Monday was a good day for science WoW. I haven’t cared much about seasonal events after I got the violet drake on my warrior (which I don’t play anymore), but eh, why not spend 20 seconds at the Headless Horseman. About a minute later… my shaman had this baby:

It looked like it was my lucky day, so I figured my priest kinda needs a new mount too. I logged onto the other realm… and got an invite 5 seconds later: the guild was having another go at Arthas. I was dead tired, but I couldn’t say no.

Two hours and a half later, he was hugging the floor, a first kill for this guild.

Before the patch, I was afraid killing him would be impossible with the new talents. Turns out I was very wrong.

Now, Soulbound isn’t full of super pro imba players and I won’t pretend I’m God’s gift to healing. I get tunnel vision and I get lost in a straight corridor. But this guild has… some sub par players.

Like the hunter who had never seen the LK and apparently never read up either. And who hadn’t changed one gem, so he had all crit and was doing an impressive 4.5K DPS at his peak.

…Or the other hunter, who was doing great DPS… while sitting with the group and not noticing the Necrotic Plague on her.

…Or the raid leader whose only method of troubleshooting a wipe was asking “Was healing a problem?”. (“No idiot, the hunter who wouldn’t run was a problem so I let her die instead of getting the plague all over us!”)
(After the 3rd time she did that, we decided not to bother yelling at her and we just dispelled her and hoped the Plague would jump to someone who can see the BIG BLUE DBM announcement.)

…Not to mention the noob disc priest who had to frantically whisper friends during the fight asking what to do… or the noob priest’s friend, the holy pally, who had only come back to WoW a week before.

The run was a bit frustrating at first, but I kept telling myself that I am not here to look down at them from my “my main has a frost wyrm” heights and that they do have a couple of very good players. The private channel where me and my friends could freely bitch helped too.

To conclude, if this group managed to get Kingslayer, anyone can. If you’re still working on the LK, don’t despair, you’ll get him down eventually. (Just please, don’t be that hunter.)

Tonight, we’re off to get KS for our alts on Alonsus too!

Edit: Of course, after writing the above… my “we killed LK in May” guild went to Sindragosa on alts and proceeded to wipe in the dumbest ways for an hour. Including yours truly trying to edit an in-game event during the raid and iceblocking everyone except the tank.

The patch dropped and the world didn’t end, despite what trade chat is saying. Personally, I find most of the changes good and the bugs not particularly annoying (I’m a night elf, so I don’t get the super slow ghost gryphons :P) They will probably be fixed soon, so I’m not panicking or raging.

I did a bit of ICC on two chars and these are the preliminary impressions.

Resto druid (mostly ilvl 264)
* Nourish is SLOW. I should probably move Regrowth to my Nourish keybind.

* The ToL cooldown is cool. It did help on BQL when everyone was dying, those insta-Regrowths were great. I don’t really get how I’m supposed to Wrath though… if ToL is a healing cooldown, it means I have to, well, heal, not DPS while people are dying.

* Mana isn’t a big problem, but I still managed to run OOM on BQL.

* I reforged all the crit I could to haste and I’m at ~950. Don’t think I’ll reach the new “cap” of 1000 something.

* Short Rejuv is sad :( Short Regrowth is not sad since it’s a “flash heal”. It would be a waste if it kept ticking when people were at max.

* Fury warrior DPS was depressing. Prot paladin was 3-4 on the DPS meters. DK dps and boomkin kept stealing aggro. 3-healing ICC normal meant I didn’t have anything to do.

Disc priest (mix of blues and ilvl 200-219 items)
* OMG everyone was buffed so much! They were hardly taking damage.

* My crappy geared priest, who I wouldn’t even take to ToC10, did fine in ICC. I was 2-healing it with a holy paladin for the first 4 bosses, then a resto druid joined in. (A resto/balance druid wearing half cloth and still rolling on it, using pure haste gems since before the patch, /cry.)

* I picked a non-smite spec for PvE since I was afraid of mana problems if I tried to DPS, and it felt exactly like pre-patch. Bubble, Flash Heal, Penance, rinse and repeat.

