Sloppy is for Joes, not Raids

The Kara team is getting better and better.

The whole team understands the early boss fights pretty clearly with a few different strategies up our sleeves.

Communication between the different specialties (tanking assignments, healing assignments, buffing assignments, CC assignments, coordination between tanks and healers on boss fights) is improving.

Usage of buff foods, and to some extent elixirs and flasks, is getting more common.

Our ability to adjust to bad pulls and dynamic situations is on the up.

Starting on time and moving swiftly through trash gets better each week.

Overall team DPS is improving, with the lead three players being much closer to eachother in output than ever before.

All signs point to this weeks initial raid night being a smashing success.

The plan is to try to clear Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, Opera, and Curator within 3 hours. If we accomplish that, it would be a guild first for a single night. We've killed Curator on our first night once, but that was with skipping Maiden. Not this week, kill 'em all!!!

Start the run on time. The full normal team is there with one Mage not showing up so we sub in an Enhancement Shammy.

Amava, and her Alchemist/Drug Dealer friend, decide to try out Elixir of Major Agility and Elixir of Draenic Wisdom instead of the usually tasty Relentless @ss, as an expirement to see the effect on DPS, specifically during endurance battles where the extra Intellect might help out.

Attumen
WTF? Wipe on the trash. When you get to the 4-pull and 5-pull right before the boss, somehow we aggroed the 5'er while working on the 4'er. Strange, that hasn't happened to us since our first or second week.

Then during the boss fight, all h3ll breaks loose, Rogue somehow pulls aggro, maybe during a transistion? A bunch of people die. WTF? Oh well, Attumen dies. He drops me a necklace. Not sure if its an upgrade, but I think there's a nother rambling post burried in there somewhere describing my scrambled up thought process on gear analysis that's bound to make the best of you go crosseyed.

Moroes

We've never had so much trouble with the packs of guys sitting at the tables. No joke, we cleared them easier our very first night in there. Continuously pulled two tables at a time, with far too many deaths in our party to be acceptable. Over and over, clearing the room by attrition rather than skill that we've been accustomed.

SLOPPY!!

Nothing special about the boss fight though. Had our Holy Paladin handy, so he tanked the two female dinner guests while we fried them into the ground.

I was extremely happy to see overall team DPS break the 3000 mark for the fight. That's an outstanding accomplishment because it showed a very well balanced contribution from each of the 4 DPS members from Kara Team 1 who were present. The sub shammy missed somewhere around 30% of his attacks, so he's got to take a look at hit rating, but oh well. Good job by the team.

Maiden

More sloppiness on the trash. Clearing out the ball room before Maiden's hallway, just complete slop on the AoE pulls, including one accidental pull of the one pack made up entirely of elites. We adjusted well, but sloppy pull.

And the bad part of the sloppiness is that (A) nobody could figure out what was causing the extra pulls that were happening continuously, and (B) we don't think it was due to being too risky while trying to move swiftly. Could it be the Shaman's totems or something? We've never had a shammy with us before, so maybe, but either way, what a mess.

We had to whip out a repair bot before we even got to Maiden :-(

Kinda ridiculous boss fight.

Everybody in the Shammy's party was supposed to stand near him because he supposedly has a totem that'll prevent or cleanse the Holy Fire. Sweet, I love shammies, get him on the team and lets get his hit rating into the acceptable range. Mage stands across the room, out of totem range. Dies from holy fire early in the fight.

I don't know what's up with us tonight, but the main tank died half way into the fight. Even with Blessing of Sacrifice keeping a healer alive through the repents.

Then the off tank picked her up, which was perfect. Only thing is that he's not really used to the little dance you do to kite Maiden over to a priest to cause consecration damage to wake the priest up. There's some finesse required to walk her over JUST close enough to cause a little teeny tiny bit of damage and wake your priest up.

Warlock, who was asking for Blessing of Kings rather than Salvation, (GRRRR, stop being too risky in order to take Amava's spot on the damage meter :-P ), pulls aggro and gets one-shot.

Off-tank, who's now main tank, tries to regain aggro AND kite boss over to priest. Ended up killing the priest and then himself.

Maiden's getting low on health. We're getting low on live players.

With both tanks dead and Feign Death having been recently resisted and still on cooldown, guess who she's after next?

BUT, aparently Amava's got mad melee skillz due to her continuous Huntardism.

Melee Crit Boss Kill, FTW!!!!!!

Personal DPS of 1081 for the fight, so I'm happy to break the 1k mark on this boss. Not so happy with how the whole event transpired, but oh well, 'nother dead boss.

Opera - Romulo & Julienne

First showing of R&J for us.

Sounds simple enough. Kill the girl, interrupting everything you can. Kill the guy, dispelling and disarming everything you can. Bring guy down to 10% health. Kill girl. Kill guy.

Yeah, simple indeed.

Just not in the stars for us to kill the star-crossed lovers tonight.

Sloppy tanking pickup of the bosses during the transitions. Sloppy aggro management by nearly all the DPS'ers, me included. How I hate when Feign Death gets resisted. Sloppy interruptions of Julienne's casting. Just all around stupid.

Trash respawned and we called it a night.

All in all, happy to kill 3 bosses, collect a variety of lewtz for the team, 5 badges, a handfull of rep, yadda yadda yadda.

Not so happy with the overall performance. Hopefully we can chalk it up to "just one of those nights". Its nice in a strange way to burst the boss killing and progression bubble we had going, relieves some of the pressure, and now we can get back to business like the pros we know we can be.

Maybe its a full moon? Maybe its the Pagan God of Relentless @ss who was angry at my elixir choices?

Easter Sunday, R&J are going down!!!