Illidan down, srsly

Now, that was as rewarding a kill as we've had in a long, long time. I confess that I had my doubts. And they were mostly about me and my ability to do my job FR tanking in Phase 2. Phase 2 is known to be the bottleneck and it really is a pain in the ass. You could say that we spent the last 3 days waiting for me to learn my job. Then everything else fell into place pretty quickly.

The Phase 2 tanking isn't really trivial, although I had hoped I'd get the feel for it more quickly. You have a small useable area to kite-tank the elemental around while it leaves high-dmg flame patches on your last position every ~10s. You move around "painting" the area and trying to keep track of where safe places remaining to stand are, while making sure you don't trigger the enrage either by getting too far from the glaive or the other elemental. You have to deal with the fact that about 30% of the time, the entire screen is invisible due to the flame spell effects. One of the things that came slowly, was building up a mental map of the tanking space in my head so I could maneuver basically blind -- I knew roughly where the next safe place was and as long as I wasn't disoriented, I could get there without seeing the screen.

You also learn the edge of the fire patch effect and get better at minimizing the fire dmg. That's an incremental thing where minor mistakes just use up a little more healing. But the stupid Eye Beam is not incremental. You have to spot its spawn, identify the trajectory, identify the next safe place and get there *fast*. And there's a little bit of adjusting to the other tank's eye beam. When Dethno was dodging (and he was better at it than I was), I'd move my elemental to the inner ridge to reduce the enrage possibility and I'm sure he was doing the same.

By the last pulls, I was starting to plan my kiting path from the beginning so I'd know where I'd be when the Eye Beam first spawned to get maximum time to react and intentionally leaving the inner ring open to move to if it went to Dethno's side first. I was also getting the hang of running blind into the spell effects on a hunch there was a safe spot on the other side. Eventually, it was working. Other than one random mis-timing (I was too close and with my back to the Eye Beam spawn point and died), we got Phase 2 pretty much under control by the end of last night.

And everybody else learned their jobs quick. I was very briefly worried after the 3% wipe and a couple of subs we had to make (late subs can be raid killers), but we had experienced people ready to jump in and pulled it together.

As an aside, I'd like to bitch that this fight is really Blizzard busting out the hate on the tanks. Not only do we get to farm up a full set of FR gear (spending badges or money other people don't have to), but Phase 2 is just plain mean. Nobody but the 2 FR tanks has to do anything complicated --- forcing us to react to the eye beams on top of the kite-tanking and adjusting to each other's positioning is harsh. I'm guessing every guild that killed Illidan went through a long phase of everybody just waiting and watching the FR tanks wipe the raid over and over. And any casual-style guild with rotating tanks is going to suffer even more.

None of the other notable boss fights are as particularly harsh on the tanks. Vashj, Kael'thas, Archimonde, even Illidari Council are all hard on everybody without particularly singling out a couple of resist tanks for abuse. But at least we managed it in the end.

The other thing I can mention is that last night's victory "feels" slightly different from my perspective as nominal GL of versus nominal main organizer of l8raid. I always felt a sense of pride in "my peeps" when l8raid managed a new victory and maybe it's a little more so today because we're together in the guild.

I'm moved to briefly reflect on the brief history of Noc. About 5-6 weeks ago, I had given up pretty much on l8raiding following some less-than-promising extra-puggy raids on Lady Vashj (my sense was that even as we got the technical aspects down, we didn't have the dps to finish it because a lot of our best dps was worn out from pug raiding). We were farming bears in ZA and running alt-KZ for random amusement while waiting on the patch and expac. I decided it was finally time to pull the trigger on the new guild. I wanted to help hold our group together and also thought it might boost morale a little bit in anticipation of the expansion.

The reponse was actually a bit more than I expected, more people flowed in to join. But I sensed a little bit of "cool to join the new guild" that didn't necessarily predict we'd be raiding again soon. But that's ok, forming the new guild was exciting on it's own.

Then 3.0 hit with the buffs to players and nerfs to bosses. And achievements. Achievements presented the possibility of going back to the Old World for killing some overlooked bosses and a reason to do it. Thinking it'd be fun and good for general morale, we fired up those raids and it was indeed great fun. We mostly rolled, but found a few tricky points that made us actually stop and think for a minute. But only a minute or small handful of attempts. MC, BWL and AQ40 all cleared in a week (one night-ender in BWL at Flamegor, one night-ender in AQ40 at Twins).

The raids were full, people were laughing and we had some momentum. So the next natural step was back to the T5's where we could try Vashj & Kael'thas in their nerfed state. I think it took us 2 nights on each of those, but one week later we had a bunch of people with the title, an unexpected bonus. The following week, we followed our momentum back into Mt Hyjal. I confess I was nervous. I had been unable to fill a MH raid a few weeks earlier -- would the fatigued raiders be willing to dive back in? Yes, and we cleared easily to Archimonde. And there we hit our roadblock. We wiped for a few nights, feeling occasionally close but no cigar. IIRC, we went back another week but ended up redirecting back to the T5 instances as an achievement favor for people who missed the first ones.

Bloc had been agitating for more Black Temple. It was supposed to be easy now, he pointed out. Other similar groups like OotC were plowing ahead there, maybe we can too. But I thought our new-found excitement to raid was largely achievement-driven and really, what are the odds we'd beat Illidan if we couldn't beat Archimonde?

With one week left before the expansion, we came back to BT. On our first raid night, Tuesday, Gurtogg was our first new victory there in a long time -- we hadn't set foot in the instance in at least a month or more. On Thursday, we pushed through Reliquary of Souls, Teron, Mother Shahraz and stopped with wiping on the Illidari Council. On Saturday, we beat the Council and found ourselves at Illidan but got no traction. Sunday we came back and wiped for 2 more hours. Monday we came back one more time and on the very last pull of the night (the warlock tank announced he was passing out after that pull regardless), we finally put everything together and somehow we won again. 5 raid nights, 6 new bosskills and 1 major achievement: Black Temple cleared.

A nice start to our little guild. Working together for 3 solid nights of occasionally-frustrating moments ought to be a preview of what we'll see in Naxx and beyond. With hopefully lots of more similarly gratifying achievements, too.