Icecrown Citadel, 10-player - Leopards

10/12

Good news everybody! We never have to go back in there! Professor Putricide is down. The whole experience was summed up by Sapphrina, who broke the stunned silence after the kill by saying "I never, ever want to do this boss again." I have lost count of the number of raid sessions we've spent squelching around in this slime-infested hellhole. Not a happy experience for any of us. The fight is remarkably intolerant of error, and even when executed well seems to have a big chunk of luck. Mistime your DPS on phase one? That's an ooze up at transition and a wipe. DPS knocked into a slime pool and frozen? That's a wipe. Gas cloud targets a melee DPS and one-shots them? Wipe. Tank driving the abomination gets cramp in his ooze-consuming hand (eeuuw) - better believe *that's* a wiping. But, we perservered. We wiped. We ran back. Trash spawned. We wiped on the trash. We ran back again. We pulled. We had people DC at phase transitions. We tried things. We realised those things were silly, and tried other things. We wiped some more. We went back to our first plan. We got tired. We wiped some more.

It was interesting, and encouraging, to see us develop as a raid team. As the wipe count mounted, we made fewer and fewer errors. The RNG seemed to hate us less. We started to make our own luck. We lasted longer and better even after problems started mounting. THe final pull was much like the previous five. This time we called the transitions perfectly. The mages did a bit of damage during the freeze. Asisia overcame a severe case of RSI to enter phase 3 with almost no slime down. Both tanks got the taunts right. The healers kept spamming out the health. The DPS stayed focussed and out of the slime. We'd done all this before, but on the last pull, it came together. While this wasn't always fun, it was an awesome team sticking together, and we are proud of the kill.

Blood Princes

Before Putricide, we cleared out the Crimson Halls. This was characterised by vicious trash pulls, sacrificial warlocks and the Blood Queen. The trash before the Blood Princes is nasty. They're tough, and they hit like a Tequila Hangover on a workday. Still, it's all trash, and we're not going to wipe (often) on that, are we. This is a tricky fight. You have to do it as a survival encounter, even though the enrage timer is actually quite tight. We started out with Russty tanking Mr. Shadowbolt (I refuse to waste brain capacity remembering their names - to me they are Mr. Shadowbolt, Captain Swirly and Sparklefarts). There are two hard things for a ranged tanke here - the pull, and the getting lucky with the RNG. If the Bloody Orb of Attackability first jumps to Sparklefarts, you're golden - the warlock has time to get five Clouds of Slightly Less-Fatal Damage. Otherwise, no matter how good the pull is, you're short a warlock for the brief remainder of the wipe. Russty performed four perfect pulls (I screwed one up for him, but we're not mentioning that), and four times straight the RNG pointed the Dread Finger of Doom at him and the whole team went splat. Oh well. Plan B. We reassigned Asisia to Mr. Shadowbolt, and I picked up the other two. Five minutes later we were sorting through the loot.

Blood Queen Lana'Thel

This one took a while to learn. It also give plenty of opportunities to attack and kill your guildies, which can be therapeutic. The enrage timer is something daft, like five minutes. This makes it refreshingly easy to build a truly impressive repair bill between trash respawns. There are some fun ways to wipe here, too. In the air phase, you need to spread out. Unless a vampire has to bite you, in which case you have to stand still. Get this wrong, and we wipe! Haha! Run back, buff up....

Doing this fight was a good example of the way we learn together. It starts out with me giving a semi-coherent description of the plan, based on TankSpot and WoWWiki research, and a firm commitment to give Asisia the crappy tanking jobs.. Those who actually know what they're doing chip in with polite corrections. "Actually, I think you meant run AWAY...", and we pull. Some things work, others dont, and people suggest things. If we don't get the boss down that day, everyone comes back with ideas and suggestions and we try them. eventually we find a balance that works for our raid comp, and we start to make solid progress. We're never afraid to move people around and try new things. Except Asisia is always the abomination.

After a couple of nights, we made al the vampire transitions, nobody died in an air phase and the DPS was monumentally insane. The boss dropped with about two seconds to spare, and we all trotted of happily to see the Professor. Poor, igorant fools....