Another week of two raids and new boss kills

Not being able to play WoW right now I figure it's a good chance to actually, you know, write something about WoW. Especially since I do have so awesome news to share. It'll be at the end.

Sneak peak to my exiting news

The past few weeks I've been raiding with Shadow Rising on Tuesdays and Wednesdays on my death knight and immediately after the raid on Wednesdays along with on Thursday and Sunday it's off to raid on my warlock with Spoiled milk.

So let's start with Tuesday night.
Shadow Rising was starting to feel the push for completing all of ToT before the patch and decided that this week we'd start with extending our raid ID. The furthest boss we had was for Durumu. So Duru is where we started. Arv and I were tanking and I was desperately trying to remember how the fights went from a tanking perspective. And I don't think I was the only one trying to remember all the steps to the fight. We needed a few trys but then we had him. Primordious fell over and it was off to Dark Animus. The raid needed to adjust the setup since different golems were broken and I knew this time my job wouldn't be to stand around looking pretty. That was Sorak's. But it wasn't difficult either. It was kill my two golems then grab Slice's to wake the Massive one. There were a few fumbles but it made the plan really set in my mind. I started with popping my ghoul and my runic weapon for the extra dps help and the extra protection it'd provide. I also knew with the Massive I could slow down the build of stacks by using anti-magic shell. I've been dying to try it. It just seems so unfair that pallys can eliminate all the stacks of debuffs all the time so I was really excited to at least slow it down. But then I learnt something really cool. By preventing one stack there's enough time between hits that by the time there's another explosive slam my stack will be gone. SWEET!!! Score for the death knight! Highest stack once I realized that was 2-3. Before I got good timing with my anti-magic shell I had let the stack get up to 5 or 6. I don't remember seeing a debuff from the dark animus other then anima ring which the dps do a good job of collecting. Maybe if/when we're doing this fight again and I'm tanking I'll suggest that I hold the massive the whole time unless Arv gets a stack of the anima ring because I really hate that tank swap.

Alright, onward and upward. It was finally time to take down the Iron Qon. The second phase cyclones had been given us a lot of trouble the last times we were fighting him and I know that while I had started the night alright but the end I was so nervous they were giving me fits. This time I reminded myself to stay calm. I'm not one for finding a path and making a mad dash. I pick and choose when to cross each spot. I was also a tank so I knew I could survive one and even two hits of cyclones although I did want to try and advoid that. It took a few trys but once we had gotten him though that phase the rest of the fight was fairly easy.

How to get a screenshot with everyone in it
Get them while they're eating

It was now time to tackle the twins. Unfortunately they were putting up a bit of a fight and we couldn't get them before it was time to end the raid. So Wednesday night we went in prepared to take them down. Wok was on so I was off the hook for tanking duty and could now show off my dwing frostiness. It was exciting for me. No one really knew how to run the constellations so we left them pretty much alone. There were a few that got off but not all of them. But we managed to win the fight without much of the celestial's aid.

Now it was time for Lei Shen. It's a complicated fight. For the intermission I'm not sure where everyone was but I was in the plate corner with Zug and Van. We did pretty good. I figured since the goal is to survive all the damage and there's not really too much stuff that needs to be beat on I'd switch my presence to blood for the extra damage reduction and the extra stamina then switch it back to frost for killing stuff. We spent the night learning the fight and you could see how each try we were improving. Finally it was time to call last pull but despite a rather valiant effort we weren't able to pull off a kill.

Now it was time for me to switch to my warlock and Zug to switch to his monk and it was off to kill stuff with Spoiled Milk. Unlike Shadow Rising, Spoiled Milk raids 3 nights a week so they decided that instead of focusing all 3 nights on Lei Shen that we would start a fresh raid. I think part of that decision is that some of our usual people weren't able to make it. Either way we started out and rushed to kill bosses as quickly as possible. It was a pretty normal evening with a few exceptional things. One is that I was trying to raid with my demonology spec. I've been using destruction since reaching 90 but I've recently I did learn that demonology is a higher dps spec so I decided that I want to start getting more used to it. That way I can have a better idea of what works for me. I saw some improvement on some fights but not on others. The other interesting thing is that I learnt how to kick turtle shells. I've been lucky in that so far there's always been someone else more experienced kick them but that night I was the only ranged aside from a pug hunter so I had to learn. I messed up the first try but being off on my aim causing a wipe. The only good thing is that it was a quick wipe instead of one at less then ten percent. But the next attempt went well. It helped that the raid leader was telling me when to get to the turtle and when to kick. I'm hoping next time I have to kick shells to be able to do it on my own.

Thursday we started at Duru and progressed to twins. Twins wasn't a one shot but I think that was partly my fault. The last time we did the fight our raid leader enhancement shaman ran the constellations. This time I got asked to do it. I had no clue what to do so they did talk me though it before the fight. Still it was a bit difficult. I even made a cheat sheet so I knew going in a bit about the pattern I would need to run. But crane was really hard for me. Something about making a triangle is hard. But I'm really happy I was able to experience and learn a new part to the fight.

Sunday night we went in at Lei Shen and spent the night working on him. I was in a quadrant with Rith, our blood death knight that I think is freaking awesome. I however was a squishy little warlock trying to survive static shocks. I learnt. Each failure I took what I saw, made adjustments and at the end of the night static shock was no longer a threat to me. Sorta. I mean, it could still kill me but I now had several plans in place. Finally it was getting late enough that the raid would need to be called soon. So the raid leader called for the last pull and things were going well. We all made it though the first phase and we were only down two people going into the third. It was going to be close. And then Boom!

Second server kill and first Horde one goes to Spoiled Milk!