A Romp Through SSC

Last night my guild joined another to go to SSC. I was asked to come as a healer so I can't comment on mage DPS in there, except from looking at Recount and seeing how other mages did.

At least one mage in my guild whom I know to have good gear and a good grasp of mages was specced Arcane and came up only 5th or so in the raid, not bad but not brilliant either. First 2 places were hunters and the third was, hold your breath, a Retribution Paladin. Nerf! :)

Trash were a blast, people rarely died (unlike before the patch) and the trash went down amazingly fast. The new CoH was sweet to use, I used up mana like there is no tomorrow but it healed like crazy.

Hydross was 1-shotted. We went through 3 phase changes before he was down and luckily all DPS managed to stop in time and not pull agro to the wrong side. The new AoE abilities of all the tanks I am sure helped a lot in tanking the adds.

Lurker started out badly, the tank somehow got knocked back, causing some melee to get agro and die. Also a few people didn't jump in the water fast enough and died from the spout. Luckily the fight was easy enough that the rest of us managed to recover and finish the fight.

From there we continued to Morogrim, wiping a couple of times on trash. Even in a nerfed raid tanks need to make sure people are ready and wait if healers are still rezzing people... Anyway Morogrim himself was easy, easier I think than Lurker. The ability of tanks to AoE-tank meant none of the healers was ever in real danger from the murlock adds.

Karathress was next and again we wiped on trash... hasty pulls ftl :(
But thankfully the boss himself was a snap. I managed to die to the spitfire totem while healing the MT but the other healers on the MT didn't have a problem keeping him up even near the end and once the raid finished the last add and went on the boss, he went down quickly.

Last for the evening was Leotheras. Of course, you guessed it, we wiped on trash on way to him. Sigh. By this time everyone was getting a bit tired (~3 hours since raid start) and making mistakes so we wiped the first time, mostly since we couldn't keep the warlock tanking the demon phase alive (he was BR several times during the fight). We tried again but failed. Third time, the warrior MT simply continued to tank him during his demon phase and we managed to do it, although just barely. Most made it alive to the final stage where he splits up (I even managed to kill my inner demon) but the demon form started fire-blasting random people and killed about half the raid before they managed to bring down the humanoid form.

We decided to call it a night after Leo and not try Vashj as it was getting late for most people. Also being a complex fight, she will probably wipe us a few times and it's best to try her fresh.

For a couple of guilds full of people who had barely set foot into SSC in the past, this was a fantastic night. Both Karathress and Leotheras were first kills for the vast majority of people. However in no way did I feel SSC was trivial for us, as evidenced by the multiple trash wipes. Yes it had become very easy, but it was still possible for individuals to die or even for the raid to wipe on both trash and bosses. So there was definitely a feeling of challenge there, even if it was mostly in keeping our mistakes from killing us ;)

Overall I enjoyed the run, I even got some new epic shoulders which should help me a bit while leveling :)