Guild Challenge modes - Our first guild gold!

My friends from Onineko (previously Blackrock now on Barthilas) have been doing challenge modes again and asked me if I would like to heal.  Of COURSE I would love to heal them!  I love challenge modes!

One of the things they love to pick on me about is the lack of Proven Healer.  Yes yes I know I am lazy/fail/non-skilled WHATEVER, but perhaps my lack of skill is made up in enthusiasm. Just to try to deflate their bubble I purposely turn off all friendly nameplates so I can't see tanks and DPS wandering around with the proven healer title when we're doing Challenge modes.

So on Thursday night they decided to initiate me with UBRS.  Which of course I found hard when I was starting it in heroic, can you imagine how I find it NOW?

The best I got was silver.  And it was a rough trot - especially since I was tired and noobing it up on Zaela and getting blasted by dragonfire... TWICE.  Hours of wiping and redoing pulls as I tried to figure out which cooldowns I should be using.  The first pull was a tough one, but I had been prewarned so I had tree form for that.  DPS seemed to be the ones who control the first boss and healing though intense was not that much different to previous challenge mode when I did it for the first time.

Naturally I was excited to get a silver, but to everyone else it was gold or bust, and getting silver was like a failure.  I think everyone who does gold challenge modes thinks like that, but I'm happy to get SOMETHING for all those hours I put in that night! And yes, the picture doesn't show the silver achievement, I only took a picture with the first 2 achievements.

They also took me to Iron Docks. And that first pull is a doozy.

There must be something in the air because Sars was talking to me about finally getting a team together for challenge modes.  It feels like it's been forever in the making but we FINALLY have a challenge mode group! Arelion was going to tank, Sars and I were both keen, and trying to find others who were interested in playing late at night doing challenge modes was the tough part. Exray/Snowcaller likes to do CMs, but he's studying at the moment, and he would probably want Aza and Lushen to come as well, so I'm sure if they were interested in coming we could ask. Sev and Brahski were both asked as well, and both seemed keen.

So first up on the menu was Skyreach.  Sars, Arelion and Ultra had spent time researching and watching videos and had some ideas on how we were going the pulls were going to work. Sev was our DPS roped in for the night and I was playing around with the best gear I could find and seemed to come up with a decent set.

So I decided on keeping Moment of Clarity and Incarnation, and the amount of healing is good when clearcasting procs whilst in treeform.  I had thought about whether Germintion would be good too, but I think mana was heaps better for me with MoC and treeform.  I was rarely out of mana and regrowth crits were always good.  That was with Glyphs of regrowth, healing touch and rejuvenation on.

We had our initial positioning issues - for example, first boss, we had spinny wind things everywhere so on subsequent attempts we dumped them all at the door and then ran the far side for the big spinny wind and dropped the lens flare near the original door also.  On the second boss the boss was in a corner and we all stood in mushroom and healing was much better than previous times I had done it when we were just doing the CM for fun and I was a little undergeared.

The third boss went well, because Sev would shadowfury the little phoenix add in a good spot and everyone would kill it and then we'd go back to the boss.  It was those annoying little birds before that boss which were a pain.  After wiping on them multiple times, what seemed to work was a vortex, then a stun, then when they started creeping again I would typhoon them and Ultra also did something that had roots and then we'd kite them and try to kill them coz they REALLY hurt!.

We invis'd the mobs after killing the group at the top of the ramp after the annoying run-around-the-wind-roundabout and we had another few hiccups with the add at the top, which was one of those Arrakoa Shield construct robots.  One time Sars pulled it with one of his magma abilities, the next time Ultra got it with barrage.  Fortunately we were able to rez and try again.  Doing the last boss was a bit like doing the achievement Monomania where we keep those Constructs crowd controlled and kill the boss.

On our gold run, we killed the boss and found we still had one mob to kill so we were hurrying to kill that pesky construct - we had stuffed up from earlier.  One of the early groups had a little bird that sacrifices itself for a mob and we accidentally let that happen so we missed out on one kill because of that sacrifice.  Well, at least it was good to know where we fell short!

Sars was up late on Sunday night after we finished the challenge modes, and he seemed pretty chuffed.  I was too, it was my first guild run that I learned all the way through to gold. Last time I did it with all guildies, was with Snowcaller tanking and they had done it multiple times before. This was us learning it from scratch - fixing our mistakes and improving and getting a bronze, then a silver then gold.  Sars said "Do you know, this is the first gold I've done myself?" And I knew exactly what he meant - it's one thing to be taken through with people who know it already, but it's another earning it for yourself.

We're looking forward to our next challenge mode night!