Raiding - Our first Mythic raid

6.0 hit and there was a flurry of activity in the guild as everyone dug into the quests, and played around in UBRS and fixed their addons, learned their class again...

Having not played around in the beta or PTR I had a look at what was gone and was pleased to see that all my spells could fit in my spell bar again!  There are heaps of summaries around about the changes but it was a nice pruning of my spellbook, Here's my 20 second summary:

Goodbye:

• Nourish (won't miss ya)
• Innervate (I thought I would miss ya)
• Shroom bloom (really miss ya!)
• Everlasting efflo-shroom (miss ya but I can see why you had to go) - now it needs to be refreshed every 30 seconds
• Faerie fire (YES I won't have to FF the boss ever again!)
• SOTF increasing haste (really miss ya - no fast tranqs anymore waaaah) - now it makes either Healing Touch cast tiem faster, increases regrowth healing, rejuvenation heal more or wild growth heal more.  I guess since haste is removed or is less important, that's the main reason.
• Symbiosis (will miss you in PvP - but I can cope I think for raids)

Hello:

• 1 application of lifebloom (make so much more sense!)
• Neverending mana (surely it can't be like this forever)
• Genesis as a 3 second hot made from squishing up whatever rejuvenation effects were left on allies (not sure about this yet)
• Boosted living seeds (yay for free better heals)
• Tranquility healing everyone within range every 2 seconds for 8 seconds, but with no hot attached to it (I don't really mind no hot)

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the nuts and bolts of the evening, which was raid.  I was nervous, I didn't know if we would be parched or flooded.  It turned out, it was just right.  We had a raid group made up of:

Tanks: Aimei, Exray (on his warrior Bladewall)

Healers: Navimie, Morzierz, Ravzz, Koda

DPS: Sevrus, Azadelta, Luxygaga, Jazzbangers, Nathamanz, Crooked, Haevela, Lushen, Kahrax, Uq/Eq, Ultrapwn/Tenshi, Souglyy, Vexil, Shoushiro

There was some talk about undergeared people.  Shoushiro was probably the most undergeared, being in some Timeless still.  Ultra's hunter was also pretty undergeared with a lot of LFR and flex gear on.  I was worried because Exray was mainswitching to his warrior, and I didn't know if it was going to be geared enough. He still has to go off his old EPGP so he won't be able to loot much! It's gonna take me some time to say normal and heroic, I think for the rest of this tier I will still refer to them as LFR, Flex and Normal, rather than LFR, Normal and Heroic.

Ultra realised this after the first boss and switched to his shaman, Tenshikanade, who was better geared. I scolded him a little - why had he not transferred THAT toon over? - and I think it was a little bit better, from my point of view.

So we started with Immerseus and we had to explain our complicated strategy to a bunch of new people.  It was hard for them at first, I think, and we wiped once, but got it on the second attempt, which was surprising!  We were 4 healing, so each of us took a compass point and rushed over to our spots.  Our first wipe was probably because people didn't focus adds down, and so we made sure people did that the next time around and we got it.   Phew!  The great thing was, people were getting loot.

Protectors was messy.  We wiped a few times and people were taking damage to the barrels being chucked out.  Also, Calamity was really hurting.  We ended up getting Crooked to heal with us to push us through with extra heals after a number of wipes, and the final kill was actually very clean.  It also helped when some of us actually downloaded the MoP DBM part of DBM instead of just having the Core DBM...  I think that made a difference.  Another thing we did slightly different was have the groups a little separated - when we were all bunched up it was really hard to see things on the ground. Having two groups helped visibility a lot.

Norushen was a one shot but it was messy as.  It was different - there were bubbles EVERYWHERE!  I am not sure if people were tunneling the boss or what, but there were loose purple orbs, and I wasn't sure how to send people down into the zone (we normally do 2 at a time but do I now do 4 at a time?).  But it was ok, and it should be ok coz that is an easy boss.  It's so WEIRD seeing so much loot dropping!  5 items drop in Mythic whereas 2 drop in 10 man.  It feels like we get bonus loot!  A lot of the loot that was dropping was the general loot, not the boss specific loot though (like cloaks - there were a damn lot of cloaks) so they weren't as much fun.

We were very close on that Sha kill, but a few of us died near the end and it was hard to catch up. We started with our normal strat and then found out in Mythic all 4 prisons are active and they need 3 people to stand on each one!  So we ended up splitting it so that half the raid was on one side, and half on the other side, and that seemed to work well. I noticed that for Sha that when we split the groups like that, a healer on each side got the buff to dispel.  That was good!  I don't think we'll have a problem on that tonight.

Server shutdown right on the dot at 11pm - which was great because of daylight savings, it meant that it was at the END of the raid instead of the middle of the raid!

Then we were done!

How did I feel after that?  Well, I was happy we did it, and it was slow, but I hadn't expected miracles. I did have some whispers from people - saying we are not geared to do this, we need more healers, people are not being raid aware and that's why we are failing, and also why are we even raiding heroics when the expac is about to drop?

I answered all those concerns as best as I could.  The undergeared people were not the healers, it was the DPS.  All the healers were heroic raiders.  We normally 2 heal these fights, and that's 10 man, so didn't it sound about right that we were 4 healing?  Especially since we had slightly lower DPS than we were used to, so they need more damage dealers anyway.

About the raid awareness, all we could do was be very clear about to avoid.  I think it showed in Protectors - initially we were all terrible.  I know I stood in poison whilst in the middle and didn't realise - it's so damned hard to see!  Even Aza was having a bad day - he couldn't hold the anguish as long as the hunters and shadowpriests - only Haevela survived, because Sev died holding it as well. Once we made it clear what to avoid, it was a lot better, and the kill attempt was just about perfect.

The last question, on why we were still raiding - I said that the purpose of the raiding was not only loot, but it was for team building.  Raiding together makes you feel part of the group.  It's supposed to be fun, and we will be raiding together in WoD, so we might as well get a feel for how the group dynamics work now, and familarise ourselves with how other people play.  I don't mind if people don't want to raid - I can always just convert to heirloom runs if that's what we're down to. But we'll see.

Hopefully we will have as much interest tonight.  Maybe this time Dragonray can actually GET ONLINE in time - poor thing was stuck trying to get in and missed the raid!