Raid catchup and Rebuke Day

Its been a busy past week and a bit for me and real life has keep me from posting on the large array of things that have been happening since my Rift post.


Our first proper raid week started very nicely 3 weeks ago, with me managing to pick up some new BoE shoulders from the trash Mobs.

That same night we got our first kill of the current expansion downing Halfus with the Dreaded Nether, Slate and Storm combo. This is defiantly a nasty set up and a big thanks goes out to the Mage who we taught to blink and interrupt the Shadow Nova after the Furious howl, you defiantly helped to compensate for the other PuG's in the group with that.


From then on Halfus has been on farm with the combos getting easier each time until this week when everyone had the simplest combo by far; Nether, Whelps and Time.
I'm not sure how much the 4.0.6 changes made to this fight being such and easy combo that will have to wait till next week to see.
Because of the lack of MS or Shadow Nova we were able to release the Nether and Whelps at once cutting the damage almost completely to my new OT who is finally raid ready.
The Time Warden was released very shortly after while the Nether Scion and Whelps were still dieing and once they were all dead it was a nice easy burn to an achievement.


Two weeks ago we got our first Magmaw kill after finally getting some PuG's in that could switch targets and kill the adds quickly. It truly is amazing how much simpler that fight got once people were getting onto those adds quickly.


In fact the fight went so well that our first kill also netted us this achievement.


We also put some attempts into the Omnotron Counsel that week but only managed a 5% wipe before the PuG's had to leave and the raid was called.


Then this week before raids patch 4.0.6 hit and what a mixed bag our 'Rebuke Day' was.
We all got Rebuke trainable baseline at 54 and there was much rejoicing, then we find a stealth change to the way HP is generated and the rejoicing is hidden by anger and confusion.
For many people they just decided to live with the new change and deal with any missed attacks as they came, which is a fair choice and keeping your survivability up is a nice bonus to that. For me being a 10man raider the good and bad went hand in hand. Getting Rebuke changes a lot for our raid as it no longer means that DPS have to watch Shadow Nova or gimp their damage by watching Arcane Annihilator on Omnotron.
To make sure that I am not letting the raid down on interrupts I need to be hit capped which as a result means the HP change has very little effect on me.
Sure I have lost 7% odd Mastery but in exchange I get a boost to Threat/Damage and can interrupt reliably and boost raid damage to.

That brings us to this week where after downing Halfus as already mentioned we moved on to try the Double Dragons.
We had seen this fight briefly the week before but had not put many attempts into them.
As we had already picked up last week we had Phase one and its transition down pack with just a little refinement to do on the Blackouts.
Phase two however was still causing issues with the ranged slowly being picked off. There were revisions made to the strat an we were reliably hitting the 50% mark on transition before we wiped. The night was then called with the plan to come back the next night.

Thursday came around and our PuG from the previous night had to drop due to being called to raid on his main. As a result we left BoT and headed for BWL to start its progress a night early.

A quick pop to town to fill the missing spots and we were in BWL clearing trash to Magmaw while the PuG Mage 'fixed' his internet.
The PuG Mage proceeded to do no damage on trash and spent half the time offline. At the boss we finally managed to get him on vent to find that not only is he a immature 14 year old but he also has very little clue about his class and is running 2k latency.
We proceeded to try anyway and immediately wipe because as I ran in I clipped the windows key while hitting shift to pop wings. Naturally I was tabbed out and ran directly off the edge into the lava.
Hilarity ensued and once we had recovered and several jokes had been made on my behalf we tried again, this time the Mage DC'd again as my AS missed and the PuG Resto Druid pulled aggro and was one shot.
With our bad luck out of the way we kicked the Mage and eventually pulled in a Hunter.
With the group back in Magmaw's room we then swiftly took the bugger down and moved across the hall to Omnotron.

Omnotron went well considering we had several players that had never seen the fight. Once we got past the first 'Never seen the fight' wipes we were making good progress.
Slimes were taken care of quickly, the Flame thrower was handled very well and my shiny friend Rebuke helped AS keep Arcanotron locked down while his shield was up.
A few 10-15% wipes later and they were down, opening the gate to BWD's insides for the first time.


We of cause popped our heads inside for a look around before calling it a night with both PuG's set to come back and our biggest raid night still ahead of us.

Friday came around and despite putting a whole night into them we only managed to get Maloriak and Chimaeron down to 50% each.
It is defiantly nice to have some challenging raid content to work on after WotLK and I can't want to get back in next week, get those guys down and see what the later bosses bring.

Left wanting Magmore

Last night I came online to a guildie who was in a PuG group looking for one more tank to try Magmaw in the new Blackwing Decent.

I should of guessed it was going to be a bad night when a DPS pulled the boss during the trash because I had tanked a fraction to close to Magmaw.
In fact the next 3 wipes on trash due to a squishy Warrior tank and bad DPS really should of hit it home but both me and my guildie wanted to see the fight so we stayed.

The fight is a reasonably simple 2 phase encounter made complicated by some nasty movies in phase one.

During the first phase the boss will summon adds through a ring of fire that ether need to be snared and AoE'd or picked up by an off-tank and very quickly nuked down.
The adds hit for a ton and any hits take give a debuff that spawns more adds and is refreshed each hit, obviously the better answer is to snare/AoE but if you are lacking AoE snares then a quick DPS nuke and snaring the final add should do just fine.
Also during phase one Magmaw will do and AoE that hits half the room that needs to be avoided and will also Eat the main tank at which point phase 2 begins.

The Tank being eaten will need to be healed but thankfully can act as normal while in the mouth so CD's and self heals can be popped while in there. Meanwhile 3 party members preferably the lowest DPS dealers should jump onto the head of Magmaw where they are given a new ability to chain his head onto the spike below, this has to be done fast because if the tank is eaten for to long then he will be instantly killed. If all 3 chains can be put down at once then the tank pops out and Magmaw becomes stunned taking double damage for the duration.

Once the stun is over the phases begin again until death.

While the concept is simple, AoE adds dodge fire nuke boss several PuG's found this to be difficult particularly one Mage who's only job was to stay in melee and AoE snare the add's and still did not understand his roll after an hour.

Eventually the healer from my guild had to bail due to being called into work and we lost a few more members shortly after. Before he logged off my healer linked his meters showing that he did literally double the healing of ether of the other two one of which was the raid leader.

Seeing the group fall apart and listening to the RL claim that we were "close" despite still not regularly making it to the first phase two I decided that I was not going to wait for 2 more PuG healers to be found. To make matters worse trash was re-spawning and the two healers we had left struggled to keep me up through a single trash mob with all my HoPo going into WoG.

I thanked them for the group and bowed out, however now both myself and our Lead Healer have a very good idea of the fight so that when we finally have our guild back from New Years Holiday we can jump in and quickly down the fiery worm.