Raiding - So far no scar on Socrethar

I was late on Wednesday so I missed Hellfire Assault.  Do you know it's actually quite hard to PuG Hellfire Assault because every group on Group Finder has already done it and are looking for more from Reaver onwards.  So annoying.  But I digress because I can always pick up a tome on normal on Sunday but was hoping maybe something nice might drop for me on Assault like trinket or bracers.

I made it for Iron Reaver but running into the house and logging in hurriedly does nothing for my warm up and so I was hit by 2 Blitz's like a real pro (you idiot Navimie) but at least I was in the right spec this time (though my healing looked like I was in boomkin it was that bad).

Enough about my failings, the rest of the night went ok until we got to Kilrogg. Rag was lagging, and that's the bummy thing when you rely on someone who is a great healer, because I let him DPS and our healing suffered a little.  It probably also didn't help that I thought that I'd let someone else go into the zone and heal for a change (Nok) with Rag DPSing and so we wiped a few times.  Not to mention our usual culprits who tunnel the boss and don't kill the adds made for extra stress - one of the ranged mentioned to me that the logic of the tunnellers is that they can let the adds get closer to the boss and then do their AoE attacks and then get them down, but in the mean time all the other ranged get a bit stressed as they switch to the adds and hit them as soon as they come out when they could also be using their DPS on the boss (because if you imagine 2 hits from the ranged who have the empowered buff versus 12 hits from normal ranged, then the empowereds feel like their damage is wasted and so do the unempowered).  Anyway, I haven't quite figured out how to make people understand what I am saying but the kill attempt we put it back to how we normally do it and it went fine.

Constantine has a bad habit of not listening on vent, so he went in on the wrong vision and threw us a little bit on one attempt.  Hopefully he will pay more attention after his minor nagging!  He wasn't the only one though, Aza asked about a changeup we did on Socrethar and we had only explained it twice on vent already LOL.

Thursday rolled around and Gorefiend went down easily with 2 vanquisher tier tokens dropping much to the disgust of every non vanquisher tier player.  This meant that even Constantine (who has the LOWEST EPGP of the entire raid could even get a tier piece).

Socrethar however, that's a different story. I had to laugh because we have 4 melee who soak with the tanks being able to not only move to the front of the boss to soak Reverberating Blow. Two groups of two melee move in rapidly consecutively and also have to be able to run out with their Felblaze Charge in the right direction.  Dan and Duck were really pro at it, but Constantine (who wasn't one of the 4 melee) was tunnelling and we had a dreadful fire followed by a melee Fel Prison (that is out of our control) and that stuffed us up.

Then we had a laugh when poor Madcow was targetted twice consecutively by the Felblaze Charge and both times ran in exactly the wrong direction so we had a wonderful 3 armed starfish of fire trails that none of us could avoid.  Madcow then asked us to leave him dead so that he couldn't get targetted a third time and the next attempt he actually stood in the corner for a while as a laugh while we waited for the first charge to go out.

I think we also have found Kelthal's HFC version of Beastlord Darmac's Pin Down. Kelthal was like a fly who consistently ran into the Fel Prison and got chained to it. Something new to tease him about :)

But what I find really difficult is the Gift of the Man'ari.  That bloody thing lasts 2 minutes and the people in them take so much bloody damage, that by the end of that phase they will be dead.  Especially when later in the fight another two people will get it meaning 4 people will have it.  With me and Yuuda we can lifebloom one each and shroom them and hot them up, and with Sars or Rowyn around we can get a shield on them but once they start getting low it's almost impossible to keep them up, especially when we have a whole bunch of other crappy magic debuffs going out as well - it's such a HUGE drain on mana.  I feel like we are missing something that's easy but important to be able to deal with that - whether that's doing something to the Dominators who are casting it or not dispelling the debuffs fast enough... anyway, it's something the healers are worrying about but the rest of the raid are worrying about something else.  I know, I know, how could something be more important than keeping people alive, right?

The rest of the raid are worrying about interrupting the Dominators and killing the ghosts that come out.  We initially tried spending a lot of time trapping them in a Fel Prison (because after Phase 1, the construct we were attacking becomes empty and then the other tank can jump into it and use the abilities that it had - the Felblaze Charge and the Prisons for the ghosts, and the Orb and the Reverberating Blow being used on to damage Socrethar), but after a while we stopped trapping them and just left a fire trail for the ghosts to walk in and leave the ranged to DPS them down and let the tank in the construct (Aimei) hit Socrethar.  That worked well as long as we didn't go running all over the place and stayed clumped together so that the ghosts moved towards us in a line.  We did try some other things that didn't work so well - one of them was this "Ghostbusters" group where a few ranged would be assigned to go kill ghosts, but that went poorly because inevitably one of them would get Gift of the Man'ari and move out of range of healers which basically meant death in 3 seconds. Another attempt I was standing too close to Socrethar with my Gift of the Man'ari and didn't leave Kyxyn much room to move Socrethar around and clipped a lot of people with my crappy circle.

Giggles from me and Kyxyn when Yuuda described the ghosts getting close to us and casting fears as "really inconvenient".  Those damned things feared me mid tranquility, inconvenient is putting it mildly.

We had one really good attempt where we made it through that phase and started again in Phase 1 but now it was a mirror image of what we were doing previously and fires were run all over the place, and that is the point where we decided to practice starting in the opposite corner so that we could learn to run fires to the left now instead of the right.

Anyway, I bet there will be someone reading this who has done Socrethar on heroic and thinks that we are all a bunch of nitwits, but at least I had some laughs while trying to learn it.  I suspect I will still be laughing, especially at Kelthal and Madcow, when we bash at it again on Monday.  What makes me worried is that people say this is so easy.  It was easy on normal. I wonder what I'm missing on the heroic version.