* I didn’t run OOM. I spent most of the fights above 70%. For my gear, this is extremely unexpected.

* The casual guild I joined on Defias is really nice, even though they have people like cloth-druid. They let me have all the drops I needed despite the fact that I have been there for less than 2 weeks and they were carrying me :D I have big plans for my gear so maybe I’ll actually be able to raid with them while Soulbound is on break \o/
[Er, is 2xT10 good for disc?]

I might be going back to ICC on Khrista tonight, I’m buying a dress before that, so with all these new upgrades I hope we can clear a fair bit. Discipline feel pretty similar to resto druiding at the moment, so I’m enjoying it a lot.

Binky says hi!

On April 26th, the last person signed the charter and <Soulbound> was officially born. We had two goals: kill the Lich King and get frost wyrms.

The Lich King died on May 19th. On September 2nd we got the wyrms.

I knew that we could do it, but it seemed hopeless at times. Small roster and people going on holiday, starting school, finishing school. Really bad nights when staying out of the fire seemed impossible. Wiping for hours on “easy” bosses. Saurfang heroic had our ranged for dinner repeatedly and P3 healing was a special kind of hell (not helped by the general lack of ranged in the guild). We went from constant 10% Putricide heroic attempts and a kill on the first night to wiping for 3 hours to killing him in 5 tries, from one week to another. Valithria heroic had everyone raging, and it felt like she’d never dielive. The next reset we were wondering why the hell we ever had a problem. Sindragosa heroic seemed to be the end of it; I’m still surprised we managed to kill her.

Last night we were 2 achievements away: All You Can Eat and Been Waiting a Long Time for This. We had been trying Sindragosa for a couple of nights. The normal strategy had failed in a bad way, we hadn’t even managed to get past the ice block. The zerg strategy kept getting us the 6th stack at 4-5%, even with my boyfriend brought in to help with his ICC25 heroic gear. Then tonight something clicked. After a couple of failed zerg attempts we gave the normal strategy a shot. And we got to 10% before people started fucking up the ice blocks. I was expecting a new horrible wipefest and… it wasn’t. Everyone was resetting their stacks in time. We fucked up the blocks (well, mostly I did) and people still killed the right one. I healed on auto-pilot and didn’t even see the health bars, only the stack counter. Then, 15 minutes before the raid end, achievement spam and yelling on Vent.

Only the Lich King stood between us and the wyrms. It was late, but it was also our last 10-man day for the reset, so we voted to give Mr Lich a try. Unfortunately we still had the Plague Wing up… but that was the fastest clear we’d ever done, they were all dead in 20 minutes. I was convinced we had no chance of getting the achievement: we’d wait for the 30 stacks, waste time and then wipe. One of the healers hadn’t even tried LK before so I kept imagining huge Defiles killing us.

First attempt, 30 stacks, dead people on phase 2. Release, run, rinse and repeat. I kept whispering strats to the new priest and watching the stacks of plague (tip: MyGhoul is a nice little addon that counts them for you). We got 30, we went to transition, the plague was still going strong at almost 40 stacks, we ran, we spread, we collapsed, I ran out of mana, I healed my roots out on Vile Spirits, I died, I was ressed, I went into Shadowmourne and I was so stressed I couldn’t find the guy at first, I couldn’t see the HP percentage… and then it was 10% and we died (yelling to the new guy to DO NOT RELEASE!!!). It was the longest RP we’d had. My hands were shaking and I kept thinking we fucked something up and we won’t get the achievement.

And then…

If you squint you can see our new priest getting Kingslayer

Vent was LOUD. My boyfriend got to show off his Jaina’s Locket and teleported us to Dalaran, where we, of course, promptly went to Krasus Landing for pictures, then we hovered above the “fly” spots for the next two hours. (One thing I discovered last night is that wyrms are an awesome means of recruitment. Spamming trade got us 2 or 3 unimpressive apps. Within 10 minutes of getting wyrms, we were getting whispers from 3-4 different people asking about recruitment. We’re not about to recruit and boost some random guys, but it’s nice to know.)

