Well, I can claim some authority on this based solely on how many times I’ve done this fight now… although, actually I suppose that’s a lot like Danny DeVito’s character from The Rainmaker claiming authority on taking the Bar Exam. Er, but I digress. Putricide. Phase 3.

Putricide in Phase 3 is a bastard if there ever was one. Basically as soon as everyone gets control of their characters back after the tear gas transition, you have 120 seconds (give or take) to drop Putricide or you’ll terrifying–and perhaps a little joyfully–rack up killing blows against every member of your raid. Not to mention triumphantly top the healing chart for that attempt.

If you’re doing 10man, you want to space out the Mutated Plague debuffs across two tanks like so: 4 on one, then 4 on the other. This will give you the smoothest transitions for the benefit of maximizing dps.

For 25man you need 3 tanks splitting the stacks like so: 2/2/2, then 4/4/4. There are more arcane patterns you can do if you want to squeeze every last drop of dps out before the soft enrage, but the textbook way is good enough.

Do note: if any tank gets 5 stacks it’s generally lights out.

Now, when the phase starts you’ll want to immediately run towards Putricide as a group and take him to the wall. Start slowly kiting him backwards, barely moving only if a puddle or flasks are dropped. Make sure to beat it into your dps they want to be directly behind Putri, because those flasks will pop up next to his legs and the middle is a safe zone. If any of your dps eat a -75% hit debuff that is murder in such a tight dps race.

Likewise, during tank transitions avoid those flasks at all costs, or else pray for the gods to look kindly upon your taunting attempt.

Keep pacing him around the wall, with no jolts or dashes ahead that will pull Putri out of range for your melee. Tank transitions should be clean, with you stacking on the current tank and then taunting and continuing the kite flow.

Once you get the 4/4/4 range don’t be afraid to pop Divine Sacrifice/Guardian. Your healers will thank you.

I’m not going to lie, Phase 3 is rough at first, and could take a few attempts to get the flow down so no one trips up on anything or eats a wayward flask. It took us quite some time to get down pat on 25man. Best of luck!

Over the last two months I’ve been steadily accumulating various pieces of Holy gear. Some spellpower plate offspec drops from ICC-10/25 (gotta love guild only having one raiding Holy paladin), ToGC-10, and the new heroics. Altogether I have a pretty decent set with (pardon the GS reference, I do it just to help you imagine the iLevel) about 5250 gearscore. The one glaring issue with my gear is my offhand. It rates a 10 for RP value, but I can enchant or block with it, so one could say it’s lacking a bit.

Nonetheless, I gemmed everything with int, more of less, then enchanted it and Saturday afternoon I was off to the races to heal my first heroic.

And… I don’t know how you Healadins do it. I mean, it’s generally pretty straightforward: Sacred Shield and Beacon the tank, Flash of Light for the little, steady damage intakes, Holy Light for bigger hits. Beacon is doubly awesome because I can generally ignore the tank and just heal the rest of the party. I find myself consistently forgetting to pop cooldowns or remembering to occasionally judge to keep Judgements of the Pure up. Stuff to work on.

All in all I healed four or so heroics this weekend: UK, OK, ToC, and HoS. Each was pretty easy (I didn’t have any of the hard ones, thank god) and no crazy wipes except for in Old Kingdom when the tank pulled a huge pack of spell flingers and everyone died in about 3 seconds. I barely had time to urinate myself. (Sorry, gross joke.)

It was interesting seeing heroics from a different point of view. In Halls of Stone we zoned in and I started blessings and the tank just up and took off. I’m sitting there blinking and yelled “hey wait for meeeeee!!” while running far behind without even Pursuit of Justice to help me catch up. Damn inconsiderate tanks. The Brann event was a little more lively than any of the boss encounters I did before, just had the aforementioned tank Beacon up and kept HLing anyone who stood in the beam.

Tons of fun overall and has definitely shaken up heroics for me. I’m tempted to start doing my daily random as heals, but I’d like to get an actual shield first before I expose myself to the piercing gazes of full pug groups.

More Uld10 hardmodes

Partly spurred on Tijeras’ recent scoring of a Rusted Protodrake, and thus my incessant nagging to do so, a group from my guild got together again to start work once more on Uld10 achievements.

We started with Orbituary for those that didn’t have it, which was a total breeze. I completely wrecked the dps chart on that fight with my Demolisher tricked out by my 264 gear. Flame Lev never had a chance.

