/ Happy Dance

I'd managed not to blog about it, as it would have been a very boring string of emotes along the lines of:

/squee
/eek
/crai

You get the general idea - but we went to 10 man Naxx for the first time last night... After obligatory insanity "Boss? If it's set to Heroic does that mean it's setting us up for 25-man?" "Oh fuck, that's why those mobs looked numerous... right...everybody out.." Exit raid. Re-set to Normal. Re-enter. Ah, kk, now there's like 10 spiders not 30...

Both Nao and I, being the good little raiders that we are, had spent a fair degree of time reading and watching strategy, both from a healzor perspective and from a tank one. It's one of the few times that I'm glad I'd trusted my gut instinct of 'we can do this' and ignored Bane's diktat that we were going to try Anub'Rekhan and look at Grand Widow Faerlina and that was all and researched all the bosses in the Spider Quarter. Because, umm, we cleared them all. Yeah the big spider-queen Maexxna as well /happy dance (with a soupcon of /I told you so dance too). Both Anub'Rekhan and the Widow we got down on the first go, due to a positioning error, Maexxna took two goes. Doing your homework is A Good Thing, kids.

So the healing, well it wasn't much of a struggle (the raid gods will now smite me on Monday for my foolish-mortal arrogance, I know...) I think our healing set up of priest (me) on MT (Nao), resto druid (Cat) on OT (Simon) and shaman (Nip) on the raid was an excellent set-up. I'm so used to healing Nao I do it without thinking (then I looked at my /played time and realised why the other day and then had a small zomgwtfbbq /weep at the number of days) the druid HoTs are fantastic (for Maexxna's webwrap, chucking a Lifebloom on the tank as webwrap hits means that, spectacularly during the wrap, his life ticks up which is bloody epic as far as I'm concerned) and the raid heals a shaman has are also superb. We also initiated Nip into the healzor channel, one of the guild's best kept secrets /grin. Yeah I blew my Guardian Spirit cooldowns a lot, but better safe than sorry and I think Nao used his Lay of Hands once (twice maybe?). And the healing meters, terrible things that they are (and without exception, all the points made there I agree with!) but y'know, me and the overheals thing and my ongoing battle... unsuprisingly as I am a priest and was healing Nao I hit the top but my over-heal was only 41.9%, which for me, especially after not having raided for 3 months, isn't bad. I didn't go OOM which was a relief - Cat and I were talking theorycrafting the other day, well, I say 'talking' she was blinding me with science whilst I tried to keep up (I suck at math therefore theorycrafting for me is hard work) and the accepted wisdom is that your spellpower to mp5 whilst in combat should be 5:1. Now my spellpower is 2k (too high tbh) and my mana regan is... shameful. But thank goodness for the wonderousness that is buff food, buffs and flasks, which took it up to a much better 400 mp5 while casting! Plus of course, I love my pet.

Anyways, so the Spider Wing Cleared we moseyed off the the Plague Wing. Noth the Plaguebringer, well I'd love to say that I had read up on this but even my self-belief would only carry me so far and I hadn't assumed that we'd clear the first Wing so quickly. Aside from the annoying adds and the threat wipe on teleport this was a long fight but nothing particularly hard to heal though, but by then it was getting late and my concentration had wandered slightly I admit. But again, he went down on the first attempt. Then we got Heigan. Now I gather this boss is famous in raid circles for making you do the dance all over the room. Ahem. Sorry rephrase. For wiping the raid in seconds. It was such utter pwnage that the laughter down vent didn't stop until a while after we ressed everyone. Ok quick re-group, the whole explanation again and umm, well, it took a bit longer for all of us to die this time. Now I know that I need to go watch the fight a few times because the safe zones are a pattern but when I'm healing, all I do is look at health bars so my awareness of the fight is very limited. So, y'know, even though Bane has a big blue square over his head I wasn't really sure where to go, and yeah, follow the mark is a simple instruction, I know...

Bane, however, depraved man that he is, was delighted. By the wipe-age. Uh-huh. He said that finally here was a challenge (no arguments here) but at that point, as we'd been going for nearly 4 hours, he called it. We shall return on Monday... after I've spent some time here watching a lot of fights. But for a first attempt? Not too shabby at all. Mind you, it would have been interesting if we'd have left it set to Heroic mode now, wouldn't it?