First Guild Raid
So, for the first guild raid of the expansion, we went in 2/4/14. We originally planned to be a little overcomped on healers, but we wound up with more DPS showing than expected(Which is odd, cus some of the people we expected didn’t even show).
Took down Teloc in one shot. Mother took 3 attempts. The first wipe was due to a DPS not going through the forcefield in the first group, causing casts to go off. Second wipe was because we trickled people through too slowly, and the third pull was really smooth.
From there, we went to Devourer, which we one shot rather easily. Did have a minor fluke where I had a lag spike on pull and my heroic leap only went 5 yards, so one of the healers happened to get one shot by the first Thrash, lol. But we recovered with a quick BRez and my reposition as my net smoothed out. Glad to say that even in phase 2, I can take all of those Thrash hits without having to swap with the other tank, since I can align my CDs to come back just at about 50%. As we kill him faster, I can probably save the CDs in the first half, so that strategy should stick fine, although on Heroic it might be another story.
Vectis is where I expected us to get caught, but amazingly, we downed him in only 2 pulls. That really impressed me, because even the coordinated pugs I tried him on absolutely struggled with the incoming damage, but we really took it like champs. Finally managed to actually make effective use of Rallying cry for the entire raid here, so that was exciting. Protip: The 3 group strategy works really well, and I wish PUGs would stop trying to just one group the damn fight.
And from there, we moved to Zek’Voz, although we had a few people drop after Vectis. We were down to a normal 2/4/12 comp though, so we didn’t worry much. Zek’Voz took a few attempts, but each one was reasonable progression, aside from just a bad fluke on the 4th pull, where the raid lead was so busy calling mechanics out, he didn’t realize the eye beam was actually on him. It was absolutely hilarious. Aside from that, the first pull was a first phase wipe to eye beam, second pull was a third phase wipe to the first corruption orb, third pull was again, a third phase wipe, although it was *very* close to the kill. Fourth pull was the raid lead’s screw up, and the fifth pull was a very smooth kill.
Zul...we lost a few more people and were down to 2/4/10, and only gave it a few shots. By this point, we’d been in the raid for over 3 hours between explanations, wipes, trash clearing, joking around between pulls, and short breaks,so we wound up calling it after the 2 attempts. Again, I was surprised, because we managed to actually phase him on the 2nd attempt, although his debuff was absolutely shredding through us with how long the first phase took.
Aside from myself and the raid lead, nobody else had actually been in the raid to the best of my knowledge. It was the first time I even met the co-tank, but he worked really well with me...definitely knew what he was doing, which is a nice change of pace from most of the tanks I met back in Legion. I pugged in early because I was helping the RL out behind the scenes, giving him a tank perspective to complement his healer/DPS perspective(Discipline priest, so he kinda deals with both sides) on the fight.
Overall, I feel like the guild has really taken a good step, especially from where we were in Legion. Having a raid lead that actually takes lead properly is a huge improvement, and I’m very glad the GM decided to actually designate someone.
