Friday, August 17, 2007

There's Something About M...

Well, last night our band of Heroes ventured once more into Karazhan. We had a pretty good turn out and had to ask a few people to sit, which was probably not so much an issue since some of us (me included) would not be available for the follow-up run on Sunday. Hopefully, they'll still have enough healers to run that night.
Anyway, when we finally got the groups sorted out and headed in our raid looked like this:
Honorshammer (prot. paladin - main tank)
Origami (feral druid - secondary tank/dps)
Baconstrip (resto. druid - main healer)
Rhubarb (holy pally - main healer)
Lakini (balance/resto druid - main dps/auxilary healer)
Wichita (elemental shaman - main dps/backup healer)
Jagdelf & Klemme (BM hunter - main dps/trapper)
Ferth (fury warrior - main dps)
Condramus (arcane mage - main dps)
Sylvara (assassination rogue - main dps)

We took down Attumen without a hitch, cleared to Moroes and took down Moroes in one shot. This was my first run where we took down Moroes without a wipe and it was nice to finally get that under my belt. We got the holy priest, arms warrior, ret. paladin, and prot. warrior. Honors tanked Moroes while I kept second threat on him and offtanked the prot. warrior, which was really nice because that guy kept my rage bar full, which meant I could unload on both of them without problems. Keeping second threat can get difficult when you aren't taking any damage as a feral tank (moreso for a warrior) because you can easily run out of rage with nothing hitting you. I remember at one point during the fight I was starting to worry about the adds and then checked Moroes' health to see how much longer we had to hold out and to my surprise Moroes was under 25% health already.
Moroes didn't drop the Pocketwatch. Sad but I'm not going to complain about loot. Just read my previous blog and you'll know why. :) Moroes did drop the Royal Cloak of Arathi Kings. This cloak was not better in terms of raw dps ranking than my current Capacitus' Cloak of Calibration, but it did offer a healthy boost in health so I took it for PvP. As well the Royal Cloak added 16 Hit Rating, which works out to slighly over 1% hit. In my PvE DPS gear, if I use the Capacitus' Cloak, I'm sitting at +3.8% Hit. Switching to the Royal Cloak takes me to +4.8% while lowering my AP marginally (~22AP) and my crit % by 0.7%, so this is definitely what you call a sidegrade.

After handing Moroes his defeat, we moved on first to Opera. Wichita, Rhubarb and I have been betting on what event we'll get and Wichita won again: it was Big Bad Wolf. I think there must be a bigger chance of getting that event than others so I think we're being cheated!
Big Bad Wolf is a pretty easy boss to take - you just have to have whoever gets turned into Little Red Riding Hood to run around the perimeter of the stage and the healers have to keep him alive. The issue is when a healer gets turned into Red Riding Hood. See, the healers won't have the Wolf targetted to know they're the one getting turned into Red Riding Hood. A number of people yell on vent but often times, the healer will be in the midst of a heal and by the time they react, the Wolf is already beating on them and if they don't get heals immediately they're likely to drop quick. This happened to Bacon the last time we did this event - the Wolf turned him into Riding Hood right away and then proceeded to beat him down and he did it again this time too. So while the event is rather easy, we usually end up with a few dead.

With the Opera event finished, we still had half an hour left in our scheduled raid so we decided to go to Maiden since she was closest and clearing to her only involved one hallway. We cleared to Maiden just fine and proceeded to take her down. Maiden, however, would not succumb. Her Holy Fires and Holy Wraths kept taking out our healers which would cause the chain reaction of everyone dying. Even with a grounding totem we couldn't keep up. Now it could be because we had 2 melee DPS along with me, the tank on this fight, so the Holy Wraths would hit them hard. We also didn't do a lot of the little things that would have helped here: we forgot to put dampen magic on the melee dps; we forgot to have our melee dps spread out; we forgot to keep our hunter's pet on passive; we didn't or couldn't keep our healers at full health. However, it was the end of the night and we were all tired so after two attempts and two wipes we called it a night. This just means the raid on Sunday will get to do more than attempt Curator.

Now, even though our raid configuration wasn't ideal for Maiden, I believe we could have succeeded. There's just something about Maiden. The fight is quite different from the others. Attumen is a straight up tank-and-spank. Moroes is a crowd-control fight. Big Bad Wolf is a kite fight (I've never done any of the other Opera events so I don't know what those fights entail). Curator is more of a dps fight. Maiden, however, is a different beast. I think what Wichita said was most accurate: this is a survival fight. You have to outlast Maiden. In our fight last night with Maiden, we went with 3 healers and 6 dps, since Maiden only requires 1 tank. In hindsight, we should have used 4 healers and 5 dps. Maiden is probably best dealt with by making sure we have enough healing and letting the dps whittle her down. Mana can become an issue in long fights but we took her down to ~33% and ~28% without anyone warning of low mana, so I think our healers and casters can out last her. Besides, with 4 healers, you spread out your heals between people more so everyone should have more mana. Perhaps the raid group on Sunday can use this to their advantage.

I wish the Sunday group good luck. I hope they have enough healers as this is a big issue for us and many other guilds. If they can take Maiden down quick then they'll have several shots at Curator. If they can take Curator down, then we'll have reached another milestone in our guild.

6 comments:

Frankie said...

Man, Origami, let someone have some loot! You and honors have to be two of the best tanks I have ever rolled with in this game! Grats on downing some kara boss!

Origami said...

I'm such a loot hog!
But nobody else wanted the Cloak so I got my grubby hands on 'em!

Ellevis said...

Wait, I thought I was the loot hog?

Origami said...

Did you get 2 epics and 1 blue in 2 days? No? Then, *I'm* the gear hog! :P

Ellevis said...

Hmmmm, you have me beat by a blue. Congratulations Mr. Hog :)

Bacon said...

Big Bad Wolf - 2
Bacon - 0