So in the past couple of weeks, I have been to ZA twice. My guild is doing that every Thursday now, and progression in the two times I've been has been pretty goddamn impressive. Last Thursday we hit the Bear Aspect first and got him down in time for the timed loot. We wiped on the Eagle dude though and had to try him again (I forget if we needed 3 tries or just the second). We wiped several times on the Lynx Aspect and decided we just didn't have an ideal party (something about needing a hunter; I honestly don't know the intricacies of what the hunter's role is in the fight is; I just heal people).
Last night's run was awesome! Shawn was leading the raid, and decided we'd hit the Eagle Aspect first. If you asked me what a perfect raid boss fight looked like, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better example of our guild executing a boss fight perfectly, especially at this level of content. The best part was, dude dropped a new healing chest piece for my paladin. I'm still unsure if it's something that's really worth using. It's got 2 more gem slots than my badge-bought chest, about 10 less healing, and 15 mana per 5 instead of 40 something spell crit. If I stick 3 Teardrop Crimson Spinels into the thing, I'll gain about 30 healing, but lose about 2% spell crit. That's a hard sell for a paladin. Also, the stam and int aren't as good on it. So I'm undecided as to whether it's worth obtaining 3 epic gems for.
As we proceded on, we wiped once on the bear aspect, disqualifying us from the timer loot. But we mopped the floor with him on the second try. He dropped the same leather dps belt he dropped last week, but it made someone new happy.
We then moved on to the dragonhawk aspect, which was a boss I'd never seen, and our guild had never succeeded against. It's a tricky fight because there're eggs that hatch non-elite 70 adds and periodic issues with globes of fire that appear on the battlefield and then explode. Your goal is to avoid the explodey, and then go right back to whaling on the boss. Of course, if you're a healer, needing to move is a pain in the ass because it means you have to stop healing the party. It was different from Karazhan, where all I do in every fight is stand in one spot and pound my flash of light hotkey while clicking on different portraits as the life-bars fluctuate. When we finally got him, on the third try, I felt really good about myself. We lost two people on that one-the main pally tank and I think our squishy mage (could've been someone else, but if I have to arbitrarily pick a guild member to be on her ass at the end of a boss fight-or even a trash mob pull-it'd be Polly's mage).
One thing that did kind of annoy me was the player of the Pally tank (whose irl name I actually don't know) counting down the percentages of the boss after he was at about 20%. I knew he meant it to be encouraging, but if there's a way to disrupt the rhythm of a raid, it's bringing to the forefront of the raiders' minds that the ordeal is almost over. The light at the end of the tunnel is a dangerous thing; you can't let yourself relax until the fucker is dead. I compared this to jinxing a no-hitter by discussing it while it's in progress, and someone in the channel commented that the analogy was very nicely put. Of course, I can't hold it against him; we did down the boss, after all. Heh.
Finally, we moved on to the Lynx aspect; the boss that was actually our main goal for the night. Our objective, as outlined by our fearless leader, guild-master Pete, was to down the third boss. It was a modest goal, progression-wise, to get another boss down in a week. Of course, we were on a roll. We'd killed 3 bosses, and were moving on to the 4th, who we one-shotted. That was another excellently-executed fight. I was really in a groove with my healing. That lynx boss is a heavy hitter, but we had priest, druid, and paladin heals, and each of the healers were on during that fight. I got into that groove where I'm pounding my 5 key (flash of light) as fast as I can and clicking on individual portraits as each flash charges so I can target the next one. In this way I can keep 2 or even 3 toons topped off relatively reliably, as long as heavy heals aren't required. It's also a tricky groove to get into. When I do, it's sort of like time slows a bit and my reactions are just faster. Obviously that's bullshit, but that's what it feels like.
That's the sort of groove I was in when I kept 3 or 4 guildies alive single-handedly in Icewing Bunker when we were holding off the horde for several minutes. This is the incident that caused my buddy Jeremy, whose warrior I christened as a 'mobile consecrate,' to launch a love-fest in his blog for me. A glorious love-fest that lasted all of one entry. But hey, that entry was mine, god dammit. Heh.
Anyway, after dominating the lynx boss, we decided to clear to the fifth boss, the Hex-Lord. He was an interesting fight. He has 4 henchmen that you basically need to crowd control while you kill him. In a way, it seems like the inverse of the Moroes fight in Karazhan where you try to pick off his help as fast as you can before isolating and killing him. This guy has a shadowbolt volley that mows everyone down. It's insane to heal for. It's channeled, seems to be uninterruptable, and goes on for long enough to put a hurting on the entire raid. And he does it frequently. It's not something that happens once every few minutes. We wiped fairly shortly, but we did see the encounter, and that was fun.
We all left extremely satisfied with the way the raid went. I had a great time. I always enjoy raiding with my guild. It's a fun group of people.
And finally, a brief AV story, since this is kind of a pvp blog. Earlier in the week I entered an AV where I led a Balinda defense effort where we repelled the initial wave of Horde, and then moved on to bunker defense. I got to Stonehearth just in time to watch it burn and then die. I made my way after rezzing to Icewing and got it back. I then waded out into a melee outside and simply tossed heals around for a while. The Alliance got off to a very smooth start. We were ahead. But then the horde started closing the gap. Eventually both sides had most of the other side's infrastructure gone, and reinforcements were becoming an issue. The alliance side even summoned Ivus! The Horde though, coordinated to the very last, managed to get in on Vann while the Alliance was celebrating prematurely and dinking around with the giant treefolk. One. Fucking. Reinforcement. Yes, they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. I applauded them for it. It was a fantastic recovery on their part, and it sucked to be on the other side of. But I felt good about my role in it. I was active the entire time, and I was in healing Vann at the end trying to make it last just a little longer. We lost seconds after I died. Oh well.
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