Last night was messier than I would have preferred. We started off with VOA25 and burnt down the three guys in there pronto, mostly scoring some pvp crap. Then we hopped over to Coliseum and started to make our way through it.
Beasts went down somewhat okay, but more people died to silly stuff than I’d like. Jaraxxus was a huge cluster-you-know-what. Two dps pulled off of the DK tank and got killed, and a few others bit it from standing in fires or the incinerate AOEs. The entire attempt was a slow attrition on a ranks and I saw the specter of an enrage wipe looming ahead. We probably downed Jaraxxus with less than a minute left on the enrage timer. Sloppy, sloppy kill.
For Faction Champs, we are basically still learning the fight, and it’s pretty difficult so I’m not going to offer any criticisms of our performance. We did kill them all in probably one of the more epic boss fights I’ve ever done. I think at the end of it were were looking at about 11 people left standing.
The order I put forward (and I’m open to suggestions on this) was burn down the priest first, then the druid. The holy pally was being handled by a rogue, so we skipped her and downed the enhance shammy next. Then the warrior (who I hate), dk, and rogue. Back to the pally, then hunter, shadow priest, and warlock.
I spent most of the fight following around the shaman, taunting him when possible, and cutting down his totems. My main goal was to keep him from getting a windfury proc and one-shotting a healer. I used shield tosses and Arcane Torrent to contribute to the healer burn. After the shaman was dead I shifted attention to the melee, trying to keep them occupied and off the squishies.
Like I said, pretty epic battle, and definitely a kill we earned. Thankfully the Champs coughed up the Juggernaut’s Vitality, which puts me at 39.1k unbuffed health. Delish.
Speaking of gear, I’m having a huge issue with hit rating right now. I’ve been eagerly gobbling up 245 gear, but in doing so I’ve been steadily losing hit. Earlier last month I was capped at 263 on the dot, and now I’m at a measly 108. To remedy this I can add 53 with the T9.45 legguards I’ll be getting in 8 emblems. I might have to enchant my weapon with Accuracy too. Considering the threat nerf we’re getting in 3.2.2, I really don’t want to take my chances with suddenly being so far under the hit cap.
But I digress! So after Champs we started up Twins, which was new to some people… with predictable consequences. First attempt was marked by people dying to Vortexes (I so badly want to call them “vortices”) and Twin Pacts going off. Part of that was me being a huge idiot and calling out during a Lightbane Twin Pact, “Everyone grab light and get Lightbane!!” I think I confused the hell out of people and that was not a bubble sundered.
Of course it also says something about the raiders that they didn’t have the critical thinking to recognize I screwed the pooch on those instructions and compensate. One guy even said “What? I just do what I’m told.” Great ‘tude champ. Yer gonna go far.
So first attempt on Twins was a wipe. Second time we were doing well, but somehow it all went to hell towards the end. The DK tank bought it and I ended up tanking the two of them in the center at like 30%. Somehow we lucked out and didn’t have anymore Twin Pacts, and I somehow managed to hold both through a Vortex. It was pretty crazy, but we got them down.
Then the ground fell out from under us and we got to finally face Anub as a 25man raid… and I totally dropped the ball. I didn’t do my due diligence on this guy, neglecting to look up strategies while thinking that it would be a carbon copy of the 10man incarnation. It wasn’t. The enrage timer is much, much tighter and requires a different approach.
Too late did we realize that having dps focus down both Burrower groups each above-ground phase was a bad idea. We spent about three attempts wiping that way, and only on the last one (declared as such because a lot had to scram after) did we obviously have the right approach. We pushed it to phase 3 easily, but then wiped because the DK is squishier than I am. I’m probably going to have to take Anub from him when that phase starts.
At least I know we can easily kill him tonight. A one-shot hopefully. Assuming everyone shows up.
After that disappointing conclusion to the raid we headed over to Uld10 to continue the Hard Mode Party. Our main goal, as you can imagine, was I Choose You, Steelbreaker, which had eluded us last time we tried it.
This time we had the same issue at the start, people didn’t realize Fusion Punch left a dot that needed to be dispelled, so when I blew up and the DK took over he was killed pretty quickly by being falcon punched to death.
The second attempt we cleaned that up but didn’t have enough dps to down Steelbreaker… although we definitely had the wrong approach by bringing me back to life and attempting to do a second tank switch. That just gave Steelbreaker another chunk of health and more damage to boot. To fix the strategy we had one of the healers go dps (so 2 healer, 6 dps) and we resolved to let the DK blow up if that’s what was going to happen.
So the fight starts, we hit phase 3 (side note: the three sweetest words in the English language are “
At about 10 seconds on the DK’s Meltdown, Steelbreaker coughs up his purples.
I think tonight we’re going to follow up Coliseum with working on the Freya hard mode.
