Ready to Raid

This week is WotLK Timewalking, which is always fun. The chest at the end was a downgrade for Strev, but the real fun has been chain-running dungeons as Acannasta forevermore known as "Canna" here…as in "I can na' heal. I can na' DPS for crap." ) Timewalking weeks are a godsend for lower level DPS who like running dungeons. Suddenly queue times are back down to 5-10 minutes! As a result, she's mind flayed her way up to level 105 without doing any Legion questing. The real downside of so much Shadow playing is I'm starting to miss doing nice AoE on Strev from a safe distance. More than once I've tried to tab through enemies on Strev to place non-existent dots.

I haven't been pvping much this week-- the reward is a helmet downgrade and the weekly brawl is "classic Ashran", which is a never-ending back and forth battlefield. That's an ok concept, particularly if you like killing people for the sake of killing people, BUT this makes it impossible to actually "win" and get the completion rewards, which defeats the point of my wanting to queue for it.

Over the past few days, I made a concerted effort to "get gud" so as to not be an embarrassment for Friday's raid. I picked up consumables: runes, flasks, and potions. I took cooking to max so I can drop the new feasts if needed. I watched the videos. I ran the first wing in LFR to get a feel for the basic mechanics of the first three bosses. I bought a subscription to Raidbots.

For the uninitiated, Raidbots is an absolutely amazing site that lets you run DPS simulators based on gear and equipment, compare talents, gear in your bags (it ain't all ilevel, kids), tells you what potential loot drops from all sources would have what effect on your DPS, etc. It's a free site and all a sub really buys you is the ability to skip the line (a 1-2 minute wait) when running your sims. I correctly estimated my time was worth more than the $3 monthly price and had a few merry hours discovering everything wrong with my build. After juggling gear, talents and such, I was able to improve my output by around 20%, which absolutely floored me.

It turned out I'd have an early chance to see how I'd mesh with most of the raid team in a Heroic Warfront. The difference between "regular" Stromgarde and Heroic was night and day. You can't solo queue for these-- it has to be a raid group of 10-20, with enemy power (and quantity) scaling based on the number of people you bring. There's a 430 chest at the end as a quest reward, which I think is the equivalent of Heroic Raid loot. We brought 15 eager people, including one carry. We hopped on Discord and began.

It started off well. One team went to the mines, my team went to the lumber mill with group three helping wherever as needed. We won our respective battles in time to see our main base was under attack from the enemy leader. We hustled back… and lost. Not as in "wiped", although we did do that. As in…the enemy boss killed our Commander and we all stared at the "DEFEAT" screen in disbelief. Clearly, we had to up our game. We recruited some more healers and another tank from LFG and made a second go at it with 20 people.

It was tough, even nerve-wracking at times. There was constant pressure to advance the front, gather mats, and defend simultaneously. We lost one of our footholds once and that was enough to compel us to send squads to investigate and deal with enemy encroachments, no matter how small. It was a war of attrition and we won. It was glorious. For my own part, depending on the encounter I bounced between first and seventh or so on the dps charts. I'm built for single-target, not AoE, and it shows. All in all, I don't think I embarrassed myself, so that was nice.

I'm now ready to raid tonight.