Unprepared

This is a bit late, so it’s two posts combined. 

So a couple of things. Tuesday’s raid was fresh, to gear up some new people and try a heroic. We managed to down heroic Norushen. We 3-healed it, but it was my monk and 2 disc priests so together we were another DPS. We’ll start tonight at Galakras.

I was a little disgruntled- I like to be prepared. I was not expecting heroics, I was expecting more work on Garrosh. I can see why we’re doing this, we have new people to gear up to replace the 2 we’ve lost, it’s nice to kill new things instead of just wiping. I probably came across as grumpy, but I like to research fights first. Yeah heroic Norushen doesn’t have any real differences that affected me beyond more health and damage, but I felt unprepared and that bugged me. But anyway, we downed him, which was nice. First time I’ve downed a boss in heroic while it was still the current tier.

My Wednesday raid… well, we got to Seigecrafter, and we’ll start there on Friday. It was full of people being a bit off. I blinked right into Thok and died. Our hunter forgot which belt he was doing. I blinked right into something else because I panicked about our other healer dying, and died myself instead. Those were the things I remember most, but there were a few more. Oh well, we’ll get the next two Friday and have a little time to work on Garrosh.

I can’t remember if I’ve posted this or just written about it, but my boyfriend visited this last weekend and proposed while he was down here. I was surprised, I had not expected it at all. 

I read Navi’s Garrosh story yesterday, and this stuck out at me:

"Yes, just like that.  But Uncle Sev knows not to use his sticky spells on people because Mummy will yell at him."

I don’t think I yell at people enough for that. We haven’t lost anyone in a while, but we haven’t had any serious attempts there either. I might have to learn how I want to handle that situation… I’ve been trying positive reinforcement with other things- every time I see someone making an effort to run through my monk healing spheres, I say something and thank them which has led to people using them a bit more. I’ve already got 2 raid groups conditioned to let me loot all the boxes near Shamans (though that was not intentional), and it looks like the monk healing spheres is coming along. Response to calendar invites has also increased, and people are showing up at or before start time!

So now to figure out what else needs improvement that we can work on. I mean, aside from “healer not dying to stupidity.”

Geez, can’t vet students be… less empathetic than you’d expect? Listening to guinea pig sounds (because that was important. yes) we started laughing at the fear squeak. You’d be surprised at some of the jokes we make about animals. They are jokes though- given a sick horse, we’re not going to jump to euthanasia right away.

Raid Thursday was slow going. We attempted Galakras on heroic a few times, then swapped to normal. We did kill it, and managed to one-shot shamans. Which was a surprise to me- we lost 3 melee, I was OOM the last 25%, and everyone was running around like a chicken with their head cut off. I have a lot of fun with that raid, but every now and then the things we do puzzle me. We 3 tank that fight- but leave all the melee down at the bottom to avoid the slimes (which is why they died, I think) while every other group I’ve seen use 3 tanks,  sends the melee away. Oh well, we got it.

We had some issues with Nazgrim. Probably would have gotten it if we’d slowed DPS earlier, or saved Hero for the end. Another example of an odd thing- hero at the start, when the end with all the adds, or even a beserker phase, makes more sense to me. I’ve been a bit grumpy at that raid because I don’t like not knowing what we are doing. Makes me grumble. 

I suppose I’ll start looking up heroic modes, and add that to my SoO notes. I just don’t have a lot of time right now. Exams are soon, with our first 2 next week, so I’m starting to stress out about that. 

I’m also wondering if I should be swapping healers for raids. I took my shaman to a raid earlier in the week, and wow can she heal. Totally stress-free, except healing the last 30% of Norushen alone. I know I am not playing my shaman optimally (example: guess how many bosses it took me to discover I had glyph of chain lightning instead of glyph of chain heal. Hint: more than 4.) She was getting some awesome numbers, and only ran OOM on that Norushen fight. So I’m wondering if I should have my druid take my monk’s place and let that raid leader know we can 2-heal just about everything then, letting our third healer get his warlock on. Then have my shaman take my druid’s place, and leave my poor monk to PUGs. 

Our raid group is not very diverse- 3 druids, 2 shamans, 2 hunters. One is an ele/resto shaman, who is mostly DPS lately in anticipation of Garrosh fights. I’m wondering if I should swap to priest, but I don’t play disc priest very well. I don’t know. I think druid/shaman healer is a better combo that druid/druid. Though it is weird playing a non-monk, non-druid- if I am not actively casting a heal on someone, their health doesn’t move. How odd is that? No HoTs, no eminence healing. Anyways, I might talk to my raid leader and the other officer and get their opinion.

“If you block one, they have another [carotid artery]. They don’t need a lot of blood to their brain.”