Sunday night was something of a wonder to me. The raid team I’m with is the only raid team I’ve ever been with. I’ve only raided in a laid back and relaxed environment, and so it’s difficult for me to judge the speed and ability of our raid to clear progression compared to a more serious group. That being said, despite members of our raid saying that we’re not good, I feel like our raid is damn good considering the amount of time we spend on content. Two nights a week, 8 hours a week, is not a lot of time to clear content (especially in Throne Thunder’s marathon 12 boss format). That being said, Sunday night was something else.
We’d been fighting hard to finish off all of our farm each week on Wednesdays, and the further we got into Throne of Thunder, the more difficult it was becoming to finish all of the farm bosses on Wednesday so we could spend all of Sunday night on progression. This is especially the case since we began subbing out main raiders for backups on bosses that people had completely farmed out so that we could gear up our subs. So far, though, we’d been able to manage it (though sometimes by the skin of our teeth). On Wednesday we finished off the last boss before progression (Primordius) a mere ten minutes before the end of the night, which poised us nicely for an entire night of Dark Animus fun.
Or so I thought! Turns out the work we’d done on Dark Animus the week before had gotten us to a damn good place, and with a few (hefty) tweaks to our strategy, we downed Dark Animus after a couple warmup pulls like it was nothing. That got us pretty pumped, so we moved on to Iron Qon. The entire time, we joked around and poked fun at raid members, thinking that Iron Qon was going to be the meat of our evening.
Or so we thought! After the first pull, it was evident that Iron Qon wasn’t going to be all that challenging. Lo and behold, we two shot Iron Qon. For the tanks, this boss was incredibly simple. Swap when Impaled. Don’t stand in lines. Easy-peasy. I highly recommend that any tank that is running TellMeWhen or WeakAuras (and everyone should run one of those two add-ons. The information you can get from those frames is just amazing) should just go through and create a frame for every stacking debuff that forces a tank swap. I have one frame set up that tracks those debuffs on Mega, the other tank, which lists on the frame how long the debuff still has and how many stacks. Thanks to this one frame, our tank swaps have been smooth as butter and fights like Iron Qon and Council of Elders are just so much easier. After two-shotting that boss, we were a little shocked. Clearly, Twin Consorts was going to be the meat of the evening then.
As we stood in front of Twin Consorts, our healer extraordinaire, Geo, started explaining the fight. None of us had really done a lot of preparation for this boss, as none of us thought we were going to get this far, so Geo set out explaining about how the fight against the Sun Bitch and Moon Bitch was going to go. At the end of the explanation, he began explaining to our DPS how the constellation mechanic worked, and we began placing raid markers to show where the balls of light would be, however we ran out of raid markers. I helped out by putting down a shaft of moonlight from the Elder’s Moonstone, then ran around Twin Consort to drop a scarecrow in the last spot, and in doing so face-pulled the boss. I began running out of the room to try and reset the boss when Dana, the guild leader, shouted over Mumble to “just do it.” Well alright, then. I turned around, picked up the boss, and started doing my tanking thing. A few minutes into the fight, though, we realized that one of our raiders, Bojax, had put himself on follow with one of our Mages. During the discussion of the boss, he’d left to answer a phone call! At the end of the first pull, we wiped with about 40% health left on the boss with one of our raid members on follow after a face-pull, no pre-pot, and no lust. We were feeling good about this fight, too.
At the end of the night, we downed three progression bosses and had 10 pulls on Lei Shen! Going into this night, I had every intention of suggesting to the raid that we extend the lockout this week so we could spend more time on progression, but after Sunday night, when Dana called for a vote on whether to extend the lockout, my answer was a definitive “No.” And in the back of my head, I wondered if this was what it was like to be in a “good” raid team.
ShotRdin 