A Tribute to Insanity

Although my guild raids 25man ToC and so has good gear and although we had a team who already downed Anub'arak in Heroic 10-man ToC, I have, until last night, failed to take him down. Nor has any team of the guild managed to do a wipe-free ToC-10 heroic till last night.

Every time, a combination of slightly weak DPS, bad tanking, not enough healing (this was usually the cause) or just bad luck kept me from getting the Anub'arak kill with the group I was in. Bad luck was hounding me..

Thankfully, last night as I said my luck changed, and quite dramatically. It started when we only had 2 tanks online so couldn't raid the 25-man Heroic ToC. It was therefore decided to raid 10man, both normal and heroic, with a single group. At this point I had to go offline for some Real Life stuff but I when I came back the group to the heroic instance was being organized and I was offered a spot. I was also asked to change my off-spec to Shadow (I was disc off-spec) so I could DPS on the last boss.

I don't think when we started, anyone had any special expectations, although we had our guild's top 2 tanks, 2 of the top healers with myself as a third (not as good alas) helper and some of our best DPS. The other 2 healers apart from me were a Paladin with Valanyr and a Druid with incredibly good HPS output.

We passed our first potential wipe point, which is the Worms encounter part of the Beasts fight, with no problems: e.g. no deaths due to the usual people with Burning Bile running into other people or stuff like that. It was really good to see everyone on top of their game like that. Icehowl also was not a problem as everyone managed to avoid each and every one of his charges (if only we could reliably do the same in the 25man Heroic version...).

Having downed Beasts with 50 remaining attempts we got ready for good old L.J. Here the discipline (and damage output) of our DPS team made the difference with every portal and volcano being taken down ASAP. Luckily for us the group we got for Faction Champions was not one of the harder ones (no ret-pally or Fury Warrior) which is probably the major reason why we managed to get to Twins with 50 tries remaining. Twins also didn't prove to be a barrier and finally we got to Anub'arak.

We started with the usual tactic of using only 2 healers so our damage would be high enough to push him to phase 3 after only one borrow. However unlike in the past this time I prepared my alternative action bars with a selection of healing spells and as soon as he we entered phase 3 I stopped DPSing and started healing. Sure this was a gamble (and not asked for by the raid leader) but it was a chance I was willing to take, since I believed our problems in the past had always been due to losing people due to Penetrating Cold. Well I was right, all went smoothly and finally, not only did I get the achievement for killing Anub'arak Heroic-10 and clearing ToC Heroic-10, but I also got at the same time the Tribute to Insanity.

Now personally I don't think it was that insane, just a combination of very good gear, following tactics to the letter and no one making any mistakes. But it was certainly fun and I was happy to be a part of it, even though the iLvl 258 cloak that dropped was a tanking one and not the healer one ;)