Welcome to the first post of This Week In Raiding; a (hopefully) weekly feature discussing the raiding encounters that my guild tackled this week, the lessons learned from them, as well as any news or thoughts on raiding in general. I am hopeful that this feature will be full of a lot of useful information and general thoughts from my perspective on raiding, with less focus on "Oooo, look who we killed this week" and pretty kill shots.
That being said, that's totally what the first post is going to be.
This Sunday was the first raid for our new raiding group led by Xzidor and Oath. Our first target was Blackwing Descent. Our guild had downed Magmaw last week with a different group, so this was the first time seeing this boss for a few of the raiders, and the first time that this group with these Raid Leaders fought together.
Magmaw went down after a few attempts with very little trouble. Our only real issues were coordination and getting people to move at the right time in the right places. We again used a one tank strategy that allows the healers to pretty much stand still and focus on their jobs without worrying about the Pillars of Flame. Next week on TWIR, I'll detail our Magmaw strategy in more detail.
On we went to the Omnotron Defense Council. This was the first time that a lot of us, including myself, had seen this fight, and it showed. We had a lot of issues trying to get everything under control. There were lots of mistakes all around, but everyone kept plugging away and we eventually had a couple of very good attempts. We even tried having our Resto Shaman solo the bosses for a while, but decided that probably wasn't going to work out so well. Things got much better once the Holy Paladin (that would be me) stopped running around the room with Magmatron's giant laser beam on him, wiping half of the raid. The biggest problem was with the blobs of poisoned poop that Toxitron spawns, which gave most of our raid fits while trying to avoid them.
We reconvened on Monday night, but started an hour late due to the fact that I was running incredibly late getting home from work. This raid group has a hard time cap and stops the raids at 10pm server time, meaning we only had an hour and a half to get whatever progression we could before the reset on Tuesday morning. Luckily, they only called me a few nasty names in raid chat before we were off and running.
It's amazing what a difference a day makes. Knowing we had limited time we quickly called for resets as soon as we ran into a major problem, so we managed to get quite a few attempts in a short amount of time. A lot of the mechanics that we were having so much difficulty with the day before worked themselves out very quickly. Target switches were crisp and quick, AOE damage from shields was minimal and Poison Protocol was less of an issue with the slimes going down quickly and people actually managing to avoid them long enough for the DPS to burn them down. Within an hour of starting we had our kill. I was very proud of our Raid Group when those pesky golems finally toppled over.
With only about 30 minutes left until our time ran out we moved on to Maloriak. If you have never done this fight, it's a complex encounter with adds and a spread-out/collapse mechanic that is on a semi-random pattern. So there is a lot of movement and a lot of
SHADOWGARDE NEEDS HEALERS
I'm very glad that my guild waited for me on Monday night, as I would have regretted missing the raid, especially since we got Omnotron down (still no loot-love for my Holy spec yet, though). However, it should never have happened... I should have been benched and replaced by another healer so as to give the raid more time to have better chance at moving our progression further forward. The sad truth is that as of right now we have very few raid-ready healers and need to recruit more.
If you are on the Sargeras-US server and are looking for a good, yet casual raiding guild, send me an email at symbology AT rocketmail.com or apply at Shadowgarde.net.
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