Razorscale’s dwarf cooking wasn’t really seriously attempted. Although funny enough, all this time I assumed the counter reset every week or something because my total was always zero. Just turns out I’ve never managed to roast any dwarves before. I got three last night.

For Stokin’ the Furnace I single tanked Ignis and we got him down about two minutes into the fight. Heartbreaker went similarly well. Ditto I Choose You, Steelbreaker, who we killed before I even got to explode. I just DI’d a healer to defuse myself.

At that point we started racking up sigils from the wing bosses. Hodir was pretty straightforward. Thorim was interesting to say the least. With two healers, one in the arena and one in the gauntlet, right at the end a chunk of the gauntlet team bit it but two of the survivors (just dps) managed to make it back to the arena with Sif. Poor Ildara then went on the single-heal the second phase while I single tanked it, Unbalancing Strike and all. I think she nearly had a stroke by the time Thorim dropped.

Freya was a bit more tricky, with a couple of missteps thanks to your truly starting to feel the effects of my chain chugging drinks during the raid. At this point I was about half way through a bottle of gin (I like to drink like I raid–with class–ok?) and getting a little sloppy. The first attempt I got too close to the shore trying to kill a tree and managed to pull the adds on the opposite side. The second try we had to reset because a few people died during phase two. The third try we knocked her over easily and scored all three versions of Knock on Wood.

After Freya we dug in for Firefighter, which eluded us the last time we tried Ulduar hardmodes. The good news is, last time we failed miserably to fires, and this time we got Mim to 10% on our best attempt, which was also our last attempt. That was also the attempt, I’m told, where during P4 I yelled out “he’s spinning up!” ran directly away from the boss, banged a 360, and then ran right back into his Laser Barrage. I have no recollection of this.

We had to call it after Mim because one of the dps had to go, but it was then drunkenly decided in officer chat that we’d go try Undying with whoever was left… because why the hell not? And we did a lot better on that than I expected, managing to get all the way to the second boss before someone died.

No reason to continue we left Naxx and the soused express rolled on to Wyrmrest to do Sarth+3. I barely remember the fight (my gin-life-force nearly extinguished) but apparently we killed him.

And then, because dammit, we were drunk and the world was our oyster, we should go do ToGC-10. So we did, and by some alcohol-fueled miracle we completed the place with 43 attempts to go. No mad skill unfortunately, but we did it nonetheless. I think this was also the first time we’ve done it with three straight healers (rather than making a healer go dps, or switch out for one, like we did when learning the place months ago).

I passed out sometime after that, though truth be told I barely remember anything after Naxxramas. It was a good night.

Some honest-to-goodness ICC progression!

After shaking off my hangover, Sunday night was spent rerolling the Wednesday crew back into Icecrown Citadel to finally bring down Dreamwalker and get some cracks at Sindragosa. We experimented a bit with group make-up, initially trying two tanks, five dps, three heals but that wasn’t working as well. We then swapped some specs around and went two tanks, four dps, four heals, which was getting the dragon up a lot faster, but the adds were taking a lot longer to die. After a few more close attempts (with one at 92%) we then tried me single tanking, five dps, four heals.

Single tanking Dreamwalker wasn’t so bad, the only thing that really needed to be tanked were the Aboms. We settled on a kill order where dps would burnt Blazing Skeletons when they appeared, then Aboms, then Suppressors, then anything else still up. A hunter was in charge of kiting any Zombies. Towards the end it was getting really hairy, we had two Aboms, a Zombie, and a few casters on me. It looked like we were about to wipe. I had no idea what the dragon’s health was at but imagine my surprise when in my darkest hour suddenly Dreamwalker stood up, bellowed, and nuked every add. It was pure awesomeness.

Great encounter. I enjoy it more now that we can actually kill it.

It was a fun surprise after Dreamwalker when we got into that weird hallway with the giant circle room and cobwebs everywhere. It was obvious what was going to happen. I still feel like I wasn’t prepared for all that trash though!

Only downside to our inevitable victory was the healers that kept running back into the room to skin the spiders. Bad healers.

Finally, it was time for Sindragosa… and what a fight that was. We didn’t have enough time to get some serious attempts in, but honestly, it didn’t seem that bad. The only hard part seemed to be dealing with the awful, intense, bellowing, Scottish woman that was apparently trapped inside her. That voice was terrifying.

