Bertman vs the raid - a lovestory

My first post, intended for our officer forum only but I edited it a bit and made it readable for the masses.

This is about our raid on the 23 of October, our second this expac. We had killed the Stone Guards on our previous raid.



So yesterday we were facing Feng and I was getting the “steal shit the boss casts-skill”.

My job in phase one is to steal a skill called “lightning fist” from the boss by casting the “steal shit the boss casts-skill”.

The “steal shit skill” is a channel, so what you have to do is make sure to be channeling it on the other tank that is getting hit by the spell you want to steal. So, Gudran has to get hit by lightning fist AND I have to be channeling the “steal shit skill” on Gudran. Thing is that you have to time it right because the boss is also casting other stuff and if you do it wrong you steal the wrong spell and then you can’t interrupt.

At first I didn’t get anywhere with the stealing but after a while it turned out Gudran wasn’t getting hit because he was standing too close to the boss. Reason he was standing too close is because Gud was tanking him with his back against the wall.

This is quite the normal tank reaction really. Position your back against a wall and the boss can’t kick you away. It wasn’t needed in this fight but it’s just the easiest way to position him right so I don’t blame Gud. At one point I was questioning myself though. I had a hard time with the first boss (being rusty and all) and then this. Had I lost my tanking mojo?

Turns out that after Gud positioned himself differently (not with his back against the wall, but still away from the raid) I could steal the interrupt skill at will. (If he casted it anyway, more on that later).

I’m 100 % certain we got the tanking down for this fight.

Phase one really isn’t that hard, just turn him away from the raid in time after he does the earth quake thingy to avoid lightning fist on the raid and we are golden.

Phase two depends mostly on how good our raid drops the flames really. Gud and me had to do some repositioning on the fly in some of the attempts. On other attempts we fucked the positioning up but after we got more and more into phase two we know where and how to tank him.

Gud got the bubble spell down remarkably fast too.

Phase three is really not that hard from a tank POV, just tank and spank really. (for tanks that is)

Throughout all the phases tanks need to taunt from each other because of debuffs that get applied (taunt on two!) but that’s just good communication and that’s never been a problem between Gud ‘n me.

Anyway, with the tanking in the bag, it’s the other 8 nabs that need to do their job.

I think it took us about an hour to get the tanking right. It could have been faster if Gud wasn’t tanking him with his back against the wall but there was no-way we could have foreseen that.

It’s not mentioned in the movies I saw, and it’s not mentioned on either Maintakadin or Tankspot so yeah…

I think it’s because the fights are so new and most of the general wow populace hasn’t done them outside of LFR.

There just isn’t much info about them. I like it though 

Anyway, after about two hours we were getting reliably to phase 3 unless something weird happened that screwed us over.

Timers didn’t always seem correct in DBM, sometimes the boss would just cast the earthquake thing almost the second he got into phase one without warning.

Things like these led to needless wipes but there is no way around this really. It did slow down progression though.

By the time we got from “getting reliably in phase 3” to “almost killing the motherfucker” we were running out of time.

The second to last attempt was gonne be our kill though. Phase 3 was going perfect. Boss’ health ticking away every second, we got him into execute range, then we got him to around 10 % and then suddenly it all stopped.

We had this beautiful kill attempt going that was going so well that we could taste the sweet taste of victory already. Renown was gonne be 2/6. I could see the newspost already.

“TWO RAID IN, TWO BOSSES DOWN – Gudran forgot to take a killshot”.

And then Eric came along and fucked all those daydreams in the butt.

He got that “arcane bomb explosion fuck up the raid”- spell and instead of running the fuck away he ran right at us.

Like Loozi said afterwards it happened in slow motion. I SAW what he was doing, I KNEW what was gonne happen but I was powerless to stop it.

boooooom

Shitton of peeps dead, wipe, game over.

Our next attempt wasn’t as clean and we wiped again in phase 3 but this time not as close to victory as the attempt that Eric manhandled.

All in all I had a SHITTON of fun tonight. The fight is fun, the raid is pretty and the atmosphere on vent was amazing. Really really really fun.