The Greatest Achievement!

For all my readers,

It's probably going to be silent around here for awhile.  If I have time I'll put something together, but since I became a father early Wednesday morning that could be awhile.

Thanks always for reading, and I'll be back!

Public Service Announcement

It is possible, with a good healer, for a level 74 Ret Pally in herloom gear and a smattering of greens and blues to tank the mushroom trash, the faceless ones, and the last boss in Old Kingdom.

So if you're tanking Old Kingdom, and 3/5s of the group asks you to go kill the mushroom trash before killing the boss, don't be an arse, because you might get kicked, and they might just not need to wait for another tank from the queue.

That is all.  Move along, citizens.

Oddities

I attempted to point out in my last post that my guild achieved I've Gone and Made a Mess on our last venture into 25-man ICC, a fact for which I am proud - it was only our second Saurfang kill, and only our second attempt that night.

I informed my raid leader last week that upon the birth of my child (an event which I expect will force me to take a break from raiding for a week or two at the very least, probably more), I will no longer heal on our guild raids - I will either be tanking with another group or I will remove my healing spec for a feral DPS, but until then I would still have the tree stuff and be available for it.

So this week when we hopped in, I didn't ask, I just tree'd up and off we went.

We plowed our way through Marrowgar and the trash before Deathwhisper (picking up the Deprogramming quest), before I looked at recount and realized we had 8 healers on the run.  I pointed this out, but my raid leader already had a plan in mind - I tanked up to hold on to Darnavan.  Unfortunately some pets and a hunter hit him before I could really get him out of the way, and the damage put in before I could get him back under control made him too weak, and he died about halfway through the first phase.  So I switched to cat form and ran around helping out killing wherever I could and we moved on.

He had me stay in cat form for the Gunship Battle, which was odd to me but since it's a ROFLstomp anyway I guessed it didn't matter.

Then Mr. Imma-vampire-really rolled up... and while he initially told me to switch back to tree (which I expected, as my healing is stronger than my DPS due to my DPS being a tank spec and mostly tank gear), some personnel switched out and he told me to switch back to cat form.

He made it very clear to me that I was to keep Mangle up at all times.

I put out what I think is a respectable 4700 DPS on our second (and successful) attempt.  I actually think the raid-wide 5% physical crit increase had more to do with our success than the Mangle debuff, but that's neither really here nor there.  I put out that much DPS while missing key DPS talents (such as King of the Jungle), having tank-based gems and enchants almost across the board, and having all tank-based glyphs.  Yes, I was far short of the raid-leading DPS of one of our rogues, just shy of 9k, but considering the limitations I was working under I don't think I did poorly.

Examining my performance on WorldofLogs, I had 88% uptime on Savage Roar, 83% on Rake, 43% on Rip, and only 4.9% on Mangle.  I'll have to check, I suspect Mangle is getting overwritten/overruled by someone else's buff somehow.  I had 32 hits/crits of Mangle and it only applied the buff 10 times.  Melee was ~39% of my damage, followed by Rake (15%), Rip (~15%), Shred (14%), and Mangle (10%).  Ferocious Bite and Swipe (why did I Swipe?) trailed down at the bottom.

I need to push that Savage Roar uptime closer to 95-100%, and the same with Rake.  I'm not sure what a good target for Rip uptime is but I've got to be better than 43%.

All in all it was a fun experience and I'm actually looking forward to switching.

Thanks for reading!

I've Gone and Made a Mess!

*points at achievement widget*

*grins*

The Best PuG Healer I Ever Had...

... was an elemental shaman.

I kid you not, I hopped on to do a random, got dropped into Halls of Lightning.

We buffed, said g'morning (with some requisite complaining about not having enough coffee,) and off we went.  I was in a (small) hurry, I didn't pay much attention other than the fact that the Shaman was my healer.

We cleared through General Whatshisname (killed him in record time for me, according to my DBM) and I took it slow through the Slag, expecting my slow pace to allow the DPS to kill them slowly and thus have no one die to mass Slag death.  Unfortunately, the rest of the group didn't pick up on it and two of them went down on the steps on the far side when a bunch of the mobs died.

We rezzed and moved on.  I was glancing at Recount and not picking up on the fact that there were really 5 bars on my damage done meter, all showing greater than 2.5k DPS.  We smashed through the brittle golem dude (Volkan?  I can never remember, and again in record time), and into the halls of random-spawning-dudes.  It was about halfway through here that I noticed the blue bar was on top of the damage done meter.  The BLUE bar.  The Shaman bar.  The Shaman that was the healer's bar.  Not only was she topping damage done, but she was 200 dps above the next highest player.

I got a record time on Mr. Lightning-Disperse too.  He was almost dead when he reformed.  Do I even need to mention the record time on Loken?  She ended up just 100 DPS behind the leader, presumably because she actually did have to heal at some point.

Of course most of us were overgeared, but it's still a little ballsy to run Elemental as the group healer.

Llivia, I salute you.

Progress Once Again!

I have no time to write!

The impending birth of my first child and pressure to finish my project at work mean that I can't spend a lot of time commenting on blogs or writing my own posts!

However...

I have just enough time this morning to report that Epic Adventurers has finally defeated Deathbringer Saurfang in his 25-man incarnation!

We made it to him this past Wednesday with enough time for 3-4 shots before we would have to stop for the night.

Our first attempt got him down to 18%.  Our second, we were doing fairly well until he decided to start picking on our healers with Mark of the Fallen Champion, and even then, we got him down to TWO PERCENT before we were overwhelmed.

One of our hunters had to leave, and we replaced with a Shaman.  The third attempt of the night was the charm - we got spammed by achievements... and then got spammed by a guildmate, whose addon congratulates guildmates for achievements.

A couple quick notes - we ran 2 tanks and 6 healers for the fight.  I can't speak for any of our other healers, but personally, until the first set of beasts came out and for quite a few of the gaps in between beasts, I was dropping out of tree and using Moonfire and Starfire to help out with the DPS on Saurfang himself.  Actually, for about to first 50-60% of his health, I was healing only minimally, when the beasts came out.  We simply didn't need 6 healers at that point.  Believe me, every little bit helps when you're struggling on that fight.  It was about the 2nd or 3rd Mark that I had to stay in tree form almost exclusively.

There was much rejoicing!

Silence

I apologize for the great echoing wall of nothing around here of late.

I've been exceptionally busy, and unfortunately that will likely continue as my baby is due very soon.

Have faith!  I shall return!