Another blue raiding weekend

With yesterday’s kills of Sartharion (with Tenebron up so it won’t be totally easy) and Malygos (we used the key we got last week), Misaka is now a Champion of the Frozen Wastes.

We started the evening with Sartharion, but one drake is nothing especially interesting and still perfectly in range of our gear, so it was more or less a formality to kill him. The only thing worth noting was the start of my absolute bad luck that evening – I’ve got healing aggro from whelps before the tank could grab them, and later that same tank managed to somehow position Tenebron in such a way that his last fire breath killed me again.

Next was Malygos, and it went even better, as we one-shotted him. Few people managed to die in third phase, so we ended the fight with only 4 dps drakes, but it was enough, and we still had over a minute to the enrage timer. After finishing with the tier 7 content, we went to Ulduar. There things began to be much more interesting.

Flame Leviathan wasn’t as hard as we expected (remember that the vehicles scale with gear, so with blues of iLevel 200 you can’t really afford to make mistakes there), but my bad luck that was silent on Malygos woke up again. I was driving a demolisher, as I’m pretty good at it – but I was Flame Leviathan’s target for what seemed half of the fight. Obviously, if your vehicle won’t survive long when he gets to you, you have to turn and run away as fast as you can, rolling pyrite stacks or not. I survived though, and thanks to a good gunner I’ve always had enough pyrite to continue dpsing right away.

Ignis took two tries, as our MT wasn’t totally familiar with the way he should kite the boss around the middle. On second try he did much better (after a very short explanation of the best path) and we killed him without much effort.

Razorscale went down in a similar way – one try to see how it goes, fixing the tactics, second attempt and a kill. That’s okay with me, since we do look at what was the problem and figure out a way around it, but it might be a bit better if the explanation and role assignment was done better before the first try. It hurts my raid leader feelings a little, but as I’m only a raider there, so I guess I should just deal with it – and it’s not like we blindly throw ourselves at the encounters again and again.

XT was just like Razorscale – at the first time we went with only two healers, but the resto druid got an unlucky chain of debuffs (Searing Light – Gravity Bomb – Searing Light in a row) and ran a bit too far, and I simply couldn’t outheal the Tantrum all by myself. Second time we went back to running with 3 healers, and it went much better.

So then, next week we’re going to extend our Ulduar raid ID (we don’t need new gear, so we don’t have to farm what we’ve killed once) and we’ll see how far we can go. This part will get a little more interesting, as the bosses start to hit like trucks there – especially Auriaya from what I remember from doing it on Vrethir back when it got released.

From my personal healing point of view – I was still a bit afraid that my limited mana pool won’t be enough, but I only ran out of mana on the less coordinated first tries, especially on Ignis. If we follow the tactics better and don’t take unnecessary damage, it’s fine. I go through a lot of mana potions during the raid though, so I have to remember to log in and make a few stacks of them this week.

Oh, and if anyone looks at the armory and wonders why I’ve looted some epics – we run the need before greed system in the raids, so if we want something for some reason – be it gear for leveling to 85, pvp, LFG or whatever, we can need it. So far I only collect them, haven’t equipped anything apart from the badge DPS totem yet, so I won’t get the Epic achievement too fast. But there’s nothing bad in having some gear prepared for when I want to use it.