My new drake is called Binky – like the horse. Death’s Binky was specifically non-skeletal, and the wyrm is a girl, but I think the name fits her perfectly.

Getting the wyrms is a huge achievement for us. From three friends unhappy with their guild situation we became one of the best 10-man guilds on the realm, we raid with a great group of people and we have a blast. Glory of the Icecrown Raider is the end of the expansion for me. We’ll probably try heroic LK and heroic Halion, but I won’t be sad if we don’t get them. If Cataclysm dropped tomorrow, I’d be fully satisfied.

…and it’s getting worse.

Our raids start off as usual. Hi, how was your day, ok guys let’s buff up and go. Usually, 10 minutes in the raid, things start going downhill. Sometimes I swear half my guildies have a degree in “That’s what she said” and a detector for innuendos (inyourendos, ha ha ha). Sometimes they swear I should stop complaining because I’m worse. Somewhere along the way, we acquired a new raiding rule from our exasperated RL: everyone has to get laid before the raid. No one’s following it or it’s not working as intended, because Vent keeps getting filthier.

Then again, Blizzard aren’t helping things. As pointed out by Tam, some encounters make it impossible to keep a straight face. My personal one is Putricide (especially on heroic). “Two oozes, one room, so many delightful possibilities!” (Uh, you might not want to look for the source of that if you don’t know it already.) And don’t get me started on the plague. Our Vent usually sounds like some sort of deranged brothel where people are passing STDs left and right. “I’ve got it, who can take it next?” “Pass it to me!” “Ok, Jen got it!” I think I’ve snickered myself to death one time.

But, of course, we, the players behind the microphones, are the worst. I blame (British) English.
The priest is going down tomorrow. Going down to Cornwall to see her parents, but it was too late to take it back.
The tank wants to see how high he can get it. The debuff count for the Lich King achievement, of course, but that part was drowned out by the laughter.
Remarks about bosses being or getting big have been mostly phased out of our vocabulary, since they tend to result in at least three voices on Vent snickering in a meaningful way.

While the smut does get distracting at times, I love it. We’ve managed to kill 11/12 in 10 man heroic, we’re 2 achievements away from our frost wyrms, and I haven’t had this much fun raiding in… forever. Many people wouldn’t see it like this, but for me one of the best things about being in a small guild is the uncensored Vent, because we all know each other and we don’t have to hold back because of some new recruit or sensitive person.

(We might have scarred a few PuGs for life, though. But one of them came back for more!)

[Yeah, I'm not dead. I might post something more game-related at some point. Sometime.]

Holidays are fun and exhausting. Fun because we saw a lot of great places (and great beaches!), exhausting because after the first 3 days I fell dead asleep at 10 (and because a loud 3-year old – not mine – can be hell).

Beach. I has it.

However, I did have my laptop with me and I did manage to find a good wifi connection, so my latest project, no. 4 in my quest to get all healers to 80, Aushra the shaman almost hit 60 while I was in Turkey.

This means two things:
1. I’m having fun! I like shammy healing and I think she will be my new main alt when she gets to 80. Also, OMG RaF is the best thing EVER, totally worth buying a second account.

2. Since my priest on Defias is 66, I am basically doing Outland twice, at the same time. This is not fun. I hope Deathwing sits on Auchindoun because the place is a shithole filled with tanks who don’t understand that if I’m being mana drained I need more fucking breaks than usual (yes, even though 2 hours ago they ran with a priest who could heal blind and one handed and was always on 110% mana).

