Figuring out what went wrong

In a recent ZA run, we struggled to take down Halazzi.

By "struggled", I mean "failed".

As a Raid Leader who would like to recover from this and return to kill him, I'm interested in figuring out what went wrong so we can fix it.

A pretty simple fight, so there's not too many elements to explore, but here's my thinking.

I'll need you, the readers, to help me figure out where to go to determine which of these elements is the problem.

The raid composition was 2 Tanks, 2 Healers, 6 DPS.

So, here's some things that can possibly go wrong with the fight, along with my thoughts on how to determine whether it is the root cause of failure or not:

• Shared Cleavage: Both tanks must stand on top of eachother to share the "cleave" effect. If this were the problem, I think I can verify with WWS to see if both tanks are taking roughly equal "cleave" damage.



• Lynx Form: Occasionally the boss farts out a lynx avatar. One of the tanks must pick up that mob instantly. I think I can verify that via WWS. I'd have to find out what kind of damage that mob does, and see if anybody besides the tank took damage from it. Also, this one can be verified intuitively. Meaning, I was there during the raid, and I saw the lynx mob get picked up instantly each time. But I like something more scientific than my own intuitive observation.



• Flame Shock: Flame Shocks must be dispelled. Quickly. And, if you have more than one toon capable of dispelling, you need to have them all participate. I can verify with WWS how many flame shocks each player dispelled. But I cannot easily verify how quickly they reacted. Perhaps I could look at the damage we all took from Flame Shock, and compare it to the amount we took during a successful kill.



• Corrupted Lightning Totem: When the totem shows up, it has to be killed verah quicklah. I'm not sure how to tell if we killed them quick enough or not. Like Flame Shock, I can look at WWS to see how much Chain Lightning damage we took and compare it to a successful kill. Alternatively, I can look at each DPS'er and see how much damage they did to the totems and yell at anybody who was too low.



• Tranquilizing Shot: Halazzi likes to go into a frenzy and whoop your tank's ass. Most Hunters don't keep Tranq shot on their action bars. As a result, sometimes they realize half way through the fight that they forgot to pull it out of the silly Marksman page of their spell book. I do not know how to determine the timeliness of the Tranq shots. Is there a way to see in WWS how much frenzy damage the tank took?



• And now for my favorite loaded question, Healer Out of Mana: Ah, the very best of the best of the finger pointing comes when a healer goes out of mana. First, the finger gets pointed at the healer himself. "Your mana pool isnt deep enough, or you're casting inefficient spells, or you're overhealing too much". Pish posh. Maybe that's it, but perhaps not. Lets dig a bit deeper.
  
  Another reason a healer might go oom is if he's got a massive dispel duty, burning his mana on non-heal activity. Examining WWS can show if there's an unequal balance in the dispels with one player doing all the work and burning all the mana. Lets keep pointing fingers though, because its fun.
  
  Maybe a healer goes OOM if the tank is taking an inappropriate amount of damage. One easy no-brainer would be that shared cleave going unshared. I can verify that. But what if the cleave is shared, and the tank has too low avoidance? Maybe the tank geared overly towards threat generation, and skimped out of proper avoidance stats? How do I determine something like this?
  
  Next up is overall raid stamina. Maybe all those DPS'ers with 7000 health are just too fragile, and require way too much attention from the healers. If you have 9 or 10k health, you give you healer a little breathing room and you also buy yourself some time to bandage or wait another 10 seconds for your potion cooldown to drink another health pot. I have no scientific way to verify that this is the cause, other than to just examine the health of each player and go with an intuitive notion of whether we have enough stamina or not.
  
  And lastly. One that's very near and dear to my heart, DPS too low. Maybe its just taking your team too long to kill the boss. Boss alive too long, requires healer to heal for too long, poof, healer oom.

I think it would be fun to yell at somebody, and I'd like to have quantitative data behind me when I yell at them.

NOTE: I really don't yell at people. In my head, I yell. When it comes out of my mouth, its generally a pretty rational, non-confrontational discussion, aiming at allowing people to make mistakes, have fun, and also keep making progress. But I do like to fantasize that I'm like Drill Instructor Hartman barking at a fresh class of recruits.

