The First Raid

You know, thinking about it, this blog has documented the fall of Apotheosis, my time on Bronzebeard, my time in my last guild and now will document my time on Skywall.

The idea that, five years from now, I could look at this entry and go “oh my God, my first raid on Skywall!” gives me a moment’s pause. Should I record everything for posterity? Probably not. Should I gloss over things in the hopes that I’ll have a shiny entry to remember my first raid by? Probably not.

As always, it seems, the right amount of detail is somewhere in the middle.

Aware that my new GM and potentially other guildies may read this, I will definitely not be naming names, as previously mentioned, but I won’t really shy away from being honest with my opinions. (And look, at least one guildie has found me while I was editing this post before publishing it… Hiya. :))

1-shot Marrowgar, though it was messy. Being asked to heal “the tanks” works okay, although I’ve been used to healing one, beaconing another and helping on a third if needed. Slight adjustment there. I let the warrior tank drop substantially at one point. Whoops. :)

Worked a lot on heroic LDW – 11 attempts. The strat was pretty foreign to me, despite a quick read on the guild’s strat forum. I think I’ve read something previously about AOEing the adds down, but my last guild didn’t do that. This strat is just a weeee bit more chaotic than what I’m used to and I was using Divine Plea a LOT.

Ghosts and MCed people are what killed people, basically. The poor GM was MCed at least 2-3 times per attempt. I was like, WTF. I’ve never seen ANYONE get MCed so often. She also ended up hexing me more than once. ><

I’m annoyed because I ate not one, but TWO ghosts. Then again, I may be the person with the least amount of ghost hits in the whole raid.

Actually, I’m not, after a quick look through the logs, but it was close. Anyways, given the “distraction” of Vent (it’s going to be tough to readjust to various people in my ears, at least people I haven’t played with before) and the new strat, I think 2 in 11 HM attempts is okay. But I’m still annoyed by it.

We burned her down on normal on the 12th attempt just so we could get a little further into the instance.

We did the Rotting Frost Giant with just one death, which is pretty much cleaner than any other attempt in my prior guild. Then Heroic Gunship and then… we tried heroic Saurfang.

They do things suuuuuuuper differently than my last guild. They’ve had to, without a holy paladin. But I *almost* feel like they’re not sure how to use me. They wanted me to focus on the tanks. Oh, and beacon a mark who’s out in ranged. But to focus on the tanks.

As this goes completely against my own strat, I asked in healer chat if they wanted me to move to a second ranged mark and the healing lead was like, yeah, sure, if you think it’s necessary. So, I totally did.

Ideally, I get two marks, another paladin gets two marks, a third paladin gets marks 5/6, but a disc priest or resto shammy gets the 5th/6th… done. But in lieu of three holy paladins…

So I didn’t argue and just did what I was told, beaconing the first ranged mark. Then I basically just swapped to the second ranged person with Mark of the Fallen Champion. And started calling it out on Vent. haha. It has been more than 10 months since I called something out on Vent in a raid situation like that. So weird.

I found I had trouble with my marks, though. The reasons I had trouble are:

1) I’m using up precious mana by healing tanks, which is literally eating time until I can start healing my second mark.

2) Because I don’t know WHEN I’ll get another mark (as opposed to 1/3, 2/4 or 1/2) I don’t know when to pop my Divine Plea and other cooldowns. It gets much, much more difficult to judge how long my 43.9k mana pool will last. As a result, on one attempt, I just about went oom and when I took a mana potion to tide me over the 20 seconds until Divine Plea was up again, I got the heal off on the person I was directly healing, but my beacon lag (God, I hate that) meant that the beaconed person died to the Mark.

The other issue we’re experiencing is that we’re getting 6-7 marks.

I’m good, but I’m not THAT good. ;) If he’s gaining Blood Power at the rate of doling out seven marks, one of four things is happening:

1) People are eating too much damage from Boiling Blood.

2) People are getting nailed by Blood Beasts.

3) Tanks aren’t swapping at Rune of Blood.

4) DPS is low.

Looking at the first kill from my last guild (where we, admittedly, haxed it up with THREE holy paladins), it’s a DPS issue. 30k raid DPS less with my new guild than my last one — on my last guild’s first kill. The fight was, however, 40 seconds shorter with my old guild than our best attempt last night.

Two people died to Blood Beasts. The first one got rezzed, the second one, much later on in the fight, did not. That probably didn’t make all the difference, but it also probably didn’t help.

Other things:

– the shadow priest didn’t have Vampiric Embrace up on our last (best) Saurfang attempt (but had it up on all previous ones). It was just about 1am, though, so I’m sure that was just an oversight.

– the ret pally isn’t bubbling off Boiling Blood pre-first mark, if he gets it, to help delay the mark. He also isn’t BOPping casters with Boiling Blood pre-first mark to delay it. I blew BOP once on each of our five attempts and even the prot pally BOPped someone on three of our attempts. I did mention this at one point, but I was semi-distracted (going through the logs as I’m eating buff food) and wasn’t clear.

I think it’s really just the unfamiliarity of this on heroic that’s messing with them. Obviously, they do it differently than I’ve ever done it, so I can’t be expecting them to do it as flawlessly as my last guild, and I don’t. I also don’t mind working on it. I am, however, going to write to my GM with my observations. ;)

Overall, I had a good first raid. I really want to help them get Saurfang down again tonight, which I think would only be their second kill. Then I’m not sure what we’ll do, but the GM indicated to me in our interview that she wanted to play with heroic Dreamwalker. I’m going to have to make a bunch of Wild Magic potions to blow on that fight.

Speaking of money, my Belt of the Lonely Noble sold for 3k (well, 2995g) as did some gems, so I’ve already doubled the money I brought over (3000g) and then some. I do believe I’ll start cranking out the flasks for the weekend and see how that goes.

Oh, and possibly the most hilarious thing ever is that it appears that no guild on Skywall has completed Glory of the Icecrown Raider (25) yet. I MAY be the only person on the whole server with the Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher mount. This amuses me greatly.