I’m half tempted to extend the lockout next week and just jump right back to her. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get people to go for that, though.

And so it was, my guild is recruiting.

This has been a long time coming for sure. Reading my raid recaps (when I’ve been in a good enough mood to do one) you could see how poor attendance has been lately. In the last month we’ve been on the razor’s edge in terms of whether or not our 25mans were going to go off. Despite having about 30 geared raiders, from night to night 6-8 decide to take the night off. If one or two were doing this, that’d be fine, but that huge a number makes raid unpredictable. Moreover, would it kill people to give some heads up that “hey, I can’t make raids next week”?

Two weeks ago when this problem first cost us a raid night it was obvious that the only real solution was to recruit, but I held off because I knew we had the people, they just were taking nights off en masse. So we shortened the raid week to two nights, though a bit longer, to make raiding less onerous on everyone’s schedules. That seemed to help a little, but now it’s plain to see we can’t ignore the root of the problem anymore. It’s time to shut up and do the hard thing and bring more dps into the fold and acclimate them into the raid core.

I’m currently attempting to find five or so new dps for the guild, qualified folks requiring minimal gearing so we can get back on track and get the progression train rolling again. We’ve been stuck at 7/12 for a while, giving Putricide the stink eye, and we really need to make good on our threats.

Wednesday was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We spent all Tuesday night literally mopping up all farm content as quickly and efficiently as possible: first four bosses, Festergut, Rotface, Blood Council, all one shots. Hell, we even killed Svalna in the Dreamwalker hallway for the free Emblem of Frost. Then we went and did Toravon and the raid weekly for good measure.

And then Wednesday only 23 people showed up for progression.

30 minutes past raid start it was becoming obvious that ICC-25 wasn’t happening, and as a back up plan I told everyone to hang tight and I’d carve out two 10man groups so we could at least get something done in ICC-10. I spent a good ten minutes huddled over a pad of paper and a pen, sweating profusely, and trying to expertly craft two balanced groups that could equally complete ICC-10 content. I thought I did pretty well, passed off the group two list to an officer for him to invite for and lead, and then went to Icecrown to start mine.

A few minutes and it occurred to me (by way of healer complaints in /o) that group two didn’t have Replenishment. Total facepalm, didn’t even enter into the equation for me.

I’m doing my best, dammit

Apologies in advance if this reeks of QQ.

On a side note, the common denominator over every moment I’ve spent raiding over the course of the last month has been unmitigated stress. Demogar, the guild leader and my brother tank, has been spotty in attendance since he got his new job, for good or ill. It’s fallen on me to pick up the pieces when he isn’t there; this normally isn’t so bad, but I’m not cut out to be the leading type, I just kind of keep getting stuck with it.

I like to think of my situation in very “Charge of the Light Brigade”/Cincinnatus-esque terms–I hate raid leading but I will shoulder the burden to that the raids can actual happen. I take the tank gear, I bear the “Co-Guild Lead” rank, it’s my job.

I was mulling around these feelings in my head when two posts popped up on twitter. One at The Hunter’s Mark, which then spawned one by Wrathy. Both touched on raid leading and the philosophies and difficulties there of.

The common thread between these two are “you rank and file don’t know how good you have it, do your job and stop making mine so hard.” Money quote from Lass’ post:

My point is, raid leaders have to do everything the average player has to do… for 25+ other people and themselves. They also have to work out the logistics of scheduling and populating raids, which doesn’t sound difficult on the surface, but if you’ve ever tried throwing a PuG raid together, you sort of get a feel for what it can be like to do that every week. You get about a dozen people whispering you back and forth constantly, asking what gear set to bring, what spec they should use, who else is going, what bosses they’ll be focusing on, what the strategies are, what loot will drop, etc etc ad infinitum.

I completely agree. For that spotty 30 minute period on Wednesday when the night’s events looked in doubt I fielded a slew of whispers from various people asking when invites were going out, why weren’t they out yet, what were we going to do, and boy does it suck that we aren’t raiding.

Yeah, no kidding guys, believe me, I feel the same way.

If you’re not one of the lucky few that have taken it upon themselves to shoulder all this torture on your behalf, then please be kind to your raid leaders. All you have to do is come to raid and worry about if some piece of gear will drop that you want, and whether you personally are having fun.

