Nefarian Down, Blackwing Descent Clear!

It was not the most auspicious of beginnings.

I’d been out all afternoon at my parents’ house because my dad’s laptop was stubbornly refusing to boot. So I went over, rescued pretty much all of his data, then we wiped it and restored the laptop to factory settings, using the restore partition. The whole process, plus dinner, lasted from 3pm until almost 8pm.

So I got home and promptly looked over the raiders for the evening and split them up into three groups for pillars on Nefarian and we eventually got the raid started.

For the first time, we dropped Cauldrons of Battle! I made 3 of them at the start and 3 of them after our break. We had an EP drive the other week for herbs and other flask mats, so I have made a TON of flasks over the last couple of weeks. We’re selling the procs to fund our repairs and keeping the base amounts in the bank for cauldrons. Well, we had enough mats to make all six cauldrons we needed and had a ton of spirit flasks (since Cauldrons don’t give you spirit as an option), so I gave out 3 spirit flasks to every healer who wanted them, while Walks and myself used the Cauldron for +intellect. The purpose? A little morale booster to show people we wanted to get this sucker down. Also, just to see how it all worked. I was amused that Mixology now seems to work and so my own Flask of Battle lasted three hours.

So I dropped three Cauldrons up front and then three of them again at the break. Each Cauldron gives 7 Flasks of Battle and, due to Chug-a-Lug (Rank 1), each flask lasts 90 minutes for your regular non-alchemist.

The first attempt wasn’t bad and got us to the P2/P3 transition. Except that at least one Chromatic Prototype was still up. Wipe!

Try 2: A disconnected healer and a Nefarian tank death in P1.
Try 3: Nefarian tank death in P1.

This happened a few times and I was like “WHAT THE EFF” because I hadn’t changed up healing strats. It was the same strat, I just had people on different assignments.

Turns out that, without being asked to by me, some of the healers had taken to spot-healing/helping out on the Ony and Nef tanks in, you know, all of our past attempts. Without asking me or letting me know. And since we’d not had any P1 tank death issues, I’d never gone through to see what the deal was. So when I kept the assignments the same, but switched a couple of healers around, one who typically spot-healed the Nef tank wasn’t able to do so any longer. Dead Nef tank.

Communication is key, people. And I now know to assign spot-heals on the tanks in P1.

Thus began the Blast Nova wipes.

Try 4: Dead healer in lava, then some Blast Novas. Wipe.
Try 5: P1 Nef tank death. (We were still figuring out the issue.)
Try 6: Blast Nova wipe.
Try 7: Blast Nova wipe.
Try 8: Blast Nova wipe.
Try 9: Hm, what’s this, oh, right, Blast Nova wipe!

Try 10:

I believe that was the attempt that  saw us get to 12%.

We took our regular 7-minute break here, since it was 10:30 and our Flasks of Battle were running out.

I made some swaps. I don’t like being the bad guy, but I had to swap out some people for a variety of reasons. Either they couldn’t get out of the lava reliably or their overall damage was lower than expected or whatever. They’d had 90 minutes to perfect doing their jobs and they just… well, some of them didn’t. Practice makes perfect, but I had to swap them out to try to get the boss down. I really hate that, but I like that I CAN swap people and then stack the raid comp appropriately.

Anyways, back to Nefarian.

Try 11: Oh, look, a return to Blast Nova wipes! /sigh.

Try 12: 14%!

Try 13:

On the pull, my holy priest got crit by Onyxia and died. We popped her up and continued.

We lost a healer on a platform in P2, but it was the third healer (we run with 7 healers, so one platform gets 3 healers) and we got him popped up in P3.

We went through two Electrocutes in P2, the second one at the tail end of the phase, right as we were hopping off platforms. It was definitely tight.

So we popped up the healer who had died in P2 and went to town on P3, with Nefarian under 60%.

Holy God. The Nef tank doesn’t take a HUGE amount of damage, but the Electrocutes come so damn quickly in P3 with all your DPS focused on Nefarian. I’d been calling out Electrocutes all night long and I missed at least two of them on Try 13 because I wasn’t expecting them to come that quickly.

We popped Time Warp (as opposed to heroism, since we only had one shaman in the raid and she was a healer who was basically oom) at 25%. And the whole damn raid was still alive. I think it was right about here where I felt “we might actually GET this!” but I knew that all it would take to wipe us was a bad shadowblaze and our add tank would be dead.

Majik and our other mage made use of Rings of Frost to slow down some adds and our add tank ran them through them here and there.

Of course, like most people’s first kills, our add tank died at 5%.

BURN, FOCUS, KILL.

1%!

But what I didn’t see… was this.

That’s right. With our add tank dead and our “backup” add tank dead, they were looking at me.

And decided to beat me.

But…

We did it!

Crazy, crazy times. 11/12 normal modes on 25-man.

We then went to Throne to try to knock out Conclave and didn’t quite get them down for a second time, but I REALLY was not expecting to go there, so no big.

After the raid, Apotheosis got another achievement.

Yup. Got the It All Adds Up guild achievement. Ouch. 50,000 gold on repairs hurts when you think about it!

Overall, a great raid week, an awesome raid night and we creep ever-closer to going 12/12. We’ll probably play with heroic Halfus this week and definitely try to repeat the Nefarian kill and see if we have time for Al’Akir. I think, anyways. :)

(Interested in joining us? Apotheosis is looking for a balance druid and an elemental shaman! Apply today!)