Sweeping the Chimmy

Like I tweeted this morning, my first major battle today was thinking up two separate puns to use in the titles of two separate blog posts. One on my guild’s website and the other in this space. I realize now, that I’ve made a huge error–I’ve bestowed the far better pun title (“He’s dead, Chim”) to the wrong audience. I apologize, my beloved readers, for failing you so utterly. From now on you’ll have first dibs on the cream of the crop of my awful punnery.

Anyway, as you might surmise from the title, we killed Chimaeron 25 last night for the first time. The clean-up 10s, as always, lead the way, however. They’ve had him dead for two weeks now. In any case, the kill was a great cap to a somewhat lackluster raiding week. We’re in a bit of a transition right now, and a little tight on dps, so having a few folks knocked out by work and weather on short notice made putting raids together this week somewhat of a chore.

But when all was said and done, our current bugbear keeled over, which is great. Frees us up to put progression shots on Atramedes next week.

The success we had in the fight last night was a culmination of about two weeks of pain for the healer corps. We’d been making steady progress for a while but last night it really clicked. First show we got him to 60% or so, and through the first feud with no deaths. I borked the second feud, unfortunately, which cut the great attempt a bit short. The next go we had another great attempt and took it to about 50%. The third attempt was when the magic happened, so to speak.

On the first massacre we lost three people right off the bat, including a healer, which resigned me to the attempt ending poorly. However, we quickly got the healer back up and made it through the next few massacres and feuds without a single death. Inexorably, we marched on through the descent in Chimmy’s hitpoints and slowly but surely reached phase 2. Completely unprepared for this sudden happening, I did my best to kite and cooldown, but flubbed it utterly while flopping about in a puddle of my own panic.

Thankfully Demo, who was offtanking, is a pro at ranging his healers (I kid, man!) and lived a pretty long time. Eventually he bit it and one by one the dps were knocked off and Chimmy’s health bar melted away. With about 3% to go and only three times that many raiders up, my knuckles began to change from white to a menagerie of unhealthy colors, and I did my best Muldoon impression, commanding the raid to SHOOT [IT]. After what seemed like an eternity, Chimaeron fell over and coughed up its purples.

As for tanking, we went with the method of me eating the break and Demo taunting off me when double strike was coming. Once he took the strike, I taunted back. Tanking was smooth as silk from my vantage point, so I think that’s the ideal method to be using.

This kill was just what we needed to get back on track.