Raiding - Revelations for me, and we CAN raid without Xyn

I am pleased that upper floor seems to go so smoothly now. But it is an endless source of amusement to the raid (or it could be an endless source of eye rolling) about the things that I still didn't know about Hellfire Citadel, despite having done it for about a year!

There was a few weeks ago, when a friend of mine was complaining about a PuG Heroic Archimonde, and the infernal had come out and he'd taken one away and had got it down to 40%, and then another melee had their infernal and dragged it over to his infernal to cleave them down. I was puzzled. So I had to ask HK - hey, so-and-so told me this story, what happens when you put the infernals together?

You could hear the incredulity in HK's voice. "What? How long have you done Archimonde now?"

I was unperturbed. I often don't know things. "Ages. Are you going to tell me or what?"

HK spoke to me very slowly, as if I was a child. "When you put the infernals together they heal, which is WHY Xyn says you have to take them away from each other. Why do you think they take them away?"

"I don't know," I replied. "I thought when they were together they did some kind of extra AoE or more damage from proximity to each other, like the little robots in Dark Animus (Throne of Thunder)."

Well, HK immediately texted Xyn about how the guild leader did not know that infernals healed when together. Xyn was not surprised. I told the story to Neuro and he partly defended me by saying that the infernals healing has never been mentioned in any of the raids that he has attended, so he wasn't surprised that I didn't know.

On Thursday, I learned something ELSE in HFC that was new. We were clearing the trash and Hk said to Moisty "Your job is coming." I knew it was to grip something, I never knew which mob it was. I just know it was a mob who ran away. So, we were doing that, and one of the mobs was trapped but it got broken out and it ran away. It ran into a pool and became one of the hulking things.

"Oh," I said. "I didn't know they turned into those things."

"What?" the same note of amazement was in HK's voice again. "Why do you think Xyn gets them gripped in week after week?"

"I thought it was because they were running away and they called more mobs or something. Like in Zul'Aman."

"NOOOOO," said HK, somewhat exasperatedly. "They turn into the big mob which does a lot of damage and yells and are hard to kill, that's why we kill and target them first."

Ohhhh. Well, the things you learn when you're DPSing. Healers don't need to know these things!

Wednesday was a good turnout day, and we trundled through middle floor rather well. Thursday we did bottom floor, and we had Zanthula join us for the first time. She didn't quite make the ilvl but she had been trying, so I said she could come for the first 3 bosses. It was a bit of a worrying raid, because we were getting a bit overwhelmed with adds in the first boss towards the end of it, which means that we are low on DPS. If we are low on DPS on the FIRST boss of HFC, and it's the easiest one, how would we go with the rest of them? We had Koda/Cosima, Sev and Neuro healing so I was DPSing. Lushen had some connectivity issues, so we were sorely missing his dps!

HK was concerned. Well perhaps that was an understatement. He told me that we couldn't kill Iron Reaver with this group. I didn't think it would be easy, but it could be done. So I had to ask the smart person in the group to put up some markers and organise the group for me - thanks Neuro! So we got Moisty to tank (much to Hk's dismay, because Moisty was top DPS), and got all the healers to pile in one spot and then everyone was much better. Zanthula warned me that she would die a lot, and she did die almost every attempt, but I hope she got the idea!

She stayed for Kormrok and left after that, though by that stage HK was feeling much more confident in the raid and thought she could have stayed for the lot. However, I already bent the rules to let her in for the first 3 and so she was happy to be allowed to come for the week. By next week she should be the right ilvl to be able to come for the bottom level.

Was a little close on Kilrogg but HK managed to move the boss away from the blood just in time. And Gorefiend was good, and there were no mistakes with the doom, thank goodness.

Not a perfect week, but it wasn't bad overall. I used to think there wasn't much challenge to doing heroic again,but it always is when you're doing it with a bunch of undergeared people, or I'm doing a different role, where each of us has to actually follow mechanics so that we can get through the fights successfully.