The Dedicated Few...

Well, last night marked a first for me, and also for a few other of my Concedo Nulli (A-Khadgar-US) (NOW HIRING) colleagues. The Dedicated Few. The achievement wherein 8 people dominate KT and his boys in one raid lockout. No more than 8.

We did this in two raid nights. Knocked out Arachnid and Plague on one night before more of our Ulduar peeps got on. We set up a separate raid night to finish it up. Mind you, we're primarily doing Naxx to help gear up our newest Elemental Shaman, Shasu (who was late to her own raid, btw... <3). Our raid consisted of:

Kreeoni - Druid MT
Tracerec - Pally DPS/OT
Bloodevil - DK DPS/OT
Kathoid - Druid Cat DPS
Sahne - Rogue Healer... i mean.. uhh. DPS
Shasu - Late (ahem) Shaman Ele DPS
Nagrarok - Shammy Healer (my mentor)
Thespia - Yours truly...

We breezed through Construct, one-shotting every boss. I'm always a little nervous to heal Patchwerk because of my level of mana. It was just Nag and I, but I was determined to focus more on LHW and Riptide than Healing Wave. The one issue I'm still struggling with is remembering to keep refreshing Water Shield. As my Intellect goes up, and my Crit% goes up, I'm consuming Water Shield charges more often, so I need to refresh it more. Problem is... when I'm in the thick of it and both Kree and Trace are taking decent damage, I wonder if I'm able to spare the GCD to keep it up. Obviously it'll make me last longer, but could it unintentionally mean death for the tanks. I'll keep working on it.

The fight that we seemed to keep dreading was 4Horse. 8 people: 2 tanks, 2 healers, 4 dps... hmm... Shasu and Thes in the back. Kree on his own, Trace & Nag with Sahne, Kat and Blood. Now, I've been a "healtank" on my priest before, but shields and renew's and Prayer of Mending are great tools to have back there, not to mention Binding Heal. I popped an Earth Shield on Shasu and we pulled. What I didn't take into account is because I was taking damage, my Water Shield was consuming charges faster than normal, which meant that my mana was reloading faster. Made healing back there a total breeze. She used her Earth Elemental in the beginning, and I still had mine on reserve. Everyone came back to help us shortly thereafter and we were golden! Phew! I was glad to have that fight over.

Sapphiron... psh... easy mode.

KT... well... It was a really rough pull. I understand that we're low on ranged DPS, but I hate having to throw lightning bolts at the Banshees and burning through mana in the 1st phase. I'll throw a couple, but I need to save my mana to make sure people stay alive. We had 4 Banshees up as KT became active. Got them all down, I think Trace died. Once we got everything down, the rest of the fight really couldn't have been better. We were communicating... everyone was pretty focused.

At the end of the night, it was just a FUN environment. Stressful maybe at times, but definitely fun. Hopefully, my next post will be about creating and maintaining a fun (but not sloppy) raid environment. Until next time...