I, and my many self-medicating cohorts, must worry about a panorama of things: is everyone having fun, why hasn’t that boss died yet, does anyone need go soon, who do I have to replace them, are we spending too much time between pulls, is the dkp addon working, is anyone afk, how are we going to do CC on this Blood Wing pull, what made us wipe on that boss, why is that hunter doing so little dps, what can I do to make people stack better, and so on and so forth.

I’m doing my best, dammit, to make sure the raids happen and the bosses die and the purples flow like wine. All I request in return is that everyone shows up. Is that so much to ask for?

10>25

The ten man I put together, however, was awesome. 10s as a rule tend to be more fun due to fewer personalities clashing, the ability to be more selective with whom you take, and a more casual atmosphere. Less seems to be at stake in ICC-10 when you’re a 25man guild.

My run was neck and neck with the other group up until Putricide when they had issues downing him while we wiped a few times at 1%. On the third try we smoked the Professor and continued on to eventually down Blood Council and the Blood Queen (a very messy one shot as you could see above).

We’re continuing the run Sunday night at Dreamwalker. I’ve got high hopes to see the LK fight, I think we can do it.

As for the other run, they killed Putricide on the fifth or so attempt, which is a bit rough, but on the bright side now 20 people in guild have killed Putricide in some format, as opposed to 10. This is knowledge we can parlay into the 25man encounter.

You know, if we can ever get the group together.

Wednesday night, the second and last raiding night according to the new schedule, we went into ICC intending to hammer out some progression–FINALLY–and maybe kill a wing boss. We’ve been taking potshots at Putricide, and barely at that, over the last month thanks to some seriously crappy attendance.

As I said, finally, we had good attendance Wednesday night and the stars seemed aligned for a wing boss kill. We got some quickie tries in on Putricide the night before, getting him to no more than 70%, but that was with us really only half-trying at the end of the night. The remainders of Tuesday night indicated two issues: rDPS on the boss was low, because those 70% attempts were lasting 6 minutes or so, meaning the boss wasn’t going down fast enough, and that we’d have to go through a bunch of wipes before everyone got used to avoiding the environmental damage.

To remedy the first issue (the low rDPS) we adopted the “stay on green” strat that would minimize how much time melee (and god, do we run melee-heavy) had to run to get to their target. Staying on green side meant that the Volatile Ooze would die expediently, and give us downtime to work on the boss. This definitely resolved the issue, suddenly we were forcing Phase 2 after the first Gas Cloud.

We went through a few wipes working out the kinks, like moving away from flasks, positioning for when the green ooze explodes so people don’t get knocked against the wall or a corner, avoiding the malleable oozes, etc. Everything was slowly coming together and suddenly our 70% attempts jumped to 50% attempts, and then we were dancing on the precipice of Phase 3.

Sidenote on phase transitions: one of the Rogues discovered if you Vanish during the Tear Gas cast (phase transitions) you don’t get stunned and can continue dpsing the boss/slime. A mage also pulled this off with Invisiblity. I’m guessing anything that takes you out of combat will do the same–Feign Death, etc.

Anyway, so we through the motions attempt after attempt, watching the health counter be lower and lower every time we wipe: serious progression. The bonus dkp flows like wine to keep everyone motivated. Honestly, I didn’t care if we didn’t kill him, I was having fun learning the fight.

Finally we start consistently pushing the good doctor into phase 3, although the first time it happened we weren’t prepared, had an add still up, and in the confusion managed to die one by one. But we were getting there!

We followed up with a few more phase 3 attempts, getting Putricide at the lowest to 20%. By this point it was getting late (attempts add up quickly when each can take up to 10 minutes), and performance was starting to reverse course. Thirty minutes before raid end we shuffled off and closed the night with VOA.

Am I disappointed we didn’t kill Putricide Wednesday? A little, but not totally. Last month we spent a whole night wiping on Rotface when he first came out, not scoring a kill, and then the following week we two shot him. I’m fully optimistic that next week we’ll build on what we learned and drop this sucker.

How do I know this? Oh, we fought them for 10 minutes and 3 seconds last night.

But how? you might ask. Wouldn’t that require most of your raid being de–

Yes, yes it would. And yes, yes they were.

The jinx was Demogar promised us twice the dkp we would normally get for the kill if we one shot the Princes. I scoffed, but whatever.

So, the fight stats … and 18.5% of the way in (according to WoL) we lost a healer and four dps. A little bit later we lost some melee and another healer. At this point I would have been prepared to wipe it and try again. But oh no, there was extra dkp on the line, everyone wanted to keep going. So we did.

