Raid Story Catch Up

I wrote that tanking etiquette post, I swear, and it’ll be up shortly. But I needed to play catch up a little bit with my raiding stories.

Where did I leave off? Oh, yes Monday.

Monday we had left the military wing, Sapphiron, and Kel’Thuzad. We started at the earlier raid time once more, 7 server/8 eastern. We marched in with the full 25man complement, and then realized we were about to attempt Razuvious with only one priest. Woops.

So we cajoled a Quebecois shadow priest to join us for that fight and a hunter graciously stepped aside. I was a little worried since the priest in question never talked in vent, so it’d be hard for him to coordinate the bone shield/taunts. However, despite my pessimism, he did excellent and we one-shot Raz in proper form.

Moving on we hit up Gothik, and specifically made sure not to repeat the mistakes of last week. This time: go slower, extra dps on undead side, wait for riders to go down before sending another one. We one-shot Gothik as well.

Now the big fight I was looking forward to was Four Horsemen, because it has one of the three items I still really, really want out of Naxx: Broken Promise. I wish I could recount some epic tale of daring-do, but the fight was nice and smooth. Flawless victory, if you will. All four went down without a fuss. No Broken Promise however. Oh well.

Moving on we hit up Sapph, which caused us a little bit of difficulty. We wiped twice mostly due to a healer accidentally getting too close to a cleave, and another time because the tank got out of range of the healers. He goes down, and I had Righteous Fury off to not pull aggro (I mean, since when does the MT go down?!) and I couldn’t pick Sapph back up. Damn you taunt immune, damn you to hell.

Anyways, third attempt everything goes just fine and Saph goes down. MT gets the Iris Key, loot is distributed, and we march on to Kel’Thuzad.

I’m actually starting to enjoy this fight now that I have the hang of it. Probably the most exciting part of the fight was when the other OT (a feral druid that usually dpses, but switches to bear when we need him too) went down so I had to pick up his adds as well as mine. I had all four on me and in vent there was frantic “Keep Rhidach up!” shouts. It wasn’t too bad though, I don’t think I dipped below 60% health at any point (gogo blockcapped).

Long story short, Kel goes down and the archlich drops two “of the Conquer” tokens. Apparently this is the only situation I can win t7 in! In cany case, I now sport my power ranger helmet (as you can see in the armory widget to the right). Yes, it is turned off.

Tuesday is designated Sartharion night and this week we wanted to finally start upping the difficulty, so we resolved to keep a drake up. The one we chose was Tenebron who not only summons little whelpling adds, but also applies a 100% shadow damage increase debuff to the whole raid.

My job, obviously enough, was to grab all the whelps when they popped up and hold them until dps could nuke them all.

To accomplish this I stacked a little more spell power than I’m comfortable with by equipping the Libram of Resurgence*, downing a leftover +35 spell Valentine’s candy, and partaking in a Fish Feast that was dropped. At that point my consecrate technically had about 900 spell power behind it, and I was seeing some awesome ticks on those whelps. Along with ret aura, I wasn’t really having any trouble holding them.

* Just to clarify, this libram is truthfully only useful for getting the Epic achievement. The only reason I equipped it was to be sure I could pick up as many adds as I could as soon as they spawned. In this case, the extra 6 damage per tick was worth it since I was going to be depending on holding adds through consecrate+ret aura+holy shield blocks. Stacking damage for consecrate seemed like the easiest way to pick up the adds with minimal fuss. Please don’t use this libram outside of gimmick situations.

We wiped twice when trying to get the hang of it, but the third time was nice and smooth.

Wednesday. It’s become a weekly tradition in the guild to do a “Drunken Naxx” on Friday nights. Basically, just drink your liver away and try to stay together enough to be able to not wipe on trash. Considering how geared we are getting as a guild, this isn’t that difficult a proposition.

Now, because yesterday was obviously not Friday (alas, alas) we actually entered two days early hoping to knock out the first half and save the second half for Friday night.

Problem was, we were doing really well. We hit the Arachnophobia achievement easily, and picked up the Safety Dance as well. We almost got the Make Quick Werk of Him achievement as well, but we were 8 seconds off. So close!

The raid started at 7:30 eastern, and by 9:30 we had spider, plague, and military wing up to 4HM down. Unfortunately we hit a bit of a wall due to group configuration on 4HM (two healers), so after a few wipes (alright, like four or five) one of the dps hopped on a healadin and then we quick cleaned up the fight.

By 11:30 we had Thaddius down and were heading into the Frost Wyrm Lair. As you can imagine, we one-shot Saph (I was given the Malygos key, sweet) and then turned out sights on Kel’Thuzad.

It’s a damn good thing our healers were so good, because KT can be a bit rough for them with the ice blockings. Considering people were pretending it was Friday and reflexes were dulling a bit seeking the “drunken” part of Drunken Naxx, we had the odds stacked against us a little. But despite the panicked slurs of “X IS ICEBLOCKED! X IS DEAD! WAIT NO X IS OK!” we were doing the fight pretty well.

We had two failed attempts due to some bad luck with ice blocks or some unfortunate void zone deaths. The third time was the charm though, and we successfully cleared Naxx in one night. All in all I think it took us 5 hours to clear the whole place. Not too shabby!