Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Firefighter

I've been away for a while.
In that time I've made a transatlantic flight, spent time with my family (on both sides of the Pond), worked a fair bit and played WoW. LOTS of WoW. My DK is now 71 and my warrior is 74. I am still raiding with probably the most amazing group of people on the server (Feathermoon-US, for those of you that didn't know) and enjoying the hell out of it. Our latest masochistic experiment is Firefighter, also known as Mimiron Hard Mode.
We have been seriously working on it for two weeks totalling about six hours in the little midget's room. We've made various tweaks to our strategy, the most significant being at the beginning of yesterday's attempts when our raid leaders decided that it would improve our chances of beating the enrage timer to roll with two healers instead of three.
So I put on my kitty gear and proceeded to fill the spot of last DPS. I was happy with my numbers at the end of the night but not so much with my performance. I died a couple of times to avoidable damage, stood in too much fire in phase 2 and overtaxed the healers. I think Ritavu put it best when he said:
The good news is that we seem to have a winning formula that we have to execute. The bad news is that it seems like the threshhold for attention and focus is so high that it's just unsustainable over any extended period of time.
And he's right. Two-and-a-half hours after starting on Mimiron, we decided that we needed a break and went to take down Thorim normal mode. The arena group wiped. We were all so mentally exhausted that we made silly mistakes. Trism (our paladin healer in the arena) got too much arena mob attention and died. I took too long to rebirth him and he never caught back up with the damage being doled around. Keep in mind that this is a fight we have had on farm status for more than two months. Next we attempted a Hodir speed kill since we still have an elemental shaman that is lusting after the shield in his frozen cache. We tried three times. Each time someone different died. On the last attempt, I popped berserk, stood in Starlight and got the storm cloud buff all at about the same time. I got aggro and died. I blame being tired but I really should have been a lot more careful.
We learned enough though that I think we will certainly get Mimiron next week. And there will be much rejoicing.