The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I logged on last night without much in mind - I figured I'd do the random daily on my level 80s, and work on leveling my mage a bit more... It was Friday night, and one of my guildies had been trying to start up his regular TOC25 PUG again, and I thought if he was online, I might bring my main and try ONE MORE TIME to get that stupid trinket from Anub'arak.

Another guildmate, a non-raider whose brother is part of my regular 10 man crew but who himself is often ignored as bad or annoying (to be fair, he is only 14, and only started playing with WOTLK), was trying to organize an ICC10 group, and not getting a lot of positive response.  I personally didn't plan to join the group - again, I was thinking I'd do heroics until TOC25, if it happened - but as 7:00 server time approached and the TOC raid leader was not online, I got a tell from a friend who'd agreed to main tank and lead Mura's ICC10 group, asking if I had a character I'd like to bring.  As my main was saved, I offered him a choice between rarbare, loltree, shammy heals, bad enhancement shammy, priest heals, or bad spriest.  They had a resto shaman and resto druid already, so my priest in healing spec was a good fit for the group, and we managed to pull together a pretty solid team of well geared alts and a few mains who hadn't done 10 man yet this week.

The group flew through the first wing, at least until Saurfang, where we had a couple of aborted attempts and a full wipe before we got serious and made healing assignments.  Yeah, I can't heal everyone at once.  With our team, we decided the best route was to have the resto druid watching the ranged dps and other healers, the resto shaman chain healing the tank and melee DPS, and me primarily on tank heals, while tossing up PW:S on the ranged when the blood beasts were targeting them just in case.  I'm not discipline spec'd, but every little bit helps, and in this case, we got well into enrage before the first mark went out.  And nobody died, at all.



Next up, Festergut.  We had a couple of people in the raid who were unfamiliar with the new wing, so it took a couple of tries, but we made the enrage timer with 40 seconds or so to spare.  We were feeling cautiously optimistic about Rotface, although the first couple of attempts went poorly as we tried to orient the newer people to the specifics of kiting and joining the oozes.  We hadn't tried it with healing assignments, and were just setting up to make another attempt when the ready check failed - the rogue was AFK, and his friend / housemate / brother or whoever he was (their characters are named similarly, and they were playing from the same location, that's all I really know) said he was having girlfriend issues and he honestly didn't know how long until he was back at keys.

We sat around for a couple of minutes, then deliberated in vent for a while.  Several of our members expressed the opinion that they didn't really expect us to be able to kill Rotface.   After all, while our 25 man raid had killed him two weeks in a row, as did my 10 man team, and made it look easy, the "elite" 10 man group still hasn't gotten Rotface down, and our offtank's guild was still struggling with him on 25 man.  The option was put forth to take our group to TOGC10 instead, since some of the raid had not yet completed the instance on heroic.  After a few grumbles about "old content", we took a vote, and the consensus was to take a 5 minute break, and if the rogue had not returned, head to TOGC.  If he had, we were going to try Rotface a few more times.

When five minutes had come and gone, the raid leader was AFK.  By the time he returned, the rogue was also back, and the Rotface vs. TOGC argument started up again.  The "we're just going to wipe endlessly" crew eventually won, and we headed to the Argent Tournament, prepared to breeze through said "old content".

And failed on Northrend Beasts.  Multiple times.

Again, we did not do healing assignments, which was part of the problem.  The other factor was that many of us had not set foot in TOC since Icecrown was released, and were a bit rusty on the fight mechanics.  We wiped because people weren't killing the snobolds fast enough and healers were getting stunned and unable to keep the tanks alive.  We wiped because people forgot that you don't get the speed boost on Icehowl on heroic mode.  The last wipe happened because I was targeted 5 times in a row for fire bombs, couldn't stand still long enough to heal myself, and died all the way across the arena from where I normally stood.  The resto druid battle rezzed me as Acidmaw and Dreadscale entered the arena, but I was the one who'd been healing the Dreadscale tank on the earlier attempts, and I was standing on the other side of Acidmaw popping my Shadowfiend when he died, and Dreadscale promptly began cruising around the room biting people's heads off.

Alas, we gave up.  Oh well, at least I got my priest her first Ashen Verdict rep ring, some frost badges, and some nice new offset shoulders.  I had 3/5 T9, so I can use them without losing a set bonus.

Oh, and the TOC25 group started up about half an hour late, breezing through the place before we were done with Saurfang.  I didn't have the heart to ask if the Reign of the Unliving dropped.  (Although I do know Death's Verdict dropped, and one of our DK main raiders lost it for the second week in a row, to a non-raider rogue... boy, was he steamed.)