Perhaps everybody smoked crack before the raid?

I dunno what's up. I published my earlier post entitled "On the road again", but it's not appearing on the blog or in my feed reader. But it appears as "published" in my Blogger control panel. Oh well, if you haven't read that one yet, you're really missing out on a gem. Not. Edit: an hour later, it showed up on the blog and in my reader. wtf?

My boss used his infinite powers of persuasion to convince me that dinner with coworkers was in my best interest. So, being the resourceful little sneak that I am, I went to the event coordinator during a break and used my infinite powers of persuasion to make sure that she arranged dinner such that I will be available for my raid.

Ding.

Dinner was nice, steaks, salmon in some weird but tasty sauce, a variety of other goodies. Open bar, not that I was overly anxious for booze. Got back to my room intime to get ready for the raid.

On to the show.

Zul'Aman bear mount run.

Not for the weak of heart.

What's the best way to start off a potential bear run?

Wipe within 30 seconds of initiating combat in the gauntlet on the way to Akil'zon.

Yep.

We haven't wiped in that area in months and months.

And we walk in with aspirations of seeing just how far out of reach the bear mount is, and we wipe instantly.

Oh well.

We regrouped and pretended that we were still pushing quickly. One shot akilzon. Whatever.

Waltz over to Nalorakk. We've been one shotting him for months. Wiped 3 times.

Gah!

I said, "ok, F nalorakk, lets go practice speed progression through the scout gauntlet on the way to jan'alai."

Wipe.

ZOMG!

One shot Jan'alai.

Ok, since the timed event would have expired about an hour ago, lets go slowly and make sure everyone knows the path to Halazzi.

In the three times we've gone to Halazzi, we wipe 4 or 5 times each night while screwing up trying to jump through huts and windows and stuff.

Somebody fails to jump through the window and aggro a patrol, a hunter fails to dismiss pet and jumps through a window and then pet comes running aroudn the outside with 10 mobs in tow.

So this time we actually did the Halazzi trash reasonably smoothly.

Go figure!

Couldn't kill Halazzi.

Perhaps everybody smoked crack before the raid?

Otherwise it seems that there aint no bears in our future.

Felt Great. Felt Empty.

At the end of the previous night of ZA with a guest uber tank (T6/Sunwell geared main tank for most advanced alliance guild on the server), there were a few mutterings of a desire to return and finish off the dungeon.

We normally don't raid on tuesdays, so the concept just sorta died there.

But the idea festered overnight, and most of the team was online and thirsty for blood.

Aside: was also cool to see a bunch of guildies doing an in-guild PuG of Kara on an off-raid night. We took Kara off the official guild schedule and its nice to see that ppl who still want to get in there can do it without looking outside the guild.

Onward and upward, or something like that.

Waltzed in and sat the Hex Lord Malazras down on his ability-stealing rump in one shot. Actually, I think he died face down, but we forgot the screenshot, so who knows. Or cares.

Secret to the fight: three healers - two resto shammies, one tree druid.

Not sure if its a secret or not, but the dual chain heals during those Spirit Blasts were clutch. We also had some peeps put on some stamina gear pieces for added survivability.

Other secret: Keep a Priest waiting outside the instance. Have him buff the raid with fortitude, spirit, and shadow resistance. Kick him from the raid. Repeat after any wipes.

This little trick felt like cheating. The T6 guys said it's standard operating procedure. Whatever.

The fight went pretty smoothly, 'cept for when Amava died and received a timely combat rez from her friendly neighborhood Druid. Then died again with boss at 1%, along with half the raid. lol, dead boss, FTW.

On to Zul'jin. Naturally, never saw the fight before. Not planning on raiding on a tuesday, I hadn't read about the fight at all either. Quick read of the WoW Wiki article, quick description from our visiting tanky tank.

Couple wipes, having a really rough time with that Phase 3 and its damn Tornados and "you take damage when you cast spells" thingie.