It also seems like I’m a lucky charm. [That, or actually having main spec healers helps.] The guild is struggling through summer holidays and class balance, so with one healer gone things get pretty tough. Raids weren’t very happy while I was gone, but everything seems to be back on track. Class balance is still not ideal and we’re using a lot of offspecs/alts on occasion, but we are 6/12 in ICC heroic and we also managed to do a bunch of frostwyrm achievements. I’m constantly impressed by how well we’re doing considering we almost never get 10 main spec, main char, 100% sure sign ups… last night we ran with 1 offspec healer, 1 alt tank, and 1 guy who can’t follow instructions or do basic things, and we still got 3 or 4 achievements (mostly 1 shots) and a heroic. We might really get those pretty skeletons after all…

Here’s another beach to end with. Yes, you should envy me because I had a great holiday :D

I knew we were close, but I didn’t know we were this close. Soulbound was formed on April 26 and on May 19 we killed the Lich King, after only 4 nights of attempts as a guild.

I wasn’t really in a raiding mood at the start of the evening, due to a deadline for part-time job, and I was trying to squeeze in a bit of work on every raid break or buffing session. Not focused tree wasn’t focused. On the bright side, the team was doing well: we had enough sign-ups, our poor paladin (who’s been Kingslayer for 2 months and I’m sure is sick of the fight) agreed to heal again, we had the right balance of classes… so we went in, tried, died, tried, watched the tank plummet down with the edge, healers flying, DK getting disconnected in a Defile, tried some more and then we hit 20%… 15%… 11% OMG guys gogogo… 10% and panicked priest who didn’t know what happens there.

Vent pretty much exploded with “OMGOMG we did it!”, “DON’T RELEASE!!!”, “I can’t believe this happened”, “Fuck, I’m disconnecti-oh no, it’s the cinematics” and “Meh, crap loot”. It took us 5 minutes to get the perfect pose for the kill shot, turned on the special effects and tada! Soulbound 1 – Lich King 0.

It feels very great to be Kingslayers*. We know we have a good team, we work very well together, there’s no drama, name calling or yelling on Vent… and I’m starting to relax now because we delivered what we promised to the recruits. The funny thing is… that last try felt easy. There was a bit of panic when I started to run oom, but it wasn’t the most frantic kill I’ve done by far. Everything just seemed to come together nicely – even though my mental conversation with myself was along the lines of “dontdienowdontdienow fuck spirit c’mon rejuv tick faster AAAA innervate 10 more seconds fuckfuck i hope the other healers have more mana shit what if i get teleported and fuck up omg i wonder what percent we’re on, don’t have time to look OMGYAY!!!!”. It was intense and my hands were shaking in the end, but I had the biggest grin on my face last night, it even made working late bearable.

To finish off this amazing evening… we went to get the dwarves achievement at Razorscale. Yeah, we were feeling that nice and we decided to make a few guildies happy (well, I wasn’t feeling nice but I got emotionally blackmailed). Let’s not mention this monument of boredom ever again. Or the fact that enrage wiped us when the last person only needed 1 bloody dwarf.

From now on, bring on the hard modes! We’re got a bunch of frostwyrms to get.

*It also feels great because our former guild hasn’t killed him yet. But we’re not spiteful, nope, not us. I won’t look forward to walking around Dalaran with my title and meeting a couple of idio-ex-guildies.

I pretty much vanished off the face of the blog for a while there. Since I got a bunch of new co-workers, I’ve spent my lunch breaks socializing instead of blogging, and things in WoW weren’t very interesting for a while.

Until Soulbound.

Things in my guild weren’t going very well lately – canceled raids, people only signing for farm night, the usual end of expansion lack of interest. Things snowballed, people leaving led to more canceled raids led to even more people leaving… and the guild management didn’t seem very interested in communicating with us. I wasn’t terribly concerned, because my schedule was pretty busy and I didn’t make all the raids anyway, but my friends wanted to raid more so they applied for another guild. I stayed for a while, but then it became obvious that WoW really is a social thing for me, first and foremost. I don’t care about the purple pixels if I don’t have fun in the process, and for me fun is playing with friends. They applied to another guild and were declined… then I got an offer I couldn’t refuse. It wasn’t the first time the idea came up, but now the time was right.

Two days later, Soulbound was born. Two days and a few hours later, the news about Cataclysm raiding hit – perfect timing. We decided to focus on 10-mans and get our ICC drakes before Cataclysm. (I have dreamed of one of those since they were announced, but I never thought I’d actually have a chance of getting it.) If everything goes as planned, when Cataclysm hits we’ll have at least one strong 10-man team, maybe two, and we’ll be able to hit the ground running.

