Alive and Progressin'

In a dramatic turn of events, Amava was still standing at the end of a progression boss kill.

Its been a while since that's happened. There was much rejoicing.

Anybody try a 25-person raid since tuesday's world shattering patch?

Its...i dunno...different?

Raid Setup

Sending out invites. Tanks do so much damage in their tanking spec/posture/gear that you can stack the raid with 'em.

No survival hunters to invite..oh yeah, mana battery now, not expose weakness.

On and on.

Try to setup the raid groups. Eh, not really much to do there, nearly everything has been converted to raid wide.

Mage leader tries to coordinate buffs amongst her colleagues. Nope, raid wide.

Paladins...well nevermind here, auras go raid-wide and blessings are totally changed.

On and on.

The Joy of a Dead Boss

Serpentshrine Cavern, Leotheras the Blind.

Wiki gives lots of descriptions for how various non-DPS classes can kill their Inner Demons.

Bah! Everybody does so much damage now, its just plain old silly.

Trash pulls were over in seconds. SECONDS! Even the ones with 9 mobs in them leading up to Lurker/Leo.

Massive Bog Lord guys, could barely target them before they were dead. Give the tank 0.5 seconds before opening fire and he's already got 6k threat built up.

First attempt at Leo. His health bar dropped faster than my sale price shoots up while pumping gas lately.

It really felt like Keystone Cops running round throwing whipcream pies and spraying seltzer on eachother. There's something comical about how silly the fights have become.

That said, took a couple tries, but we killed him on our first night trying.

A Pack of Loot Whores

T5 Yo!

Everybody's been drooling over the 2-piece T5 bonus, not just the Hunters.

Now we've got a second T5 dropping boss under out belts, which is nice.

The Hunter who landed himself a second piece of T5 will likely find himself spitefully placed in a party with the...oh wait....party composition barely matters. /doh, how can I spite people now :(

A Pack of Ego Maniacs

No combat log successfully captured the night, which is a pity since we're all anxious to see who won at WWS how our new talents and attacks and such were performing.

Recount for the total run (newly installed and I didnt know how to reset it between boss fights) showed BM Hunter & MM Hunter nearly equal at the top (booya, BM tops by 700 damage for the night), followed by a Rogue. Didn't have a Ret Pally, so nothing hugely crushing to our ego. In other news, our main tank Prot Warrior was roughly 8th in overall damage, which is just insane. Lets stack the raid with tanks, no CC. Ever. Every mob gets a tank.

Mana, Mana, Everywhere

Strangely, I had ZERO mana issues the entire night.

When I say ZERO, I really mean ZERO. Felt like anytime I looked, I was at 100% mana or maybe 90%.

I walked into the fight with serious concerns about mana.

Dramatic changes to Aspect of the Viper, no chain drinking Fel Mana Potions, nearly every glyph for hunters involves mana conservation in one way or another.

Given all that, I was pretty worried about mana.

Nope.

Raid had a single Shammy dropping Mana Spring, a single Shadow Priest in the mana battery buff category. That's basically it for mana regeneration.

Individually, I was rolling with a 2H wep with Superior Mana Oil, drinking Elixir of Draenic Wisdom. I had no Glyphs installed because I discovered to my chagrin that you need to be near Lexicon of Power to apply them.

In my bag was my usual stock of 35 Fel Mana Potions.

When I went back to Aldor Bank to unload at the end of the night, I had in my bag...35 Fel Mana Potions.

I don't get it.

My shot rotation was manually chosen (poor poor macro, my #3 button was a sad panda from neglect), primarily Steady Shot. I tried keeping Serpent Sting up during boss fights, which is an interesting exercise to say the least. Arcane shots were added whenever I remembered to check the cooldown.

That said, the addition of more Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting had me worried that it'd be more mana guzzling than my old 1:1 macro.

Nope. Nearly 100% the entire fight.

Taste the Rainbow

Skittle the Purple Wasp seemed to do nicely. Only level 69 but plenty survivable as long as her mama remembers to recall during whirlwind.

610 armor penetration is nice. I am under the impression that its a raid-wide armor debuff for all physical attacks, but I can't find anywhere that'll confirm that 100% for me or not.

Other hunters showed up with Silithid, Ravager and Cat. Gonna have to have a sit down and make sure somebody brings a Wolf too, pending the outcome of my "is it raid wide?" research above.

Buh Bye

So there you go, still raidin and progressin after the 3.0.2 patch. The Officers decided to go with 2 weekly raids instead of 3 until level 80 raiding, so we've got probably 5 more nights to cram in as many bosses as we can. Keep fingers crossed for another kill in Tempest Keep (Al'ar, you evil evil bird), and some sweet lovin in Black Temple.