I looked at my combat log after a wipe, noticed that Tornado is Nature Damage. Aspect of the Wild, FTW. I split the two Hunters into separate groups, and also the Warlocks, resulting in each party receiving an AotW nature resist buff and a Blood Pact stamina buff.

Bingo!

Dead Zul'jin

Zul'Aman cleared for the first time.

Felt great. Felt empty.

Nice accomplishment for a team mostly in T4 stuff. Gotta repeat it without the uber tank to really feel satisfied.

YAPK.K.

Yet Another Progression Kill. Kinda.

Headed on over to Zul'Aman. In an attempt to more seriously focus on the timed events and maybe even push further into some progression bosses, we formed up a raid of our best performing toons.

Only sticking issue was that only one of the tanks that were on is appropriately geared for ZA.

So 9 of us went looking for a tank. Fire out a general message in Shattrath City.

Get a response from The Man!

A well-known Paladin tank, revered as the Main Tank for the most progressed Alliance guild on the server. Fully geared in T6, progressing in Sunwell Plateau.

Apparently, since nearly every one of his friends already has a Bear Mount, he has trouble getting ZA raids together, and he's looking for a piece of gear from Hex Lord.

I let him know that we've never beaten Lynx boss, and never even seen Hex Lord, to give him the option of bailing out before we even start. He's good to go.

Our guild's Main Tank wisely says The Man should lead, so I let him know a little bit of what level of raider he is dealing with. He should feel free to set the pace and try to treat us the same as any raid he normally runs with. I was pretty excited to see what sort of pace and cadence for pulling he would work with.

The goal was to do Akil'zon and Nalorakk within the timed events, and then progression attempts at Halazzi.

Nice 'n Easy, two bosses down within the timer. Then on to Halazzi.

There's a short-cut where you leap through two huts to bypass a bunch of trash on the way to the boss. Both weeks that we've tried doing it, just miserable. Gonna have to get people to be more aware of their pets and their own toons during this little trek.

But we made it.

And we spanked Halazzi.

Not sure if we get to consider it a Guild First kill or not, because an overpowered visitor was Main Tanking the boss. Everyone else was from the guild though, so I'm gonna go with "Yes", just because I want to.

Went over to kill Jan'alai. A little sloppy, but we one-shot him, which is not unusual for us.

Then, on to some new territory, forging the way up to Hex Lord.

Based on The Man's suggestion, I had a Shadow Priest respec to Holy to make 3 healers, and our Protection Warrior respec to Fury to make 6 DPS.

Made lots of attempts at Hex Lord, came close, but in the end, only got him to about 20% or so.

So, here's some thoughts I had about working with someone who is among the top 3 progressed tanks on the server...

• I'll start with attitude. I was expecting impatience with us bunch of n00bs. Not at all, he was great. He consulted with us about our normal strategies, he provided suggestions but never mandates. He explained fights well. He didn't treat me as a n00b raid leader, but instead asked me what I wanted in most situations. At no point did he make the people in our Guild feel inferior or that he was holier than thou. Very grounded and relaxed about his approach, which made the rest of the raiders feel comfortable.


• Perspective. At one point, he said "these two guys are just like those guys in Black Temple". Um, er, yeah. We just killed Maggy on wednesday. Got another way to describe the mobs? We all got a chuckle out of that one.


• Pace. It was eye-opening to see that the pace between pulls was very similar to what our Main Tank normally pushes. The Man did go a little faster, specifically during transitions between a boss kill and getting ready for the next trash. Once the boss was down, loot, and he was mounted up and already stationed at the next trash pull location. I can definitely see this as an area we can learn from and improve.


• Kill order and pull-planning. The pulls were not very planned. Only when absolutely necessary was there anything besides his primary target marked. When CC was needed, he communicated clearly via voice and raid icons what was needed. As an overpowered pally tank, it really allowed lots of room for error. The only thing I'd like to change about how this went is to have the DPS use an assist macro. We've never used one before, and in a situation like this, all we'd need is for one player to choose targets and everyone else to assist that person. No need to communicate a kill order, just make sure that Main Assist player is smart about choosing targets.