About five minutes in we lost another chunk of dps. And we kept going.

Eight minutes into the fight and we’re at the 15% range, and Demo buys the farm. Taldaram goes wild and one shots a few people before I can pick him up. Now I’m tanking both guys with few healers left up and watching my hp yo-yo up and down.

The enrage timer is starting to get really close. By the 9 minute mark there was still 8% or so to go with only 9 of us left standing. It was going to be a photo finish.

Timer finally counts down the last few seconds, people yelling out health percentages in vent, and then it hits 0. The Princes enrage, their big one-shotting attack misses me and someone manages to pluck away the last bit of health.

The Princes go down with the nine of us left standing. Epic kill.

And yes, we all got our extra dkp.

If you’ve been following me on twitter (and hell, even here on the blog) I’ve been pretty down about my guild lately as it pertains to raiding. There’s been a few issues of nascent drama in addition to some very annoying attendance issues that have nearly cost us the ability to raid for the last two weeks. The problem isn’t so much we don’t have people, it’s that the people we do have are being fickle about showing up or have had scheduling issues (I myself had to miss the raid Wednesday because of a scheduling issue).

In one sense, the problem could be solved with recruiting, but the problem remains that there are capable people in guild, and we just need them to show up. I guess our first step is to work on getting those people to log in and get some of the lesser geared people into raids. We’re probably going to change the raid schedule from three three-hour days to two four-hour days, so we don’t have a stretch of raid nights that may be untenable for some folks. We’ll see how that goes.

In the meantime I’m going to console myself with the knowledge that the core of the guild is strong, and made up of awesome people. Half of our ICC raid core weren’t even in guild during Naxx, so if we eventually have to build up again, it’s not the end of the world.

Some funny things form guild chat last night, so I may take comfort in the hilarity of the people I am blessed to raid with.

Slyke when he was asked for his gearscore when trying to get into a ToGC-10 pug:

And Zilga (a healer) from the attempts we put in on Dreamwalker last night:

Speaking of Dreamwalker …

Interesting fight. We tried it for the two hours or so we could and mostly got the hang of the adds, but we need to work on them a bit more. I really can’t offer any observations other than the Blazing Skeletons hurt like a mother, and need to die asap, and dps really needs to be on the ball with target switches. The fight reminds me a lot of when we were first trying Deathwhisper and the adds seemed unmanageable. Once we figure out what to kill when and how, it’ll go a lot smoother.

Ultimately though I regret trying Dreamwalker last night. We should have built on our experience with Putricide or Blood Queen rather than splitting our progression three ways.

Whack goes the nerf bat

Just to revisit this topic again briefly–I’m going to reiterate my lack of surprised that we were nerfed. I saw this coming earlier this week, the warning signs were all there.

The one thing that bothers me about the nerf (other than how it was just sprung on us in the middle of the night) is that Blizzard thinks that other tanks are “fine”. Specifically, warriors. Warriors right now are at the bottom of the heap across most, if not all metrics, and have very little to show for it. I don’t understand Blizz’s mentality that if a tank can tank a boss then they are fine. Tank survival should be the same across all four classes, much like how pure dps classes are more or less balanced against other pure dpsers.

The situation is now that the tank classes are a lot more balanced than they were a week ago, but warriors are still coming up short. They need some serious loving.

I can’t imagine there will be anymore Paladin nerfs in the near future, so don’t worry that we’re in the crosshairs or something. If any other changes are to be made they might involve making Seal of Command require a two-hander so Prot can’t use it anymore (thus, sadly, killing heroics spec). Beyond that… I just can’t see it.

But then again, I can’t imagine why Blizzard would be so willfully blind to how behind Warriors are in EH, dps, etc. So, who knows?

I think now that the Lich King is vulnerable he must be attempting to slow down raids with buggy boss encounters. How else can I explain the painful nonsense we kept running into last night?

First of all, thanks to Patch Day a swath of people were either late or having huge performance issues. Lag was also a major issue for some, though we were thankfully spared the dreaded Gunship lag. Nonetheless, all these little nibbling bites that were slowing people down were invariably cutting into raid performance.

And then there was the brand new buggified version of Saurfang we ran into last night. Usually we don’t see the first Mark until sub-50%, last night we had it at around 70% or so, and a second one going out before 60%. We assumed maybe someone was having issues kiting or people were standing too close together, but instead it just seemed like his Blood Power generation rate was off the charts.