Last week, our guild (only) had potential. There was the three of us (a tankadin, a rogue and a tree, aka me and my little group of friends who’ve been following each other in guilds for a year or so), plus my boyfriend’s shaman alt (because he doesn’t want to leave his main guild yet). Since then, our little Soulbound has progressed far more than I would’ve imagined – our first semi-PuG raid has stepped on the Lich King’s toes last night and our raids for the next reset have 8-9 sign ups, all of this without having to recruit anyone we didn’t know already. We were expecting one or two people from our old guild to join us, but we got more and we’re still talking to a few. We got some even older WoW friends to join and I still have some on my “to recruit” list. We even had to leave people out from the last raid.

Our raids are a bit like six degrees of separation now: our pugged pally healer was the GM of a social guild we joined for a while in Wrath, and then she raided with my boyfriend; the shaman was in the same social guild with the pally, then he joined the guild I was in during TBC; the moonkin used to work with my boyfriend, then he was in the same guild as us in TBC. It felt a bit like a high school reunion and hearing familiar voices on Vent felt amazing. Hearing familiar voices of people who can also pew pew and get out of the green shit felt even better.

The future looks bright. The guild itself is not big (if you don’t count the gazzilion officer alts), but we have the best pugs. If everything goes right, quite a few of those pugs will become guild members and join in the fun every night. We’re at the “dazzle them with amazing guild progress” phase right now, and so far, so good. I’m having a blast playing with the guild site and playing raid leader assistant (i.e. I’ll handle DKP and anything else as long as I don’t have to actually lead), our raids have just the right amount of Vent snark and banter, we’ve killed bosses at a steady rate and everyone seems to be having fun. (And I totally didn’t get lost in ICC trying to get to the Lich King and then spent 10 minutes trying to find my way there. I also didn’t release on a “failed” Sindragosa try and didn’t miss my achievement when they actually killed her.)

With a little luck, this tree will be a Kingslayer soon. Until then, some screenshots.

Soulbound meets the Lich King.

Mandatory “me on the Frozen Throne” shot.

Kids, this is why you need to DPS and slow down the Valkyrs. “Tiiimbeeer!” jokes aren’t funny when the poor tree dies :(

Nothing interesting here. Go look at some gnomes.

If you insist on staying, here’s a story of what my sexy druid has done over the past week or so. I find blog posts like this pretty boring, but I’m not aiming to educate the masses or anything, this is meant to be a nice reminder for myself.

First off, after battling the boss of people-not-signing-up (I’m guilty as charged), we finally killed Putricide on 25-man. I don’t have a kill picture, but here’s what the raid looked like when he died. Most of the DPS probably died because no one was healing – I was spam Nourishing the tank and praying I don’t run OOM before he dies, no time for hotting. He died right as the last bits of my mana were draining and Vent got LOUD. I don’t think I’ve heard cheers so loud since SSC.

Then, we figured we might as well schedule a run to kill Algalon. “Yeah, right, us kill Algalon,” Jen thinks. Our last tries (admittedly, months ago) had not been terribly successful.

Now we were prepared for wiping for an hour, made sure everyone knew they needed to run back ASAP… wiped once, and got him down on the second attempt. Turns out a tier of gear does make a difference. Of course, it’s not near as impressive as killing him in Ulduar stuff… but it still felt damn good.

Sidenote: I LOVE the animation he does when you engage him. Love it. While the raid was busy going “ughhh it makes me sick” I was staring dreamily into the tunnel of stars and wishing it lasted longer. I wish I could get it as a screensaver…

So, he died. He died so fast I didn’t even realize we’d killed him, I kept expecting the fight to get harder and then people were cheering. Wait what?

I won the quest item, so I got to talk to Rhonin, get an Abyss Crystal and start the light show! Even months after Ulduar was old news, people in Dalaran were excited and asking who’d killed Algalon. (Including a guildie of ours who apparently wasn’t paying attention to /gchat.) After the recent trouble with sign-ups and people failing at easy fights, doing something cool as a guild was very nice.

