Raid in Review – Rag’s Fire Flickers

Thought I would take a stab at something resembling a regular feature. I’m shooting for this to be a Tuesday thing, but I fail for this week.

I think I might have tried it waaaaaay back a long time ago with a semi-regular (2 or 3 installments) bit I did reviewing web comix. I am now woefully about 2 years behind on all my comix reading. Man, I’m a slacker.

But I’m staring down burnout as our roster revolves faster than the Gravitron at your local fair.

We lost a main tank due to… creative differences? We weren’t killing Rag fast enough so he moved on to greener pastures. He must have been planning it for a while since he started building a holy set for a couple months and was taken in to the new guild as a healer instead of a tank.

Funny how at the start of the expansion we had too many tanks, great for smashing through heroics for the entire guild, terrible for raiding.

(I’ve mentioned before, in a comment on someone else’s blog, that the ratios of tanks to DPS needed to sustain a healthy 5-man environment do not mesh with the tank requirements for raids. You’ll always have too few for dungeons otherwise you have too many for raids.)

Real life did its thing and we suddenly had fewer tanks (and appropriate back ups) than required. Using the back ups of the back ups has led to some unpleasant realizations regarding the Ragnaros fight.

He hits hard. Like a truck. Plus the DoT. Plus the damage from the traps. And the adds.

Anyway, we’ve been stalled on Ragnaros for a bit now and the raid nights are starting to blend together. What are we raiding? Rag. Again.

In an attempt to snap myself out of my raiding slump, I’m going to try to capture what happened that was new or exciting in the raiding week.

Normally we full clear on Tuesday (sometimes bleeding over into Wednesday depending on how slow of a start we got) and spend Wednesday, sometimes Thursday, and most Mondays on Rag. Over the weekends there may be a BoT/BWD raid.

…

This past weekend I don’t think I logged in to do anything but work on the rogue so no T11 raids to report on.

…

But our Monday night token attempts on Rag were worthwhile this week.

We were down a few regular members but one of the guys that had to take a RL hiatus was on and offered to tank.

Now, Mech tanking isn’t as surprising as say, me offering to tank, but it’s not far from the mark. And to offer to tank the fight after having spent more time in FL on his warlock and never having seen the Rag fight before… let’s just say that we were all a little nervous.

On top of it, he’s a warrior.

I’ve now healed all four tanking classes on Rag. In order of ease to heal (IMO) they are: DK, pally, warrior, druid.

Of course, looking at the same members that I’m healing, their gear and tanking experience happens to also run DK, pally, warrior, druid. So I’m not sure how much is from class, how much is gear, and how much is raw awesomeness.

We flop between a 2 and 3 heal strat. With a new tank and several non-regulars (including a hunter from Shadow Rising – hi, Adoe!) we opted for the three heals.

In the 3-heal strat I’m still on trap duty and provide healing support to the raid and tanks as needed. I run a non-Atonement/non-Archangel spec for this fight, opting for more haste to help recover from traps and molten seeds.

So we run in with our warrior tanking Rag to start.

First words out of my mouth, “OMG is he wearing any armor?!?!?!” And I’m just the back up heals on him!

After a few attempts and he got the hang of the damage spikes and taunting appropriately, things were a little smoother.

Normally, we can get through the first transition,  we can do a wave or two of molten seeds and then the short bus to hell pulls up and we all pile in.

But that night, we made it through the molten seeds, through the second transition (wasn’t planning on getting there and had neglected to instruct the new tank about the Scions, oops), and made it to playing soccer with a giant meteor.

Sadly, we had some time constraints for our irregular raiders, but we’ve proven that it can be done.

A crack has appeared in the wall, a bit of light is creeping through, and this just might be possible.

…

Adding fuel to the fire of the “maybe we can do this,” I duo healed the first six bosses in FL with a holy pally. Granted, he’s awesome, but it’s not widely accepted strategy to 2-heal with a disc priest and holy pally. Crazy as we may have been, our resto druid was having issues downloading the patch, necessitating the move or stand around picking our noses all evening.

I still think pally/druid is better combo for healing Rag, but if I’m not on traps it should be better.

We face Rag again tonight. Maybe this will be our week?