• Buffing. Dead toons were given nearly zero time for re-buffing during trash. Rebuff before bosses, definitely. He did not allow downtime during trash, which I am a huge fan of. None of our toons absolutely NEEDS buffs during the trash, and we're going to move faster overall if we do not waste time rebuffing until the bosses. This left some of our raid feeling upset, but I think it is a really good habit for the raid.


• Relative difficulty of bosses. Leading up to Jan'alai, the Dragonhawk boss, The Man was actually pretty concerned about the difficulty level. Not sure if it was the "inspiring" performance we were putting in up to that point, or if it was a result of his previous experiences in ZA with his normal raid, but he was worried about how tough that fight is. I assured him that we've killed Jan'alai 6 times or so, including some one-shots, with our all-T4 team. He seemed satisfied, and we then went on to one-shot the boss.


• Changing raid composition. The tank felt pretty strongly about swapping players in and out of the raid to tailor the composition to each encounter. We've never done that before, plus, we had the best performing toons from our guild already in the raid, so not too many options there. I compromised with the Shadow/Holy and Prot/Fury respec before Hex Lord. But it was another eye-opener to discuss with him how frequently and often his very advanced guild does this. It is a normal, accepted way of life for their raids.


• Threat Management. I was happy to discover from my overall feel for threat and aggro management is that the tanks in my guild do a great job generating threat. Sure, The Man put out a little more threat than I'm used to, giving me a little more room to open the flood gates on the DPS, but not a whole lot more room. Amava's resisted FD's were still brutal to our progress through a trash pull.

It was a great night, filled with fun, new boss encounters, and even some tension at not wanting to seem like scrubs in front of The Man.

I felt bad at having to call the raid without killing the one and only boss that our visitor was here for, but it was late and we even threw in two more attempts after our normal end time.

The night left us with some good ideas for how we can improve our team's performance and speed. I'm thinking I'd like to try to have a quick de-brief with him to hear what the experience was like for him. We take pride in trying to do a good job, and I'd love to hear the first-hand reflections of a more veteran raider.

The Best Buffalo Wings in Azeroth

When I think of Buffalo Wings in WoW, my mind typically goes straight for Skettis, and my hate/hate relationship with the Kaliri flying around the place like overgrown mosquitoes. One of the more common daily cooking quests has you head up to the mountains and farm a Buffalo Wing off of one of them puppies.

But, last night we found out that the best wings in the game come off of Jan'alai in Zul'Aman.

Not quite as easy to come by as the Kaliri, but when we finally fried him up, it was quite the feast. Mmmmm, Frank's Red Hot.

Zoned into ZA. Our goal for the evening was Nalorakk and Akil'zon within the timed event, followed by attempts at Jan'alai with the hopes of killing him. Our previous attempts had us pretty close, but not quite there yet.

We also had a change in our team. Our previous Team 1 off-tank is having a rough time with the conflict between bed time and raid time, so he's opting out of 10-man stuff. So the team has a new Paladin tank, and visions of a dead Eagle Boss.

Here's where we admit the complete and total incompetence of our raid.

The Gong. That stupid gong that Indiana Jones bangs, and five of you need to bang in concert with him.

I think this is the hardest part of the dungeon for the team. We laugh on and on with the Guild Master as he counts down repeatedly to coordinate our actions. Never works. We wasted a full 9 minutes trying to bang the gong last night.

But, eventually the stars aligned and the timer began. Nalorakk, Akil. No sweat. Both timed events nailed, with what feels like a reasonable amount of time to spare for when we decide to try an additional boss within the timer.

The loot in ZA is outstanding. Nalorakk dropped some mail shoulders that look like little bear heads that rest next to your head. I passed on them in favor of our Survival Hunter, since they were agility upgrade for him. Expose Weakness, FTW!!!

Cruised through the Scout gauntlet section.

Made 5 unsuccessful attempts at Jan'alai. Each attempt was progressively better, but was mostly the same strategy each time, only tweaking the number of eggs we allowed to hatch each time.

At 30% health, he spawns all remaining eggs. At 25% health (or 5 minutes elapsed time), he enrages, painfully messing with his aggro table and wacking anybody he can find.

