Tuesday Night Raiding Club

Tuesday night is 25-man night.
On the tap for this Tuesday was Onyxia and Trial of the Crusader.
Log report for 12/1/9 for Black Axe Clan

Building the group went ok, but not great.  We had 20 people instantly.  6 healers and 1 full-time tank.  Abhorred has a good tanking set for DK and was my first choice to OT (but we prefer him dps-ing).  Other than that it was a crap-shoot.  I was considering getting on my warrior to tank, but Sondebar (one of our leading mages) hoped on his DK to be another OT.  At this point we had 24 and were going to bring in another dps, but luckily one of the guild main tanks, Judeaded, logged on to fill a spot.  This let Abhorred go back to dps, which is just full of win, and we had the makings of a great group.
We only had one hunter.  We only had one shaman.  Healing team was 3 priests, 2 druid and a paladin.  Not a bad mix, especially since everybody knew their business.  Tanking team was Pallie, and 2 DKs.


Onyxia was first.  I'm often asked why we do that first.  Essentially, I see it as a warm up.  Sometimes it takes folks a few minutes to realize that they are raiding, and in that interval we have a few folks die from inattention.  Onyxia is something that we can easily kill with 20 people, so I like starting there.  Plus, because it's so short, we typically end up giving out some loot that can get quickly gemmed and enchanted before we start ToC.

On this night we did wonderfully in Onyxia:

• Akaichisuru, our MT, d/c'd when the whelps first appeared, but the two DK OTs did a great job of picking them up and Akaichisuru was able to hop back in quickly.  I too always get a huge lag spike during that first AOE blast.  Typically, I have Recount hidden, but I think I need to be turning it off entirely to avoid the processing lag.
  

• Nobody died to her breath, and only 2 or 3 people were hit by it at all.

• The only death was an unfortunate melee who was feared into a cleave and got 1-shot.  That was pretty near the end, so I was not at all concerned.

We passed out a few helms and weapons and ported over to ToC.  At this point our casual-ness showed through.  It took about 20 minutes to get set up in ToC after the loot was passed out.  A few people took the time to afk, a few people had gone to Auction House . . .essentially, time was wasted.

Nevertheless, we one shot Beasts of Northrend.  That is not unusual, really.  But we did it without allowing Icehowl to enrage at all.  Last week, he enraged on every charge (including hitting ME once!).  This week, not once.

Jax went down super smoothly.  Lost one person who lagged a little when he had the fire on him.  Clothies + fire = toasty cloth.

We took a 5 min break before PVP for bio and a little R&R.  Coming back to the PVP event we were facing: disc priest, tree, holy pallie, rogue, warrior, enhancement shaman, DK, hunter, warlock, shadow priest.  Basically, a nightmare group for us.  We usually do really well when there is fewer melee.  We wiped a bunch.  It seemed as though we had everybody cc-ing and nobody dps-ing for a few seconds, then everybody dps-ing and nobody cc-ing for a few seconds.  We had rotations for cc assigned, and we had all kinds of teams for that, but it was still a giant mess.  Even when we killed the priest quickly, the tide would shift and we would get behind the dps-curve.

Most of us were pretty frustrated by it.  Especially on that fight it is hard to find something to correct.  Because the fight is so chaotic, we cannot tell who is missing a cc or who is not getting their cleanse off or whatever.  We spent about 45 minutes in there (maybe more).  We ended up calling it a night a little early to avoid burning out.

The Faction Champions fight is tricky, no doubt, but it is one that we have had success with in the past.  I think that our team's overall lack of experience shows a little bit in that fight.  The deep knowledge of class and race abilities is less when people have not had as much experience raiding.  Still, it was a fun night, and the fact that we really flew through the first 3 encounters was great.

We are scheduled to get back into ToC on Thursday for more PVP love.  Fingers are crossed.