We reset the fight by fleeing to the boat, but then the second time we had the same BP generation issues. We just decided to go with the flow and ended up killing Saurfang with something like six Marks up, no deaths. It wasn’t ultimately an issue for us, but this bug can probably prove to be a roadblock for others. Hopefully they’ll fix it soon.

After Saurfang we were already pushing against the clock and just went to cement our Blood Council kill last week with an equally clean kill. No luck on our part though, because in addition to melee dps assuming being told to scatter when Empowered Shock Vortex was being cast actually meant clump with other melee and get one shot, we had to deal the Kinetic Bombs deciding to randomly explode in midair.

We probably had a few wipes caused by bombs going off and killing too many people, especially ranged dps, which was tight last night and led to more Bombs hitting the ground and exploding. We kept getting ground up in the negative feedback loop.

Based on some cursory research I did it sounds like putting dots on the Bombs was making them explode as they were preparing to despawn. Does that make sense? Anyone have any insight into this?

Finally at around 15 minutes before raid end we dropped Blood Council after eeking out the kill with half the raid dead.

Overall not the best raid night, by far. Still, as long as attendance holds all week we can finally get some progress done on a wing boss. That’s all I ask, dammit.

Wednesday last week may have sucked, but on the bright side it gave us a jump start on our 10man group and allowed us to go into ICC-10 last night with all but the two wings bosses and Blood Council down.

First things first, we hit up Blood Council and despite a dopey wipe (hunter pulled aggro on Keleseth, died, his orb hit the ground, everyone died in the ensuing chaos) the second shot was a quick and clean kill. Netted the orb achievement again, because nothing makes that fight easier than siccing a pet on an orb.

We then bounded up the ramp to the first trash pull before the Blood Queen. Bad things ensued. First we tried a straight pull but it went south very quickly. Second time we tried a little more CC but I got gibbed before we all got in position (I hatehatehate the Tactician). Third time we got a clean pull but the other tank and I soon died, leaving two healers and two dps up with about three mobs. They then proceeded to somehow kill all the mobs with coordinated CC while us losers ran back in a classic cavalry maneuver. By the time we heroically returned, the dps had mopped them all up. Well played.

Once we were done with the trash pull from hell we dispatched the four guys at the top of the ramp and tried to figure out how we were going to handle Blood Queen. After kind of rambling off everything I remembered reading about the fight, we all basically agreed we weren’t going to do a good attempt until we say the fight ourselves. So, we pulled and had a hilariously disastrous wipe, though we ended up seeing the different aspects of the fight: the brain link, the swarming shadows, the vampire bite, etc.

Going back we retooled the strategy a bit (ok, actually formed a strategy) and pulled again. This time we lost a few people early on to some silliness but kept going to get more practice. Had her down to ~60% that time.

The third attempt we had more a plan going and new what to look for. We also had one of the dps (actually, a druid healer going boom for the raid) switch to heals. Seems counterproductive for a dps race fight, but the dps we had was good and we needed the breathing room that a third healer would provide. The third attempt was awesome and despite losing someone early in the fight (who was then brezzed) and a rogue (Falowin, of course) at around 40% we managed to kill her right at the exact second when she enraged and murdered both me and the offtank.

So, wow, our first wing boss down. I was expecting that fight to be a lot harder.

Exuberant after dethroning the Blood Queen, we then bounced back to the Plague Wing to bring a fiery vengeance down upon Professor Putricide. Our very first attempt and it was clear that we had built upon the knowledge we gain from previous attempts. And, also, the dps we had was nuts. We hit phase 2 after the first green slime was dead. We pushed it to phase 3, but we had an orange slime up at the same time, and a little too many puddles on the ground. Wiped in the ensuing chaos.

Still, great first showing! We were all pumped. The next try we got it again to phase 3 but I screwed up the tank switch and kept accidentally outthreating and pulling off Nordic, the warrior tank, when he would taunt it off me. We wiped because I had 5 stacks and he had 2. /facepalm

I clearly wasn’t giving him enough time to build rage after he was crammed in the Abom the entire time. So third attempt I swore I wasn’t going to wipe the raid that time and we had similar results. Quick switch to phase 2, a hop, skip, and a jump to phase 3, and then I’d back off when not tanking Putricide so as not to pull threat. We lasted a lot longer and finally downed the bastard about 5 stacks on me and 4 on Nordic. Down to the wire, for sure.