Yes, I’m wearing the wrong title

So Algalon was dead, and this was supposed to be the end of the night – I had work to do -, but our RL suggested going back and doing some achievements. How could I refuse…

To make a long story short, I’m one achievement away from the drake I never thought I’d get. We 1-shot most encounters (even Firefighter), despite the fact that a certain tree was asleep during half of them. Literally asleep, as in casting WG and closing my eyes, waking up when someone talked on Vent. Ironically, I got my Vezax hard mode achievement at the same time as Vezax normal, finally completing my Ulduar 10-man meta… I had only done the fight once, in 25-man. The ups and downs of joining a guild mid-progression – I never saw the skippable bosses and spent many nights wiping on Yogg.

We stopped at mr. Cthulhu-wannabe – partly because by the end I was reduced to sleepy mumbles on Vent -, so he’s the only one standing between me and a pretty drake I’ll never use unless they make it insta-summon too… while my poor pally is still using the ugly CoS mount, of course.

In the end, some druid eye-candy.

Exhibit no. 1, our guild’s other tree, strangely still shapedshifted on a motorcycle.

Exhibit no. 2, your host, who totally didn’t spend 10 minutes taking pictures of herself with her new title and the pretty, pretty leaves of Wild Growth.

A while ago, I read this post. It asked a simple question: do you trust the people in your raid?

Then, a few days ago, I spent an hour laughing my ass of at this. You probably don’t have all those 25 people in your raid group, but you definitely have some…

They don’t seem related, but they are. Read on.

Do I trust the people in my raid?
As a whole? No. We’ve got those people who always die. The big blob of death is chasing them? We’re gonna wipe. There’s a puddle of pain under them? They’re dead even with 3 dedicated healers. God forbid, they’re the only one of the class with a vital role? Might as well try another boss.

Luckily, we also have some of those who will get us out of trouble – the healers who somehow find the mana and cooldowns to keep the tanks alive for 30 seconds more, the DPS who save the day by blowing the last 1%, the tanks who use LoH at the appropriate time.

Personally, I have a few generic trust issues. This never happened when I was playing a DPS, though: I was there to kill and other people were supposed to take care of me. Then I rolled a healer and got a hero complex.

I only trust myself. Something chasing me and I’m on my pally as holy? I’ve stopped once to cast a FoL and I died, because I didn’t trust the others to keep me up. The Bad is trying to eat my roots? I’ll hot myself up more than I do the tanks (I even find my LB!).

It gets worse when I’m tanking. I’ve learned not to be as trigger-happy with my LoH since a healer asked why I didn’t trust her, but I still feel helpless and my fingers go to my Clique keybinds… “No Jen, casting FoL while you’re tanking is NOT good”… I need to tell myself that a lot. (How would it be to play a non-paladin that can’t even judge Light? Aaaa!)

Which leads to question no. 2…

Do the people in my raid trust me?

Going back to that list of stereotypes, it’s quite clear to everyone who knows me that the following descriptions is me.

Trade Troll will be giving general chat a concise rundown of what it is exactly your raid is doing at the moment between wipes. (S)he will be going on the realm forums and typing stuff instead of running back (Ever wonder why they’re AFK? It’s not because they have a bad computer..) and will need a rez every single time. Is known by half the miscreants and dysfunctional people on the server, and not in a good way. Will never actually pay attention to the raid except at the exact second the pull starts, and even then, if Trade Troll is a druid healer, will apply hots and alt tab to see the latest juicy news on the forums. Trade Troll is possibly a good player in your raid, they just have ADD and can’t focus on one thing at a time for longer than 5 minutes.

