Raiding - Our first look at Highmaul

It was raid day! I was excited, nervous and hopeful all at the same time - you know that's a little bit like taking chocolate, strawberry and a bit of caramel as a sundae and then swirling it all together until you get a uniform browny coloured concotion but somehow it still equals yum.  So basically, all those things mixed in still led me to be happy to be raiding.

I wondered how many people would be on.  I thought about what I wanted to say on our first raid. I wanted to be clear about how things were to run, how loot works and how I did not want to see loot drama, make sure people listen to the raid leader etc etc.

So we beat the first boss before the raid - the loading screen boss.  WE WERE ALL CONNECTED!

As predicted, we had too many turn up to raid.  It was stormy with thunder and lightning and Exray was worried because the storm was over his place.  However, it rapidly moved to Sydney where it became everyone EXCEPT Exray's problem!

So in the final 30 we had:
Tanks: Aimei, Bladewall (Exray)
Heals: Navi, Ama, Morz, Ravz, Bacon
DPS: Aza, Sev, Haevela, Disco, Vexil, Duck, Kahrax, Luxy, Crooked, Una, Jazz, Nath, Ultra, Kelthal, Souglyy, Raverager, Nok, Kyjenn, Roshii, Alca, Dragonray and Brahski.

Eq disconnected in the second boss fight so Lushen came in and took his place.

Koda, Hwired, Chosenx and Wijji sat out. I have to remember to give them EP when I get back online at home.  For those who are sat out but are available for the raid they will get half a raid's worth of EP.

I actually ran with one less healer than I wanted to (5 healers) to see how we went, and lovely darling Koda offered to sit out (since it was my turn to sit, but I hadn't made it to raid yesterday so I was a bit pooped that I wasn't going to be there on the first raid day) so that I could be there for the first raid.

These idiots started the event so I missed all the talking!  Lucky it didn't start the actual fight!

Exray explained the fight, I did my not so fun talk (which sounded more like a lecture) and had to tell poor Alca to stop with the naughty general chat talk and flopping his bits out and then we were ready to roll.  The first fight went very well, and it was actually so easy that people wanted to do heroic. But, we are doing normals and we're going to finish them before we get onto that.

I found it weird that Kargath was the first boss, as he was a Warlord, but I guess it's really an ogre arena, so an ogre should be the last boss.  He charges at clumps of people so there was a designated clump and he also chucked people up into the stands so those guys could kill a couple of those nasty haters who were throwing crap at us.  Oh, and guess which noob druid died from Kargath charging around... DUH.  "Navi, you're supposed to move out of that!" said Aza.  Whoops.  Boy did I feel silly.

There was SO MUCH LOOT to distribute, it took AGES. I was busy watching the cinematic but I thought OMG I need to stop watching this because I have loot to do!  And then, I was so busy doing loot that I forgot to take screenshots!  THANK THE EARTHMOTHER FOR DRAGONRAY!  But she didn't get good pics of the first boss, and neither did I.  But she did for the other fights!

The second fight, the Butcher, was a bit messy but we did manage to kill it in the end.  He turns and smashes groups of melee so there were two groups and they were supposed to take turns getting cleaved.  However, the groups were taking lots of damage - especially the one that was on the left (from our PoV it was left, but from tank PoV it was on right) and their health was REALLY bad and they ended up dying which was unfortunately a healing problem.  Even with Efflo under them and not much healing on tanks, it was a nightmare trying to keep them up, not sure if the hunters moving between groups was working properly or not, because I was pretty focussed on those green bars. Anyway, some of the ranged moved in and we eventually got it down.  I think that could go a lot better next time.

Then onto Brackenspore.  Roshii said it wasn't a hard fight, but it took a bit of coordination and we were all over the place with healing mushrooms and timing them to bloom and pulse.  I like the idea of healing a mushroom - very druidy!

The storm hit Sydney and Aimei lost internet a few times as well as had a brief interruption of power. He could get back on but it was suboptimal and he disconnected a few more times.

We all had a 5 min break to watch the video and then came back to the fight. Good mushies, bad mushies, spore spitting plants, creeping fungus, a big ass add... seemed like a lot to do!  I actually found it difficult to know what the mushies were at first coz I didn't recognise them but now I know the good and bad ones.  Love that Blue one - regenerates mana and health and with full mana back you can churn out a ton of heals with it!

We had the rogues running around with the fire extinguisher at first and then we switched it to the hunters. I am thinking that perhaps they should burn that creeping moss when it's in an area we need to be in.  Aimei disconnected a few times and we had to wait till he was on for our final go.  On our last attempt for the night we got it, and Aimei had disconnected too!  We were pouring heals into Exray and he died, got rezzed, then died again!  OMG so close!  And then it was WEIRD, because even though Aimei was offline he was somehow autoattacking the boss and Brackenspore was hitting him. "Heal on HK!" and we healed him as much as we could and we ended up getting it down.  Wewt!

And that's all of the inside bosses done and we got the achievement The Walled City.  I wonder what that fight would be like on LFR.... but the others seem rather easy to do on LFR so should be pretty easy I think.

I thought the raid went very well. There was no loot drama, but there was a little bit of people calling out things when I specifically said that you only call out if you're using a cooldown or doing a special function.  I will talk to them about that.  But I didn't feel like there was any finger pointing or blaming, and everyone was just happy to raid.

No bloody Warcraft logs to look at because of the disconnections which is a bit crap.  But I can tell you that hunters are doing great, and mages in general are not.  Heals were pretty even I thought, with fights with movement doing best for druids, and static ones best for the others.  Tank wise I didn't find either tank particular hard to heal but with 4 others healing as well, there would be green ticks going everywhere anyway.

Thinking of raiding on Sunday if possible.  That would be rather good since we lost Wednesday.  We shall see who is interested!  I think we'll get a decent turnout!