Wednesday raiding - This fight has gone to the dogs...

Raiding for Frostwolves did not get off to a good start this week - Bladewind ended up not turning up to raid last night and Fue had to heal and they brought Raked in... I don't know exactly what happened but the group gave up at about 930 when we were starting to do our run!  They said that it just wasn't happening... I couldn't help but tease Fue about his healing - obviously so awful they had to give up after an hour.

That didn't bode well for us, since they were the more advanced group and more experienced and the change of just one healer for a melee dps resulted in them not raiding for the rest of the night.  So we went in to see the horror for ourselves.

So this week, the dog combination was Jasper (torturous chains), Amethyst (pools of pain) and Cobalt (ouchy ices).  I groaned inside.  This is the fight everyone yells at Gutsy coz he doesn't move!  I didn't want to be the Gutsy so I made a conscious effort to try to stick to my melee.

Our attempts varied - our early attempts were encouraging, the next few were abyssmal, and our last attempt was our best with a wipe at 8%.  We decided to go with attack power speed over blood lust because we weren't using bloodlust in our attempts, but perhaps in hindsight we could lust at the beginning to get the most benefit out of it - though that would be crap for Slurs trying to hold agro.  Gutsy wasn't awful on the chains, he did stand still a lot because of cast times, channelling etc, but I felt like I was the weak link because I had difficulty in melee when I was chained trying to see the stuff on the ground as well as keep health bars up.  The number of times I stood in ice when I can't see squat under a dog and all the aoe heals was too numerous to count!

When I remembered, I symbiosed Priestietute or Gutsy so I could have the Leap of Faith to pull my chains to me if there was a problem, but I never used it, I always tried to get into melee.  Another problem I found healing in melee (and Priestie mentioned it too) was that we couldn't reach the other tank to heal.  Out of everyone there, I think I was the only person who enjoyed being chained to Gutsy because he and I could happily stay at ranged and heal and I could see the floor and move accordingly.  Of the melee I was chained to, it was best with Moo because being a tauren he's so big and he moves in strafes, so he was easy to follow. When I was chained to Balinar, who is a svelte male blood elf, he tends to run left and right and around, more like a dancing rogue, I found, and I couldn't figure out where he went.  And I must have the total opposite thinking to a melee because if there was ever something under us and we had to run out of it, I ALWAYS ran the opposite direction to my chain and I ended up getting huge damage from that... sigh.  That didn't seem to happen so much when I was chained to Gutsy, Lushnek, Sev or Sabre.

By the end of the fight the tanks were getting much more independent with the taunts and calling out, which was great.  Sev was doing the callouts first, then handed over to Lushnek but then Slurs started doing warning calls to watch for a swap soon which was really helpful and it was going much better after that.  Even Tout finally started to get the picture!  Of course, I can't talk since I have no idea which one to taunt still because I have so much OTHER stuff to worry about, but I should make a conscious effort to learn it in case I have to teach someone else how to do it.

So tonight... more of the same.  Sigh.  Ok, happy thoughts...

Actually, our happiness would be a dead puppy.  Or 3.