*I have been chastised for spending more time in /1 (either joining the banter or telling them to STFU) than actually healing or listening to the strats.
*I always (always) read blogs and Twitter while raiding, sometimes even during boss fights; it’s gotten worse since I have a desktop for WoW and a laptop next to it for Vent and browsing.
*I do run back instead of waiting for rezzes, but usually it’s on follow or autorun, and I’ve pulled a few bosses…
* The whole server doesn’t know me, but oh, the bit about the druid healer… My raid leaders would be horrified to learn how easy it is to slack (in easy fights) when you have hots. The pugs I end up with would bitch at me forever if they knew how much attention I actually pay to the instance. Hint: when I say I Rejuv the tank and WG when it’s off cooldown, I’m not kidding. Of course, this is much easier to do when the tank is my friend and geared in ICC25 stuff :P
* ADD? Well, perhaps not in the clinical diagnosis sense, but I’ve always had trouble focusing on things for longer periods of time.

That being said… I think my raid generally trusts me – with a few key exceptions, namely the people who know me better. It’s not exactly rare to get a whisper asking if I was really there/if I heard what I’m supposed to do/if I was on follow when I pulled that trash/if I was alt-tabbed for the ready check. I have bad spatial awareness, and it’s good that some people know this. A well-timed “Jen, move!” has saved more than one raid. (Also, this is the reason why I name changed my druid – although Cynn was a nice name, I respond much, much faster to Jen… and I knew how important that was for me in raids.)

Let’s just conclude by saying that me and my guild are a good match. We can’t fully trust each other, but we get along.

Valithria Dreamwalker is supposed to be a healer’s dream. We get to shine and prove our worth! Damn you, DPS and your e-peen!

Well, I’m thinking of dusting off my feathers and going critchicken for the fight, because so far I suck at healing it. When we started our 10-man tries last night, strategy was pretty fuzzy to me, but the other dragon healer had already done it and the RL explained in detail, so everything sounded just fine. Keep HoTs up on the boss, go in portals and get stacks, collect loot.

Hah. As if.

First off, of course Valithria doesn’t show up on Grid. However, thanks to Keeva’s awesome guide, I was prepared. Or at least semi-prepared – I didn’t know we were going to do Valithria that night, but I have Quartz so I just enabled the appropriate module. Now I could see my HoTs, but healing a boss portrait instead of my nice green rectangles was still annoying – not to mention that the portals made me lose my target. Another macro, another try, lots of frustration over refreshing HoTs (did I ever mention I hate stacking Lifebloom?), anyway I was starting to get the hang of it.

Except not. I was flying around and hitting green clouds… but apparently I wasn’t, because my stacks were still pitiful. I still don’t understand what animation I should see, because my tree sure looked like she was hitting things… I could probably get 4-5 stacks tops in a portal. Come out, frantically try to target the dragon again, mess up my rotation and Nourish too soon… then miss the next portals. Or get the portals, but lose the stacks before I got in. Or just after I got in. The other healer had 30 stacks or more; the most I managed was 8 (and it was by accident).

[This should be a picture of me in the portal. However, I was too busy failing to hit the clouds, so I didn't have time to take a screenshot. Use your imagination.]

Now, it’s not like I wasn’t expecting it. Playing in 3D on 2D screen is hard, and this kind of fight has always been weird to me. I can’t see if I’m above, below or on the same level with the clouds/dragons/orbs of death! To make things worse, it was already midnight, on a Thursday evening, and I was tired even before I started raiding.

To make a long story short, we manage to wipe at 99% a few minutes before the raid end time. We pushed on (even though it was 1 a.m.) with the other dragon healer doing all the work. I was told to stay out of the portals if I didn’t need mana, because I was getting her clouds – erm, I seriously doubt my 2-3 measly stacks were getting in the way – and help with raid/tank healing (our raid healer was a very nice but undegeared shaman who was struggling).

Our best attempt after that 99% was a 90%, by which point (1.30 a.m. already) I wanted to strangle someone. Probably myself. With 2 dragon healers with proper stacks, it would’ve been a breeze. So I’m sitting out tonight, partly due to tiredness/work, partly because I’m sure that any other healer with half a brain can probably manage the bloody stacks better.

My only hope is that we go to Valithria on Sunday evening for our 25-man. Getting proper sleep before the raid might help.