Weekly raid and me

I love me some weekly raid, generally speaking. So far, everything that has come up has been excessively easy to get to and to pwn.

Then yesterday, the thing I had dreaded more than anything else happened.

The weekly raid was Malygos. Eee. Oh. Eee. Our nemesis.

I've mentioned before that it should be an easy fight but that people tend to want to give Malygos hugs while they're on their dragon mounts or not give the tank time to grab aggro on the mobs at the start of phase two or assume that it's everyone else's responsibility to kill those nasty sparks o' doom.

So when I heard from Noxy that the weekly raid was Maly, I started mentally drinking then and there. Had I been not at work, I might have started actually drinking.

Raid time rolled around and I sent out invites and we got everyone summoned out to Colderra. Then I kicked everyone out of the raid, yelled "psyche!" over vent and gquit.

Okay, not really. I did tell everyone to split into two teams though, and that we were going to practice our dragon skills while doing the daily quest Aces High! The healers practiced their healing and the dps practiced their button mashing and every now and again I would bark out "move!" and people would practice strafing to the right. It was delightful, sort of like being in Kindergarten and practicing drawing circles when you know you and all the people with you should be at least at a college equivalent level.

Once both teams had completed the daily we reformed into a raid group and headed in.

The first phase went well enough. Although we didn't manage to actually stack any sparks and in fact killed one before it even reached the platform so that it fell uselessly into the abyss, at least we managed to kill them rather than let them reach Maly. The second phase also went well enough. The two hunter's pets decided to kill the mob that the tank wasn't working on but that was sorted out and no actual raiders were harmed in the process. We also saw our melee dps get up on the discs first, rather than some random healer.

We hit the third phase with just under 4 minutes before enrage and...

...everything worked like a dream. The healers healed and absolutely no one crashed and burned. When I told people to group back up, they did. When I told them to move, there was not a 5 second delay before they did. We one shot Maly with time to spare. Some people even managed to obtain the heart thinger they needed for the quest from the key from when they got that a year or so ago killing Saph. Other people finally obtained their "Champion of the Frozen Wastes" title.

Then we went and kicked Ony's ass and it was very good.

It gives me hope that we'll maybe someday manage to find the time to go finish out the back half of Ulduar. I know we're all capable raiders. The trick is getting everyone to pay attention and understand what exactly they should be doing and when.

Thoughts on fire magery

I got to looking a little bit more long and hard at my gear, gems and stats last week. I'm not sure what triggered that, other than suddenly obtaining something like five new upgrades all at once and subsequently realizing that - Sweet Fancy Moses - I have a lot of hit. No really. Tons. More than anyone needs.

 

Without bothering to put a whole lot of thought into it initially, I respecced fire. The next day, it occurred to me that I might want to put a little more research into the whole spec changing thing. It's been some time since I was fire - like about a year - and there had been a lot of changes I only half-heartedly kept up with since my focus was on wringing everything I could out of arcane. So I cruised by EJ, talentchic and a random smattering of articles turned up by a Google search. I hadn't misplaced too many points, but there were a few that I thought I should change over. Naturally, I went to respec again and farked up one point so a third outlay of gold later, I was finally happy with my build. 

 

Of course, now that I am writing this, I am contemplating the virtues of dumping Precision and putting some points elsewhere, since I do not at all need the hit. Good thing I have money to burn. 

 

Anyhow, I ran some 5 mans to try to get used to the rotation again and ended up doing a lot of stupid stuff in the process. Hell, I was blinking when I meant to be casting a pyro last night - still! - so it's not like I've really got it all down just yet. (What kills me is that it's not like I've moved blink from its keybinding, so there's no real reason for me to make that mistake as often as I do.)

 

But last night was meant to be the real test of my dps output since last night was the first time I would get to raid since my respec. 

 

So, naturally, the weekly raid was Flame Leviathan. On the plus side, I suggested we leave Freya's tower up, along with Thorim's, thinking that we had downed that stupid piece of metal with two towers still up. Turns out we hadn't, so there were achievements all around, plus a nice epic tailoring pattern that went to me. 

 

With enough time left to run Ony, we put up a portal to Theramore, swapped some people around to get three heals, and headed down. 

 

It was a very sloppy run, and thanks to me being a dumbass, I died on the second deep breath. Still, while I was alive, I wasn't completely displeased with my output. 

