Raiding continues

Okay so we went to ICC again last night ...

We downed Lord Marrowgar on our third attempt at him with a bit of go-go juice in the tank and only one of us flat on the floor pixelated at the end of the fight (not counting the two battle rez's during the fight). We were most impressed and decided in a moment of comunal forgetfulness to ingore the somewhat ignoble wipe we had on one of the trash mobs at the start of our second run. At that point, I was asked by a mate if they thought we'd get there and, well, you can imagine my response. I had expected to have to work a couple more tries so was a little surprised to get him down. Both loot items were hunter gear and so the one hunter in the group was, to say the least a little happy and as we are all about the same with our gearing, and we are all pretty cool guildies, none of us had a bad word to say about that outcome.

oh I would so like a new weapon for my tree. She still weilds the titansteel guardian and a book. I don't know if bosses are frightened by a tree waving a book. I rather suspect that they laugh at her instead.

Rather than stopping there we decided to roll on to Lady Deathwisper and have a 'cuppa tea' with her and a bit of a natter. Instead her adds and trash handed out butts to us on a platter. We gave it two goes and then admitted that while it was nice that one of the guildies was able to talk us through the fight, nothing beat being battered one week and going back the next to exact revenge in a similar way to beating the Lord some half hour or so earlier. I did hear a story of someone being able to down the ICC bosses in not much more than an hour ... my thought ... yerrrr right ... show me the logs so to speak.

I'm not sure how my healing is going. I tend to spec tallents for mana regen/threat reduction and haste over crit and then gem for spell power as I use a lot of HoT and while crit is nice, not running out of mana and keeping out of the eye of the boss so that I can get in one more cast I sort of feel is a little more important. Even though we are not maxed on hp or anything like that (can you max your health? good question ... I don't know but our health as a group is mmm growing) it is not often that I find myself wishing for a bit more health on a tank so long as the healers are doing their job. Anyway, last night the MT healer (the pally healer) ran at about 30 - 35% of the healing, the raid healer at about 25% I think and me a little under that so my first reaction was hmmm third in the healing. But ... I then looked at the overhealing stats and saw the same pattern. Does this suggest that although I'm not outputting as many heals as the other two, more of them are actually being effectively used by the system to top up a character's health or are the other two better healers because they output more heals than I do. I can shift a few tallents around in my build to pick up mastershape shifter, I've always avoided as you need 3 points in shapeshifter that just reduce the mana consumed in shapeshifting (which is sparrow fartish small in the first place) to gain a 2% bonus in my healing of master shapeshifting. There is another tallent I can pick up that gives nourish and healing touch bonuses I've avoided in the past as those two tended to be less used spells. I do use nourish in raids more often so it may now be worth my while picking them up. I suppose I could finally dual spec, one for my day to day and instance work and one for raids. hmmm dunno.... but I've also not answered my own question about whether or not I think I'm a better healer as I'm not over healing as much. I use to watch the over heal stats like a hawk and try to keep them as low as possible in instances pushing my timing on HoT on the theory that a good player manages their resourcse and over healing represented wasted mana. Now I don't bother and just spam HoT giving the tank in particular a slightly inflated sense of invincibility by rarely not having full health.

raiding

Well we finally stuck our noses into ICC. Completely inexperienced we got the boss down to about 1/5th of his hp on our second of three wipes. The MT pally healer was 'embarrassed' that we wiped 3 times on the first boss and then called it (the wiping apparently was the embarrassing bit). That just cheesed me off as we'd all gone in knowing that we wanted to have a look but also knowing that we really should be only in maybe EoE or somewhere like that. We were inexperienced as a group both at raiding but also raiding as a group. ... some had raided ICC with pugs. Which part of all that spelt 'walk in the park' to the pally healer. The fact that she seemed to think that all she had to do was heal the MT and not worry about herself and was the first healer dead each time leaving a pair of inexperienced druid heals. grrrr. When I did throw a few heals at her I got told not to bother, she'd be right ... go figure.

what did I say in my last post about raids having nobs on?

The positive of the night was that people just generally went in with a suck it and see approach and enjoyed them selves.