Little Steps

This is a bit what last night felt like - new raid night in an attempt to get into ICC. Many of the people in the raid had not been to ICC before, some of them are quite new to raiding itself and some of them had a long break and only just returned to WoW.

Not entirely surprisingly, there were bumps on the way.

To get the good stuff out of the way first, before I can get into a proper ranty whine: It was good fun, actually. We made really good progress.

Now for the bad news: We didn't actually manage to kill even Lord Marrowgar. Not with the 10% buff, not with repeated attempts and not with trying extra hard.

Overall, I think our damage may have been slightly too low for ICC. But it didn't matter - people got to see a new instance (*points to picture above*), get some reputation (*points to picture above*) and learn a new fight. The first fight. Let me see if I can describe why we had trouble....

The original description of the fight included all the four big issues:

1) Do not stand near the tanks unless you really like them and want to reduce the damage they take from Saberlash (which is not called Saberlash, but those are details).

2) Do not stand in the burning fire of death, which this time is blue, not green. If you stand inside the red circle that appears when you target him, you will not be hit by fire.

3) When someone gets impaled by a ginormous bone spike, stop doing whatever you are doing and do your best to apply burst damage to the bone spike. This even applies to shadow priests.

4) When he goes into Blender mode (not Bender, Blender!) run like a chicken to the walls and try not to be hit by him. However, his Blender mode only hurts a little (around 1500 damage on cloth in 10-man) whereas fire burnBURNSBURNS! (around 6000 damage in 10-man), so better take a hit rather than running into the fire.

I think everyone got it.

However, lack of raid experience and lack of communications made the whole exercise a lot more difficult than it should have been. Our DPS were spread out at the beginning - probably to avoid burning to death, but unnecessarily complicating the bone-spike thing. One of the DPS (our boomkin) thought it would be a good idea to stand behind the tanks - this did put him in easy battleres range, but meant that the tanks got even more fire to dance out of. One of our healers was doing the mad running chicken dance and occasionally stumbled through the tanks - insta-splat if that coincided with Saberlash.

We managed to get him down to around 50% at one point - just before this happened:

Our raidleader apparently was twice as dead as required. Two ghost debuffs, even.

Ressurection did not make it any better. At that time he tried a relog and found out the login servers were down.

Clearly not a lucky night.

I did ramble on a bit there, didn't I? Well the point is (and you can imagine a drunken handwaving and slur here) that we made progress. Slow progress and it was occasionally painful, but this was how a boss-fight is learnt properly - by not being overgeared and able to overcome game-design by "not having to care". I liked it.

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Okay.. I'll post it. I also liked being at the top of the damage meter as a tank. I know it's probably shameful to post and I should possibly have edited out names, but they are all good folks who don't mind ... and *SQUEEEEE*:

Warrior-tank dps is amazing these days *nodnod*.