Praise Allah for Dual Spec.
It seems not too long ago I was posting our previous Heroic Icecrown update, in which we had a member vanish, and then this last week we lost a truly core member, one of our dynamic Tree Duo, which left us scrambling for a few days trying to figure out how to patch up the hole in our raid setup.
Sadly a couple of our DPS have had to make far too much use out of their offspecs lately, but we finally steered things back on course and managed to finish off Rotface & Festergut a few days ago, along with Blood Princes and Blood Queen Sunday evening, which was a great feeling as we're back in the swing of things!
I think I mentioned Rotface in my last post, but Festergut, in spite of our roster issues, gave us more trouble than we expected (and in fact, based on Normal difficulties, we thought Rotface would surely be the more difficult of the two). Truth is, once again Blizzard should be commended on a very properly tuned DPS check on Festergut's Berserk given the strong healing requirements. Our best attempts after our first night left us with a good 1 million HP remaining as Berserk hit, and only after we'd completely maximized our DPS options and worked out near-perfect positioning for Goo did we manage to pull out a kill.
So tonight we got to really sink our teeth into Princes, after trying them a handful of attempts the week before just to see what the new debuff was like. I must say, I had high expectations for how challenging the fight could be on Heroic after seeing what Normal was like, and I wasn't disappointed!
What I simultaneously love and hate about the Princes fight is that any time there is a death, as a Raid Leader I can simply scan down a list of possible outcomes and viola, find exactly which particular thing raped someone's face. Very simple, very easy, very elegant. The downside, of course, is that this list of things is about a half a dozen things:
- Standing in Shock Vortex
- Not spreading for Empowered Shock Vortex
- Empowered Glittering Sparks not dispelled
- Empowered Flame Orb not reduced enough
- Kinetic Bomb landed
- Shadow Prison stacked too high and didn't stop moving
Usually on any given encounter when something can kill someone/force a wipe, it's generally only preventable by a small handful of people: Tank should've taunted sooner or Tank should've moved away faster; Healer should've thrown an instant on that guy or Healer should've spammed tank at this time; that DPS should've moved out of flame or this DPS should've killed the add.
Yet what's cool about Princes is basically everyone has to watch for nearly everything at all times, which makes for an exciting and incredibly dynamic encounter we don't get to see often in WoW. Shock Vortex, Empowered Shock Vortex, Flame Orbs, & Shadow Prison all have to be managed by the entire raid force throughout the fight. Kinetics must also be nearly constantly monitored
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Say Wut... Go on, SAY IT!