 

 There do seem to be a few bugs to work out there. Despite the fact that I had something like 50 iterations of on my screen, I didn't actually get the instant pyro and kept getting hung up on the cast timer, jumping out of it and trying again. But Living Bomb on as many whelps as I could tab to before the bombs all started exploding? Yes, please! I'll have some more! I am looking forward to further experiments with dps output next raid night.

 

In the meantime, I'm on an addons hunt. Hoping there's something out there like "Shock and Awe" for mages. Anyone know of anything that's specific to fire mages that is a must have?  

Seriously?

So Tuesday and Thursday are 'quickie' nights in my guild. This is mostly because I manage the calendar and I am lame and sometimes think I am funny. The reason for these 'quickie' nights is the fact that our raider base is spread all the way the hell across America and up into Canada a bit. Most of us are Central time people, but there are a fair few of us on either coast as well. As a guild of mostly (really, all) adults, with jobs and kids and other Responsible Things To Do in the Morning, we have to work pretty hard at finding times that we can all overlap enough to have at least 10 people on and able to raid. 

Hence, quickies. The balance is found somewhere among two West Coasters, two Midwesterners and one East Coaster. And there's about an hour in all that overlap that we can head into one of the fast raids, maybe two if we do well.

Last night started off great. We headed out and murdered Ony in one shot, no deaths, no stupid, and a shiny new achievement because for once no one got hit with the deep breath flamey thing. Loot went quickly as always and I looked at the time and then my map. It appeared that we were in possession of Wintergrasp so I proposed that we all hustle our asses out to Vault. Only thing is that when we stepped through my portal to Dalaran there was no "Yay, you have Wintergrasp" buff in my buff bar. Looking again at the map, the dirty rotten horde had control. And we had two options.

"It's EoE or Sarth with a drake up," said I. "And if it's EoE, we're gonna have to lose a tank."

So we voted and shuffled and one of our tanks grabbed her mage and we asked another mage to grab her shaman and headed out to EoE.

Now, in case the two paragraphs above did not make it really clear, we're sort of a casual group with a lot of alts and we still struggle with stupid fights, like EoE and Sarth with a drake up. I think this is mostly because we haven't really tried to master these fights until just recently, and were giving most of our raiding attention to the long raids, like Naxx and Ulduar. But I know if we practice we can usually get something down and on farm status swiftly. Or swiftly for a casual guild. I mean, we went from many wipes a night on Ony to about three to walking in and one-shotting within about a month. 

Anyway, I was riding the high and thought that surely we would be able to make some progress on Malygos. We did okay on the first try. DPS was a little slow on the first phase and we failed to get all our melee up on the discs before ranged/healers started hopping on in the second phase. The third phase was an unmitigated disaster.

There must be something hard to comprehend about stay together, omg, I mean right fucking on top of each other and why the hell is someone way off on their own? If you can't see dozens of other flapping wings overlapping you, you're doing it wrong. Also, "Move!" meaning "strafe to the right for a few seconds!" seems to require some additional processing time. About 30 seconds before the enrage, I was alone in the sky. And then I was blasted out of it.

Before we tried again, I made everyone stack on top of me and pretend to be on their dragons in the air. I started babbling the way I do so well when I am tipsy and then interrupted myself by barking out: "Move!" I strafed to the right. There was a pause. And then about half the raid started off and were followed a second later by those who hadn't gotten there yet. 

"I think," said I, "that I know why we're dying up there."

We practiced a little longer on the ground and I still wasn't happy with reaction time but it was getting a bit better and we were running out of time. We went into it again and managed a fairly quick burn on the first phase. Second phase was really sloppy and we ended up with a few people dead on the floor because the tank suffered a massive lag spike and couldn't pick up aggro or, indeed, even tell what the hell was going on for a few seconds. As a result, the burn was slow and we had maybe 1.5 minutes before the enrage by the time we hit phase three. It was obviously a wipe but I knew the practice would be good so we hung in there. Not too much later, I was alone in the sky again, facing one pissed off magical dragon aspect. Needless to say, I was quickly dispatched and, God save me, we better have Wintergrasp on Thursday because I don't know if I can grin my way through a whole night's worth of wiping on EoE, no matter how drunk I am.  

What tips and tricks does anyone else have for keeping the raid together and reacting well on phase three?