Nalorakk, Schmalorakk. Akil'zon, Schmakil'zon

After everybody was done paying homage to their mothers, we gathered up our forces and headed into Zul'Aman for our weekly wipefest.

The raid looked a drop different than usual, with our normal off-tank not logged in at raid time. Or, even an hour later than raid time, which we ended up bumping to because of two raiders not being on. In retrospect, probably should have not scheduled a raid for Mother's Day, but what you gonna do? The delay did let me get my arenas in, but that's another story all together.

So we find a friendly Bear in the neighborhood who wants to join us.

Plus, joining our ZA team for the first time is a long lost friend of mine who returned to WoW and who also joined my guild.

So we figure that with two combat rez'es and a soul stone available, we should be in decent shape.

Plus we had a new strategy for healing. Two tanks, three healers. In the past, we had one healer handle the tank during troll phase, and the other two handle the other tank during bear phase. The purpose of this trick was to allow a mana-regen phase during your off-phase. I'm no healing expert, but they tell me that this meant they had to spam their least mana efficient spells, thus leading to troubles, specifically during bear phase.

This time, all three healers were on bear duty, and two of them were on troll duty. This allows one healer to mana regen during troll, and all three can be using their most mana efficient heals since they'd be backing eachother up at all times.

Plus, having a tree in the tanking group, the buff to tank healing is very nice. Plus he was wearing a pair of gloves I crafted for him, so I felt special. lol.

Soooo, entering the fight with like 50 things changed from how we did it last week, we set forth to battle.

And one-shot the mutha.

No combat rez, no soul stone needed.

Just pure and simple pew pew pew for about 5 minutes.

I happily broke 1100dps, despite needing to take a mini DPS break to bandage, as was our plan for DPS'ers who get charged by the boss.

In a somewhat recent posting, BRK told a story of how he does fights in two stages. One is DPS phase, the other is mana-regen phase. Aparently he waits for mana to get low, then drinks a potion, turns on aspect of the viper, perhaps some other buffs like rapid fire or some such? During this phase he doesn't use any magical spells, not even kill command, for about 10 seconds. Supposedly, in 10 seconds he regens about 60% of his mana pool, which is much larger than mine.

I tried this a few times recently. I must be doing it wrong, because I really don't get the benefit that BRK illustrates.

Instead, I proactively drink Fel Mana Potion. Nearly immediately at the beginning of a fight. It is a MoT, mana over time. So once down 500 or 1000 mana, I drink it, blowing the cooldown as soon as possible during the fight, which allows another potion to be available pretty early.

I find this works for me substantially better than the two phase approach. Although, if I still do get down low, I do go into a mana regen phase with Viper and Rapid fire and no spell usage for a little while.

Either way. Nalorakk down in a first ever kill. Not sure whether to call it a guild first or not, because our bear off-tank was from outside, but we're working on that :-)

Went on to Akil'zon.

Love the gauntlet approaching his roost.

Well, love/hate it. That was total chaos, but it is fun to watch the team try to coordinate and react together, as opposed to most trash pull situations where you carefully plan out each and every mob's fate. The mobs jumping us from behind was a really cool touch. Me and the other hunter stood in the rear of the pack, with traps at our backs, and that took care of most of the trailers.

Cleared the gauntlet without much fuss.

Got to the boss.

Did an experiemental fight. Pretty cool. The visuals of his electric storm are awesome.

Went back in to fight him for real.

And GOT HIM DOWN....


....to 6%

And it was pure stupidity on the part of many of our raiders that we wiped. We successfully handled all the electrical storms, until the last fateful one. There's a random delay between when DBM tells you the storm is here, and when it actually casts. So we all collapsed in on the boss when the timer was up. Delay. Delay. Delay. Most of the team got antsy and ran back to their positions before the electical storm cast. Then it cast and crushed us.

But the stupidity is totally forgivable, as it was only first night and second time we were ever seeing the boss.

We got this guy nailed. Lets head back in there.

Doh. Trash in the gauntlet had respawned. Which sux because that really was a quick respawn. Not sure how much time it gave us, but it really was fast.


And then this is when the late start stings you in the butt. Half the team, including the key member that caused us to start an hour late, wanted to continue past our scheduled end time.

As much as I complain about my job, I'd really prefer to not get fired. Thus, being (A) on time, and (B) alert/attentive/well rested is a good thing. Going to bed was my top priority.

Hopefully we can get started on time next week, because if so, Akil'zon is gonna make me some fine Buffalo Wings. Way better than those gamey kaliri wings I eat a couple times a week.