For the 6th try, we changed it up a bit.

Rather than treat the eggs as purely an AoE thing, we went hybrid.

When the first set of hatchers arrives, Amava kills one before he can hatch anybody. Concussive Shot does the trick, and he's dead before he even enters the bridge towards the eggs.

Everybody else focuses on the other side, with Amava joining in once his hatcher is dead.

The first 3 eggs get treated as normal, single-target mobs, not AoE. Pally tank picks them up, DPS hammers them down.

Allow the hatcher to hatch all remaining eggs on the one side.

Now its AoE time. Seed of Corruption, Arcane Explosion, Volley, 2xConsecration (Ret Pally, FTW).

So, in the first arrival of Hatchers, we cleared one full side in this manner.

Next arrival of Hatchers, same routine on the other side.

The reason we did the hybrid "single-target mode / AoE mode" approach was that the Mage doing Frost Nova had to wait for large quantites of dragons before she froze them in place. Plus, and I'm no expert on Warlock-iness so take this with a grain of salt, Seeds of Corruption would go off too early if he cast it on the 1 or 2 initial mobs. By waiting for the large pack of mobs to be present, maximum value out of the AoE damagers.

Now its just Pew Pew Pew, and avoid the fire bombs. When he starts throwing the bombs, rotate camera to directly overhead looking down, and the safe spots are clearly visible.

Hunters, save your Misdirection for when he enrages, because his aggro table will get all funky.

And that's all there is to it :-)

Its the first progression boss we've had to struggle through lately, wiping for two weeks, followed by a 6-try night ending with a kill.

He dropped a Leather chest with over 200 Ignore Armor. I was drooling over it, but no way I could justify using it over the Merciless Gladiator's Chain Armor S2 Chest I just got.

We probably would have DE'd it, but we really wanted the WoW Jutsu scan to register the kill, so we forced a Resto Druid to take it in case she ever wanted to play Cat Woman.

And we're now 3/6 in ZA, which feels pretty good for a bunch of jokers who just recently set foot in the Big Boy Raids.

Gauntlets

I'm a big fan of Gauntlet events in dungeons.

Thrall's escape in OHB, the firey hallway in Shattered Halls, the approach to Akil'zon in Zul'Aman, pushing through the Scouts on the way to Jan'ali. Even the 5v5 PvP event in Magister's Terrace, although not really a gauntlet, but definitely fast paced and unpredictable.

They break you out of the mold of carefully planning each and every mob in each and every pull, and force the team to react to a dynamic environment, communicate on the fly, and improvise your execution.

Lots of people hate them, because they're tough. They push us out of our comfort zone. They illustrate the beauty of an /assist macro. They renew your love for your Druids and a timely combat rez that saves you from starting the gauntlet over.

Seems like the further we get in raid progression, the more gauntlets there are. Sign me up!!!

Hittin' ZA last night, we started with Akil'zon, and beat the timer. Then, it only gave us 14 minutes to get Nalorakk, which was not enough. Is that right? Shouldn't it reset the timer to 20 minutes, which definitely would have been enough. We were unclear about what order you have to do the timed events in. Is there a specific boss kill sequence you need to follow?

Cleared on over to Jan'ali. Came so so close to killing him, and with two Protection Warriors. Key seems to be for the Warlock and Mage to determine just how many hatchlings they can handle at a time. They clear one side, while I put up the goal line defense and stop the Hatcher on the other side from reaching his eggs. Next week, we return with a Pally tank and he's dead meat, even though I want to do it with 2 Warriors, just to prove a point.

Cleared on over to Halazzi. Got him to phase 2 before wiping. That's our first, and only, attempt at that boss.

I soooo want to clear this place out before WotLK.

Do you call the raid before it even starts?

Zul'Aman. Not for the ill of heart, or for the blue of gear.

Our two best geared and most experienced raiding healers were unavailable for the raid, so we went with a reasonable guild holy priest, reasonable friendly resto druid, and a pretty entry level guild holy priest.

