Secrets of Shadowbolting

In a highlight of Blizzard of Oz history, we 2 shotted high king, 1 shot Gruul and then did a “oh. ok. Now what?”
Realizing we didn’t have the group makeup for mag’s (Vuur is a wonder lock but can not do Mag’s on her own), we decide to go exploring SSC. We do amazingly well considering this is a random idea and make it to Morogrim. He was oh so scary and if the Murloc’s hadn’t eaten the warlocks after the waterfall incidents, we may have even made it further. The fact we got him down to 83% on our first try into SSC at 1am was pretty impressive, the group was humming along, it was just getting late. Sleepy people make silly mistakes. But we found a new boss, oohed and ahhhhed at Hydross as we passed him by (our tanks were totally not ready to take him on) and worked our way to new and uncharted territory. It was a good day.

Now why our guild can only get 25 people available on a monday night at 9pm to do 25 mans is beyond me….

In the Officer post mortem we went over many important things that had come up during the raid such as:
1. Loot council – while rolling has been working for people so far through Gruul because certain people have sunwell badge loot that is better, we’re getting to a point where we’re going to have to start making some tough choices. We don’t want to be a DKP guild, but truth of the matter is, we’re going to need to find someway to give the purple items to people who need it most. Instead of hearing whining – we’re making a loot council of the officers and they get to decide. This means more research on the guildies we have running to know who needs what, but should hopefully cut down on arguments and anger in the future.

2. WE NEED MORE WARLOCKS. I am unfortunately the only main warlock character in our guild at this time. While that has been fantastic so far, it’s unfeasible to run Magtheridon with 1 warlock and 4 hunters when the warlock and one of those hunters are the top dpsers as well. We have a few warlock’s as alts, but we need a few more mains.

3. Raiding times – always hotly contested, unfortunately we have so many problems getting 25 people online at any given time aside from monday nights. Half the healers are not available until 9pm due to family constraints and this can be a bit of a raid killer. So far, we’re sticking with monday, but that could change at any time.

4. The morale boost – we’ve been stuck in a rut for a while. We’ve been struggling on the high king pull, but things are finally clicking. Between Kara, ZA and Gruul, we haven’t done anything new in months. The breath of fresh air that was SSC released a lot of tension that has been building as we were able to see new content AND the raid was able to listen and adapt on the fly. Not all decisions went over as well as others, but this was managed to be discussed privately or in officer chat so as not to detract from the raid.

5. the raid leading group – the core is getting stronger. We have the tank main RL, the warlock with her 2 cents in the back on DPS, the 2 healers keeping everyone calm and a few others tossing in comments here and there on best ideas. Honestly, as far as leading goes, we have a fairly painless raid leadership model that seems to be working out well. There’s still tweaking that needs to be done, but for where we are and where we’ve come from, this is huge.

Just a few more comments on the Gruul win last week – Lock’s are loved, we just don’t usually have 3 like we managed to get the other day.

Surprise ensued when the fel puppies stayed under control and there was a (mostly) stress-free vuur in the raid. It took a few tries naturally – we’re still working on the 25 man coordination but we did it.

After that we beat on gruul for a while, took a break and came back the next day all refreshed to one shot him. This is a nice picture of a very very happy guild.

We did it! Finally! My baby guild is slowly growing up. (ok technically it’s not my guild but with all the work I put in and how much effort to keep it running – it’s partly my guild) We added in 3 people pugging our gruul’s run last night. After our success on high king we really wanted to get gruul down and after about 5 wipes last night we decided to leave off and try again the next night. I knew we could and we did. 1 shot and he was down. BAM. Notch up another mark.
25 man raids are all about coordination and yes, it is totally possible in the wrong place that 1 person can wipe a raid. Thankfully, that wasn’t last night.
Last night we were up to 13 grows when our Pally tank was crushed. Smushed. Pasted onto the floor like he belonged there and it was ugly. We were down 2 dps at this time and Gruul is at 6%. Knowing it’s all a matter of time before the raid gets turned into a sea of red I call out for massive dpsing and damage to get this sucker down. The group has been doing much better about avoiding damage so the healers are completely focusing on keeping the druid up and tanking. Knowing it’s all about damage – i curse of doom, pop a trinket and go nuts shadowbolting. The druid falls over in a sea of red and the dps starts getting smushed. Our death count is growing and the counter on CoD is ticking. I fall over with 1 second left on CoD, 7 people left standing and Gruul at 1%. CoD pops and with the dps still going Gruul goes down on a 10k CoD crit.
Very sweet.
I passed on the t4 legs as my badge gear is better and I got the shoulders from High King which is going to make me have to badge farm to break my shadoweave set bonus. I currently have the t4 head/gloves but that shadoweave set is still huge. T4 shoulders + badge gear gloves + chest = super dps… lotsa badges to go though.

THEN I make a super group and we go to ZA all is good until one recently specced elemental shaman wipes us on the eagle boss by not collapsing and then /raid quits.

< — angry Vuur.

Anyway, I pull a new mage in and get my butt handed to me in dps and damage done. Its been a while since that has happened and I liked the challenge. Its my new motivation to get better gear and better dps. AOEs of course I win on, but straight out damage I was lacking…

Pictures to come later. This poor sleepy warlock is stuck at work on a Saturday and the screenshots are on a different machine.

Maybe I’m just jaded. I have a lot of high hopes for our guild and what we can do. However, Gruul’s lair is quite possibly one of the biggest thorns in my side. We had 5 non-guildies step in to help out so we could have 25 people. 2 tries of failures and they dropped out. I’m a warlock, but in this case we needed a mage with HP – so I was the mage tank…on a crappy laptop while mentally exhausted and after waiting an hour to get the group together. I wasn’t feeling it but I tried for the guild. Gruul’s is frustrating with our guild. I mean beyond frustrating. We’re just not coordinated enough to do it yet. Nothing against the guy who was organizing it but typing everything into chat takes MUCH longer than saying it out loud.
It was painful, it was awful and I’d prefer to keep it all in-guild next time so we don’t have people bailing. That fight SHOULD be simple. We just need to sort it out a little better and be more prepared when we start so we don’t spend half the time we are there organizing who tanks who and who heals who.
Next week should be better. I’ll be on my main computer, we’ll have vent and we’ll make sure people come.
I’m just starting to dislike gruul’s cause we can’t get high king down and there’s no real reason why aside from a little un-coordination which seems to destroy the raid.