Scaling the Firelands

Success in raiding this weekend.

Day one we were short, so we got a couple of guildies together and took down Cho’gall and some other older content. Fun and easy. 

Even better was day two. We stepped into the Firelands without even a single piece of trash down. Two hours later, we already had our normal two bosses down AND were taking down Lord Rhyolith for the first time!  Nice. 

Some trash later, and we ended up getting about four attempts on Baleroth the Gatekeeper. I don’t think all of us were fresh on the fight video (I watched it, but weeks ago), and I think we’ll do well when we next go at it. 

It was also a good gear weekend. Chillhand bought valor gloves for tanking, purchased a tanking beck off the AH following a sale of an engineering gun, and got a Scales of Life trink from a lucky trash drop. Plus a couple of ret offspec pieces from boss drops no one needed for main. Wow.

Scales of Life is interesting. It saves up overheals, which you can use once per minute to heal up to 17k. Very nice IF you are being overhealed at least once per 20 seconds–otherwise the ‘Light as a Feather’ buff drops and using the trinket will do nothing. So if you are being healed in most fights it is great; but not all. 

For instance, in Beth’tilac I was up above. Beth hits hard and I was being healed by Teo on his disc priest. So naturally between her crazy hard hits, no other healer in range, and shield healing, I wasn’t being overhealed at all. So only the stam on the trunk was useful at that point-which, being 91 higher than the Symbiotic Worm, is still substantial. 

When it was available, it was nice to know that I could do a solid self-heal every minute or so. I have added a Power Aura WITH a buff timer to use this trinket better. I am also tying to start boss fights with a self-cast overheal. 

Interesting items like the Scales are among the things that, beyond my guild, keep the game fun. 

Bye Bye Beth’tilac

Paranoid took out Shannox and Beth’tilac over the weekend. 

Day one was rough. Ripp came in on his bear tank. With his high dodge it was best for him to take the boss to lower the number of stacks he would have.  I would then take the dog. 

I too would get stacks, but it is slightly easier for my stacks to drop due to the extra leg of the trip the dog took to get back to me. 

That us fine except for two things: one, both tanks were new to their job. Two, one of the tanks had no tools for the job.

That would be me. I had no tools for the job. By that I mean I had no slows. You need to slow the dog during his trip or the stacks just won’t drop off often enough. to be fair, I don’t think bear tanks would have slows either. I tried the dazing shield glyph but Blizzard in its wisdom made the dog immune to slows via daze. 

In turn this means that the DPS had to help me slow the dog.  That meant having to switch targets. We didn’t get him down on day one. 

However we did get him down on day two, and early. So we moved on to Beth’tilac. I was up above with Hyp healing and Skove adding damage. We got her down on our third attempt, with Skove (and I) able to get her to about 75% for phase two.

I found that if I was quick on the button, I could taunt another spider down even as I was climbing the web.  This helped Rubb, who was in charge of making sure all the spiders were down and doing less damage.

Anyway, with her down fairly quickly we moved to Lord Rhyolith. Fun fight but we are just learning the dance.  I was on adds; Ripp was in cat form.  Lots of adds, lots of damage needing to be done.