OS+1D

Last evening I went to OS with my guild in order to try Sartharion with one drake up. The last time my guild managed to do OS+1, I was not in the raid and they had a tank from outside the guild tank for them.
This time it was an all guild run and after a few learning wipes we managed to do it and I got the achievement :)

At first we had some tries where we tried to clear the whelps from each portal before DPS-ing the mini-boss or even go into the portal to kill eggs, but those tactics didn't work well. Inside the portal the eggs are spread out so it is hard to get all or even most of them down in time. Outside the portal, the OT had his hands full with the mini-boss and the whelps proved to be a bit of the problem to take down - hunters would shoot only to get agro and get a face full of whelps, therefore being forced to melee. We had a mage who died several times when he tried to AoE and go agro. Whelp agro on clothy = dead clothy :)

The way which finally worked for us was to nuke the mini-boss as fast as possible, before the whelps became too much. We wiped once when DPS was a bit slow and the OT healer didn't manage to keep him up but the second time we tried we managed, including a quick heal from me on the OT (I was MT healing). Once the boss was down the tank could concentrace on the keeping agro on the whelps (without dying from the combined DPS of too many whelps + mini-boss) while the DPS were free to AoE them down.

Of course once the mini-boss and whelps were down the fight becomes trivial and we quickly got Sartharion down as well, to the sound of much cheering :)
I even got lucky and won the 22 slot bag - pretty soon everyone in the guild will have one :)

From a healing standpoint, our Shammie healer had his hands full healing the party (they were taking quite a lot of damage) as well as helping with the OT, while trying not to die to the whelps and fire adds. I think his job was the hardest, I certainly didn't feel very strained in healing the MT although I had to be on my toes - either because he is a DK or just because of the nature of the fight, damage on him was pretty spiky and his life could quickly go down if I missed a heal (e.g. when I tried to help with the OT).

As a group we still need to practise the fight, sometimes people still get cought in the fire walls. Once we do the current mini-boss a few more times we'll be ready to try out a harder mini-boss or even OS+2 which will be really hard :)

Solidfaith, Champion of the Frozen Wastes

Last evening my guild downed Malygos again and this time I was there. Finally I can remove that silly Jenkins title and use the much better Champion of the Frozen Wastes one :)

OS+3D

Wow, I haven't blogged in a long time have I? :)

Well TBH nothing much has been going on. I've slowed down leveling Solidstar and instead have been busy doing heroics and daily quests with Solidfaith in order to get his reputation with the various factions us. It's a slow process and there's nothing much to tell about. I usually do the heroics with a paladin tank from my guild who is a really good player - his character on our guild is actually an alt of his. His main is a druid tank on one of the best 25man guilds on our server, one of the (very) few who have managed to down Sartharion-25 with 3 drakes up. More on that in a bit...

On the guild front things have also been slow. Now that we've cleared the content I can't really post about new boss kills :) We are still suffering from a tank shortage - our remaining tanks are good enough for Naxx but not really up to Sar+1D. So we're not doing much except re-clearing Naxx every week. This is good for gearing up (Solidfaith now has the complete T7 outfit) but is a bit boring.

Now to the subject line of this post and the reason I am writing today:
Last evening I was not raiding (got in a bit late and the guild had the 3 healers they needed) when I got a whisper from my friend's main, the druid I wrote about above. It seems he was organizing a PuG to go do OS+3d and wanted me to come heal.
Now, the very idea of a doing a raid in a PuG is usually something I avoid like the plague and the thought of even trying to do the hardest raid in the game in a PuG mights seem laughable. Only in this case my friend was bringing in people from some of the best raiding guilds in the server (I was by far the least geared and experienced raider there). Basically he had a few friends here and there, they looked up people from their own guilds and friends list and pretty soon we had a run going.

Considering how hard OS+3 is it is not amazing we wiped and did not manage eventually do to it. What is amazing is how long the raid lasted and how pro all the people were about it. We must have been in there for 3 hours straight and there was not a single AFK. Wipe after wipe everybody would simply release, run back in, quickly get health and mana up and be ready. I'm sure we did easily over 20 attempts, and the repair bill for even cloth wearers like myself was over 150g easily. People owned up to mistakes, tempers did not flare up and everyone was focused on getting the fight done.

That raid, for all the wipes and the fact that we didn't manage to do what we set out, was one of the most intensive and fun nights I have had in a long time in WoW. I'm not sure I'm up for that 4 times a week - but as a one time deal it was pretty sweet :)

Solidstar Dings 74, Malygos Down

So Solidstar dinged 74 a few days ago, following a few quests in Dragonblight.

Leveling as blood vs. frost feels significantly easier and since I've learned the trick to use Dancing Rune Weapon and follow it up with Death & Decay I can down groups of mobs insanely fast as 2x(D&D) on mobs takes down their health like you wouldn't believe :)

Malygos 10-man has been downed by my guild, again I missed the raid :( But I'm happy for the guild and really it was only a matter of time as we were taking him down to below 10% on a regular basis so it was really only a question of getting slightly faster on phases 1+2 and doing the tactic of phase 3 correctly, all of which are just a matter of gear+practise.

Now that my guild has cleared all the 10-man content all that remains is to do the harder versions of OS+2/3 and gear up in preparation of patch 3.1.