Enraged just means it’s a more exciting kill

Last night wasn’t as bad as I originally dreaded. Yeah we started the raid with 24 people in group, but once we got through the Ignis trash (for the second day in a row) we picked up a 25th person. The first attempt was attempted and somewhat shortly ended in a wipe. Eek, I remarked.

On the bright side, while attempting to run out Ignis stuffed me in his fire crotch and recognizing my chance for an achievement I popped LOH and furious Flash healed myself. When I dropped out unscathed I continued running away, but he snatched me up again. The second time I wasn’t so lucky. Oh well, mission accomplished.

Part of the reason we wiped wasn’t due to heals or anything like that, but some confusion with the adds. The person in charge of popping brittle golems wasn’t familiar with the job (not his fault, that was corrected) and one of the other add tanks was doing the job for the first time. The second try both knew then what to do and executed their tasks with ease. So Ignis dropped and my fears that last night would be a repeat of Tuesday’s shite show were allayed.

We then moved on to Iron Council and one-shot them as well. And, proudly, I didn’t get instagibbed at all by Steelbreaker! (Thank you healers).

Auriaya was next and after a false start with the pull we regrouped and put in a seriously attempt. Things were going well until Demo bit it and I took over the tanking, but a lot of people died to pounces or being feared into the void zone.

One particular Shaman, who’s a nice guy, has an awful connection and often DCs. And as you know I’m sure, this is one fight where a DC is really painful, because if he’s standing outside of the stack, the Feral Defender is going to pounce at him, then back at someone else, and back and forth ad nauseam. I appreciate the healers hate letting someone die, but let him go! He’s causing raid damage and keeping him alive gives less benefit than just letting him die.

So anyways, Demo’s dead, I’m tanking, and a lot of dps bit it too. We had something on the order of 12 people left, 30% of Auriaya’s health remaining, and the clock was ticking on her enrage timer. We’re just focusing her down and I’m watching her health slowly tick, popping wings when I can and dpsing as hard as my measly tank damage will allow. Eventually we’re down to 8 or so, 30 seconds, 10% health. Clock keeps ticking, people pouring all they have into her. Then 10 seconds, 5%… her HP keeps going down. Finally at 2 seconds before enrage timer we heard that horrifying shriek as Auriaya’s corpse falls to the floor.

Phew.

After the excitement of that near-wipe died down we shuffled over to Hodir’s hallway and took his frosty behind down as well. I was pretty happy to be able to indulge in a little dpsing for once, since the new third tank didn’t have a dps offset and two tanks is overkill as it is on that fight.

And finally after Hodir we went after Mimiron who’d up til last night we had one-shot every non-progression attempt. I say “up til” because unfortunately we did wipe, and during Phase 4 as well, which hurts because that’s a good 10 minutes or so into the fight. Mimiron is so long that any wipe deep into the encounter is a huge amount of time spent.

One thing that definitely hurt us wasn’t spare heals or tanks eating too much of a plasma blast, it was idiots eating mines or shockwaves. Both in the first attempt, and after phase one of the second, the same two people had died to the same, stupid, shite. A tad frustrating since we explicitly call out in vent “SHOCK WAVE” so you have enough time to take your face off the keyboard and high tail it out of there.

So we’re on phase 2 in the second attempt with those two mouth breathers sucking tile and feeling pretty good about the attempt nonetheless. We get through phase 3 with another person or two down. Still doing pretty well. Then in phase 4 we start suffering serious attrition. People bite it to the intermittent shockwaves, others to the spun-up lasers. It was definitely a race against the clock.

Eventually there were only a handful of us left, once again staring down the enrage timer. Cendra’s reading off in vent the health of the three parts while we furious dps as hard as we can. The second tick down but it looks like we’re not going to make it, when finally in a burst of luck Sated dropped off. Gulliveig blasts off a Bloodlust and we close the gap down to 1% each piece. Then the enrage timer hits 0 and Mimiron turns gigantic and red. It looked like the end, but we successfully dropped the parts to zero at literally the last second.

Probably shouldn’t have been that close, but a kill was a kill.

It’s been a pretty lackluster raid week thus far, but at least we’re only one boss shy of our usually kill count. So, could be worse.