Lightly singed by our first week in Firelands

Who was it that said “the first casualty of war is planning”? Because that guy had our number. Poor Zilga went to the trouble of doing all this research on the early fights of the Firelands and the very first one we get to — Shannox — was a complete clusterfrak thanks to the last-minute change making him untauntable. Coping with that and formulating a new strategy cost us Tuesday, though we managed to knock him over Wednesday.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though, there’s still a mountain of trash and about a thousand BOEs between the first pull Tuesday night and the last one on Wedneday.

For starters, can I emphasize how much I love the Firelands trash? Actually, I’m exaggerating a tad. I love how quickly they die and how little (ie, non-existent) the need for CC is. The flip-side, however, is that there’s so-goddamn-much of it. Trash as far as the eye can see. And worse, to bring forth the first boss we fought, you need to clear a huge swath of it.

On the bright side, some of the trash is interesting. I love how the Corehounds attempt to eat the tank, or the spinning turtles which are oh-so-fun to kite around and guide into unwary dps or healers. That latter choice might be a bad idea, however, if you want to live through the boss fight.

Not really knowing how the place worked we initially kept clearing our way to where Shannox’s icon was on the map. Not seeing him, we cleared some more, having some hilarious zero-day wipes. For example, that pack of Flamewalker summoners. We kill their protector and heal back up and began to wonder why we were still in combat. Suddenly, the summoner finished charging the elemental, who promptly exploded and killed us.

So that’s how that worked …

Going up against Shannox was an exercise in patience, as our carefully laid plans quickly went agley. We had to rethink things on the fly, in addition to me quickly deploying some speedy strat-fu to find tips on how to handle an untauntable fight. Tank swaps were out; we learned later — much too late — the key was to keep Riplimb and Shannox apart. We basically spent the night learning what not to do.

Wednesday was a much different affair. After spending about 45 minutes clearing trash and compelling Shannox to finally appear, we hit him with our first attempt and got him .3%. That was a heartbreaking wipe, nearly a one shot, which would have been incredible.

Alas, we then did another six, long attempts and even suffering a trash respawn. Each attempt was foiled by some flavor of tank death, mostly due to us still figuring out the lay of the land and distances between tanks, healers, and everything in-between.

Thankfully, on attempt number seven we finally finished him off. I noticed that from how Shannox’s corpse was laying, it looked like he had bashed his head open on a rock. “Well, that’s what happened,” Sheepin countered, “he slipped and fell during the fight and killed himself on a rock.” I like it.

In any case, loot was distributed and we continued on our merry way, somehow weaving between trash and making our way up to Rhyolith’s plateau. Karr the Invincible was slightly anti-climactic. I was expecting him to do something that lived up to his name. Possibly involving his baby Magmaws that were sunning in the lava pits. But instead, he just toppled over with only a few volcanos to show for it.

We got to Rhyolith with only about twenty minutes left in the raid and put some learning attempts on him. Thankfully this one did gel with what was reported from the PTR and overall doesn’t seem to be a very difficult encounter. We’ll have to see how it goes when we have more time for it next week.

Kind of a slow start to Firelands, but we’ll pick up the pace. I’m happy just having new content to run.

Before I forget: I’ll be in the Great White North (aka, Buffalo, NY) next week so I will not be doing any posting. I will however, as always, be puttering away on Twitter. Good luck to everyone hitting Firelands this weekend/next week!