Raiding - Gruul down!

It was decided that we do Gruul again on Thursday night - we didn't seem so far off, and we made a few tweaks to make it a bit better.

The first thing we noticed that was different was trash drops.  We had one trash drop on Wednesday, and we grumbled about the trash and how difficult it was and all we got was this one lousy trash loot. But we got 3 trash drops in the first 3 groups, then another one when we went downstairs and got another drop when we cleared trash downstairs.  Arelion got his first heroic loot, Doomslag Greatboots, and another one dropped downstairs which had a socket so Madcow got that. Aimei took the Bracers of Shattered Limbs, and Punchynok took Iron Flecked Sandals (at the end of the raid).

That Ogron Hauler is like a damned boss!  As long as the tanks tank swap it after Overhead Smash then the raid lives - also, don't have it facing the raid when he does that! It damages the tank and people around him - not sure of the range but 10 yards seems about right.  There is also a fire breathing cone attack that doesn't do too much damage, but it's avoidable to an extent.

Gruul is the diamond

What we found out is that you can take ONE inferno slice per side on heroic. Made a big difference not having to do heal our heads off to live through a second inferno slice.  The OT runs to north group. taunts at slash, runs to south group, taunts at slash, and keeps agro on the boss and moves into the MT position. Then the MT does the same - moves to north group and taunt at a slash, move to south group and taunt at slash and then hold the boss back to the tanking position.

People with the petrify went behind the group, not to the side, and didn't run miles away like previous attempts, which helped a lot.  We had enough cooldowns to go around (Crooked helped heal this time)

Groups were better grouped, I could reach everyone this time.  And we had 4 wipes whilst we still tweaked it.  Bish turned up on our 5th attempt.. and the attempt was flawless! We practically had no damage from avoidable damage, and there were no deaths at all that attempt!  We all scratched our heads - why did that seem so EASY?  I guess the cave-ins were good to us that time, everyone had good spots to stand in to avoid them.

Punchynok was bummed because he was a bit late and he missed the kill.  "The ONLY time I miss raid and I miss the first boss kill!" he lamented. But he got loot anyway with one of the trash drops so he was happy.  I was hoping to sell it, because the market isn't saturated with BoEs like it is at the moment.

We had a look at Beastlord Darmac after that, and the DPS were LOVING that fight!  My mana was not loving that fight but it was a good healing fight to do - lots of mobs to dot up, moving out of spears that will pin you to the ground, and lots of damage. The Beastlord rides different animals at health of 85%, 65% and 45%, and the order you do them in does different abilities.  He has an elekk (Ironcrusher), wolf (Cruelfang) and rylak (Dreadwing). The wolf jumps around doing a bleed in a small area of effect, the rylak breathes fire that conflags you and puts a dot, and the elekk does a raid wide large trample damage.

Our second attempt was our longest living attempt - but apparently they had stuffed up the order of which beasts he was going to ride, and we did wolf, rylak then elekk instead of wolf, elekk then rylak.  But that elekk with the trample with all the bleeds and dots out from the rylak is a nightmare to heal - by then we were all OOM.  It was amusing, because Snowcaller said "Oh this is pretty easy, I don't seem that hard to heal," and Alca said "Well if you look, all the healers are OOM" because the raid was taking so much damage.  We didn't get it, but it seemed like an fun fight and I think people are looking forward to doing it again.