Not quite

In spite of the best efforts of everybody involved, the battle with Archimonde did not go to our advantage last night. We did work up to one very promising pull, but 41% was the best we reached.

It's just a touchy fight were any one player can screw up and wipe the raid. I personally wiped the raid myself on the first pull by fumbling the basic tanking buttons and failing to generate any noticeable threat. After about an hour of practice, we took a short break and then did 2-3 "no dps" pulls where we just had people work on survival techniques. After seeing a nice solid 3.5m of no deaths, we went back to regular dps and promptly failed to make it back to 2m. D'oh.

Until we realized that Tremor Totem is only a group wide buff, I was starting to get concerned that I had made a major mistake in volunteering to MT since I couldn't berserker out of the fear. But once we corrected that, the fear was no issue at all, I think.

The basic problem was just what it was before -- the fire. Even when people remembered to run away from the boss and avoid it aggressively, it does switch targets and snake around the raid a bit. And it's very hard to perfectly protect yourself from getting feared into the fire. Plus between the fear and running from the fire, people often found themselves out of range of their decurser and/or healer. Somehow, everybody has to find a way to virtually guarantee that they just won't die.

Personally, I find myself annoyed now at having 2 running nights of doing nothing but dying repeatedly. So tonight, I think we might try a run into KZ to kill the new boss. And maybe I can find time for Hawksy and I to go 2-man Onyxia. I'm fairly certain we can kill her together, although it might take a little while. That should provide revenge and also a lot of data on how my dps/healing stacks up to what I'll need to solo it and how to cope with Phase 2 & 3 (which I didn't see a lot of on Wednesday).

But first I have a lot of trick-or-treating to do tonight, and then probably a lot of candy eating. Which will get my kids all wired up on sugar and delay their bedtime and probably my arrival online time. I ought to be on eventually, but it's a bit unpredictable when on Halloween.