investigated the Ruby Sanctum, as per the quest Krasus at Wyrmrest had us do, turned it in and decided to see what Zarithrian was like.

God bless Tremor Totem.

The sunder debuff on the tanks suck, the fear sucks, the adds suck, but we one-shot the bastard because WE WERE AMAZING. Ahahaha.

And then we decided to take a look at Halion himself.

We only did two attempts on him, but had a good time of it. We blew hero at the start on the second attempt now that we knew to expect crazy fire shit dropping from the sky and actually got into P2 and all zoned into the shadow realm. THE DEATH BEAMS ARE HILARIOUS. Oh my God, I haven’t laughed so hard on a wipe in a REALLY long time.

Anyways, we called it and plan to go back sometime this week to finish it off. With any luck, I’ll have done it on the pally by then.

Man, too much fun. I really miss raiding at all with Majik. And my brother, for that matter. :)