But it was a kill nonetheless! Very exciting, two wing bosses for the first time.

I’m trying to think of any tips for Putricide that I can impart (I surely can’t offer anything for BQL, haven’t done that fight enough) and the main thing I can emphasize is the fight revolves around how quickly you kill and how well you control the green/orange slimes. If you can down each before they reach their victim that’s more time you have on Putricide. And, furthermore, it’s so very key to make sure everyone stays as far back as possible from where the slimes spawn (except for hunters, who can feign off a link) so there’s a maximum distance between add and target.

Once you get down to phase 3, it’s all about the dps and the tanks not screwing up their switches (ahem). Tensest part of the fight, but the easiest as well if everyone is alive and everyone is doing their job.

The best part of last night is for sure the realization that the group we had last night could easily kill the Lich King. Well, maybe not easily, but with some practice. We have the capability, now we just need the opportunity.

And now to parlay this knowledge into the 25man so we can kill a wing boss there…

This week has been quite the rollercoaster ride. Tuesday was probably our best raid night yet, killing up to Saurfang and then Festergut and Rotface, all in the span of about two and a half hours. And then putting some shots in on Blood Council before calling it at the usual time. We were all pumped to get the farm stuff done in one night and have the next two for some honest-to-goodness progression. Nothing could stop us now.

And then nobody showed up on Wednesday.

Actually. not entirely true. About twenty regular raiders showed up Wed, and we couldn’t scrape together enough fillers to make a full raid. So, we called it after standing around while trying to work everything out. We broke into 10mans instead and farmed badges/killed some bosses/destressed a little.

Last night I was getting worried that the poor attendance monster would rear his ugly head. On top of a few other absences, Demo couldn’t make it due to some madlibesque family entanglement–though, on the bright side, this did spawn a new guild meme of using “wife’s [familial relation]’s [familial relation]’s [asian nationality] [random relation]’s [event]” as a reason for not being able to make raids. I predict great things for that joke.

So I threw together the raid and Cendra got the dkp in order and we all headed in. The raid was composed of 22 regulars and 3 fillers, and generally wasted bad looking. Not our Tuesday night prime, but you can’t win them all.

We immediately head for the Blood Wing and start going through the trash, wherein I successfully demonstrated my model of Sap Tanking (ie. tanking both the Tacticians while being stunlocked for the duration of the pull).

On the Council itself I gave a (not so) brief rundown of the fight and how it goes for the people who didn’t see it last week or Tuesday. I was tanking Valanar on the stage, Purraj the Druid had Taldaram over to the right, and Slyke the Shadow Priest would ranged tank Keleseth.

Our first pull went, as you’d expect, chaotically. Keleseth was the second Prince and he quickly dispatched poor Slyke who didn’t have enough dark nuclei. One of the raiders, who despite being a nice guy has a major tendency to insist on raid changes–loudly–in vent, suggested vociferously that Slyke couldn’t cut it and we needed a warrior tank on Keleseth. Considering that was the first try of the night, I wasn’t prepared to shift strategy, so that avenue of discussion was cut off and we buckled down to work on the strategy at hand.

The second pull went a lot more smoothly and when it came Slyke’s turn to tank and empowered Prince he did a fantastic job and easily survived his phase. Unfortunately the melee had to muddle it up by getting blown up by an empowered shock vortex.

Third try we had an Empowered Conjured Flame take out a huge chunk of range that was too close together. On that attempt though we got them to ~60%. Progress was obviously being made. I played the optimist for the crowd, told everyone they were doing fantastic (which they were), and re-emphasized positioning to minimize Conjured Flame damage.

Fourth try we had another mishap with the Empowered Shock Vortex, but still got them down to 37%. We were definitely getting there!

Fifth try everything seemed to click. Melee switched fast, hunters were on the ball (literally) getting pets onto the Kinetic Bombs. No one died to ESV, no one died to ECF, and when we were on Valanar with 5% of his health to go I suddenly realized we were about to score the kill. At about 1% the Invocation of Blood jumped to Taldaram though, and Purraj ended up finishing him off, I think.

Anyway, we got the kill and an achievement to boot!

After the Council we went to work on Putricide a bit since we were somewhat familiar with that fight (as opposed to going in blind on the Queen). Our best attempt was something like 65% out of the six attempts we did, so not awesome, but we’ll get there.

I just need people to actually show up, dammit.