Clear to Nalorakk. Do quite poorly. Once. Twice. Three times.

Ok, what's the deal. Seems like the healers are out of mana very quickly. I'm no expert on healing gear and such, but I figure I'll take a look see.

A quickie inspection of the entry level guild holy priest shows generally blue gear, with a couple PvP epics. This is expected, what with him being relatively entry level to raiding.

However, a wise man once said "expect the unexpected"....

1) Empty Meta Gem slot
2) Grand total of one (1) enchant
3) Riding Crop equipped
4) Medallion of the Alliance equipped

So I ask on voice if he's wearing his PvP set by accident.

No, these are the only two trinkets I have. I haven't really worked on this guy.

ZOM-mutha-f'ing-G

After ensuring my hand was no where near my mic activation button, a brief outburst of ranting the likes of which R. Lee Ermey the Gunny Sgt would approve of.

Clearly, this toon should not be raiding ZA. Barely even Kara. Just on principle.

Me and the GM discuss via whispers and after the raid, give a little pep talk about the benefits of enchants and other such gear enhancements.


So now I wonder how to deal with this going forward.

Do I inspect unknown/new-ish folks prior to the raid? Before invites?

If I make a stink and assert that a person is clearly unprepared, we would have been faced with calling the raid.

Would it have been better to not raid at all that night, than to struggle on Nalorakk but kill him eventually, and then struggle through the gauntlet but make it to the boss, and then wipe on Akil'zon until the scheduled end of the raid time?

Do I make the reason for not including a person in a raid public? To do so would reinforce to the other raiders how important ship shape gear is, but it also might publicly humiliate the person being singled out.

In the end, I wasn't sure if I was just in a generally cranky mood yesterday or if my anger was appropriate. Although I did share my thoughts on enchants with the team, I only shared my level of upset with the GM/RL, and he agrees we need to prevent this from occurring.

I've never minded wiping before, but knowing we were wiping while people were clearly leaving massive amounts of capability right there for the taking, probably my most frustrating raid to date. The guild needs to put steps in place to ensure that our wipes are because we're doing challenging content with well prepared people, not because we're doing things well within our grasp but we're just not doing the basics to achieve that.

The question is how do we make that happen?

Akil'zon is Akil'gone

I couldn't resist the title.

Second boss in Zul'Aman sleeps with the fishes for the first time at the hands of my guild.

The wowwiki description confused the hell out of me, so I'll just go ahead and give it the old "this fight comes down to one thing and one thing only". If you've got the gear to kill Nalorakk, beating Akil'zon really only requires one little detail to master.

Team movement during Electrical Storms.

When your Boss Mod tells you there's about 6-ish seconds before the storm, cancel anything you're casting, and run into melee range of the boss. Everybody. And wait. Wait for it. Wait for it. Electrical Storm casts. Target raid member lifts up way high in a beautiful display of blue lightning, and then he drops back down. Now you can go back to max range and pew pew pew.

It really was that simple.

Oh, and you've got to space yourselves, but if you've beaten Maiden of Virtue this is no surprise. We ignored the little eagle adds entirely.

On each of the 3 failed attempts, the fight was totally under control, but each time, somebody would fail to run close enough fast enough during the storms. OR, since its a random amount of time from when the warning shows up to when the spell is actually cast, somebody would get impatient and run back into position before the storm gets cast.

The result is the same, you blow up.

So, show up with the gear to beat Nalorakk, and Akil'zon is just a matter of figuring out the movement for electrical storm. Assuming you've got enough AoE damage to clear the gauntlet up to him :-)

What a beautiful sight to behold as we strolled in with 1 Holy Priest, 1 Holy Paladin, and 1 Resto Druid. For a 10-man raid, that's a pretty sweet combo.

And next time I'm gonna expirement a little bit, perhaps at the expense of blowing my team up, but don't tell them that. During Electrical Storm, I was running into melee range, and just firing off Raptor Strikes and dropping Immolation traps. This gimps my DPS hardcore. Next time, I'm gonna try standing at minimum ranged distance and see if we're safe.

Shhhh, don't tell anybody.

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.