Secrets of Shadowbolting

After a few days of building resist sets and a few too many wipes on Lurker, we decided to give Hydross a try. With his switching between water and nature damage, we were hoping for the best.

As usual, a couple of wipes on the boss were expected and as it was getting late, we found out the hard way about the aggro issues on this fight.

Vuur was loved as usual and after a few tries, we called it for the night.

Because a picture can say a thousand words, I figure I’ll shorten my writing and let the pictures speak for themselves.
Below is a quick recap of my day.

Someone was asking around for the +15 spell damage to bracers enchant. I didn’t have it so decided to start farming. Apparently the ogre’s thought I was someone important and decided to fall over and die for me. I really didn’t mind too much except I still did not get the enchant. More farming is needed.

We always joke around about Biscuit’s (or fbcarbon in this case) loaded dice. Well Nixx/Nightly has been close behind in the loaded die rolls as well and this roll for the recipe was just so priceless I doubt they will ever be able to repeat the magic of 3 rolls of 77. We were laughing about this for a while.

After downing gruul and realizing we had 25 geared people, we went running around SSC for a bit. While waiting for a few people to finish the walk of shame from the graveyard, an impromptu dance party broke out on one of the platforms. Everyone was getting into it and it was a great stress relief in the middle of a raid.

Since we could, we went to go see Vashj. A couple overeager mages accidentally pulled her while the rest of us just sat back and laughed. With all my history of crocolisk petting, I figured more water like creatures were best to stay away from. i admired from a distance and was fine with it.

While setting up for Lurker I brought out my Spirit of Summer pet. We then had to go back to the main island for buffs and my poor spirit got stuck. It was very sad. On another note – demon pets can’t swim. I had Betlia out and attempted to go from the small outer island to the inner island. She could not get up out of the water and was being slowly cooked to death so in pity, I sacrificed her. It was better that way.

The new fun of the night was going after Lurker. We had a fishing party and caught some big fish. Unfortunately the roasting and cooking side of the party was not as successful unless you count the raid being roasted. We were having some issues with the adds – dotting sheep, trapping sheep and not the other myrman, rampaging myrmen in the center isle…. it was a little ugly but for a first try, I think we did great getting him to 65%.

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.