The one night raid week
Another raid reset day, another one night ICC clear. Thankfully we really could only swing one raid night this week, with the holiday and all, so it’s not like we’ll be spending the rest of the week sitting on our hands.
Because of Christmas, we were missing a few regulars. Especially three of our best healers, which was painful and cast a pall on the possible success of the raid.
Demo (the gm and other tank) and I have an interesting dynamic where we tend to always be on opposite sides of various things. For example, if a raid looks iffy he tends to go full out chicken little while I have to crap sunshine and vomit rainbows to keep the guy from throwing himself off Icecrown glacier.
If we agree on the viability of a raid, god help us all.
So last night I was playing the part of the eternal optimist and thankfully I was right. Sure there was that harrowing first wipe on Marrowgar where some dps was obviously ignoring spikes and the backup healers were getting the dynamic of the fight worked out. But after we reformed we easily dropped him; though I found myself screeching “stay away from the tanks!!” a little too often.
After Marrowgar we went over to Deathwhisper and soundly one shot her. Our first time pulling that off too. Dps did a fantastic job on adds, they really got the hang of the fight.
It’s amazing to think we went from spending a night of wipes to down the Lady the first time to one shotting. I’m proud of how quickly the raid translated our learning wipes into actionable knowledge.
So after Deathwhisper we plowed through the Ally trash to get to the gunship. I switched to my heroic, SoComm spec for tanking D. The spec worked awesomely, giving me some badly needed snap aggro for the mobs pouring out of the portal. I definitely recommend having SoComm in some capacity for tanking D, it makes a world of difference.
After we nuked the Ally ship (I have a sick fantasy that it crashes into the Crusader’s Coliseum) we gathered for the last boss of the wing, Saurfang.
This fight even I was a little worried about, on account of the three healers that had never done the fight before. We did wipe intially, and spectacularly at that, with three marks up before 50%. Eek.
After regrouping we then remembered a few things we always forget til after the first wipe: p:ws the Blood Boils, Amp Magic, yell a few times the phrase “13 yards, you bastards!!” Etc.
And then we killed him.
I rushed over to the chest, hoping to spy a Conqueror’s Mark of Sanctification, but my hopes were dashed.
After the 25man disbanded we put together an ICC-10 run, and ran back into the breach. Of course the run went exceptionally smoothly and we really didn’t have trouble with anything.
I whipped out the heroics spec in the pre-Marrowgar trash and pulled around 5k dps and second damage done overall. Not too shabby. Next week I’ll use it on that trash in the 25man.
Overall, great night and great raid! I’m happy to rest on our laurels this week but next week is going to be hard to burn through everything in one night and then bum around for the rest of the week.
I guess there’s always ToC… /shudder.
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We were missing a few regulars from last night’s ICC 10, too. We had just one caster, the rest physical DPS. No Shaman.
It wasn’t smooth, there was a lot of winging it, but we only wiped on the Gunship because the tank forgot to equip the rocket pack. No other wipes.
Hope the next wing is harder.
@Rhidach
23 December 2009 at 2:18 pm #
Agreed, a step up in challenge would be nice.
I am not the only one who has to be talked down from the ledge when things don’t go, or don’t look like they’re gonna go smoothly.
I play the glass is half full guy to your pessimist quite often as well.
I should have been more relaxed though, with how amazing I am we probably could have done it with no healers at all. :P
@Rhidach
23 December 2009 at 2:51 pm #
True, your pessimism seems to always be before the raid, and mine’s mostly during.
On the PTR, Festergut had 43,230,000 health and a five minute hard enrage that instantly kills everyone. I think that’s where the challenge is going to be.
The Renaissance Man’s last blog ..Gearing with Badges in Icecrown
@Rhidach
23 December 2009 at 4:56 pm #
Oh right, isn’t that the one-tank dps race boss? Oh great, some fight that will make the deeps get delusions of gradeur over their importance.
I’m curious what addon’s you have that are consuming almost 70MB’s of memory?
From the looks of it it’s pretty basic and I have a UI not far off that only uses 12MB tops.
What are your comp spec’s?
@Rhidach
24 December 2009 at 10:46 am #
Oh I keep auctioneer running at all times. I think that and recount eats up a lot of memory.
My pc has 8 gigs of RAM and some ~3 ghz processor. I think dual core. I can’t remember. Suffice it to say, I don’t notice my gluttony, haha.
I highly doubt that Festergut will retain 43.5 million hp and a 5 minute enrage for normal mode. 145k rdps isn’t all that hard to pull off with 19 dps, for a 258 geared guild, but it’s asking a lot for a 245 geared guild. Rather, given what we’ve seen so far, I expect a 6 or 7 minute enrage, drastically reducing the dps requirement.
We’re gambling a little bit on it, honestly. For ICC, we’ve decided to run 2 runs until hardmodes open, 15mains and 10alts in each, so that we double our loot income, and particularily the tier income. If Festergut is actually tuned that tightly, we’re going to be right up against the wall with partially alt-dps, but it’s going to be a really tough go for primarily normal-mode guilds.