Last night was night 2 of our usual raid group so we went back in and picked up at Heroic Spellblade and we spent the majority of our raid night on her. Our main problem was we weren’t handling Phases 1 and 3 well at the start. Phase 1 had the Mark of Frost debuff go out on pairs of people and they needed to remove the debuff by running into each other and we had lots of fun and games where people would remove the debuff with the wrong pair, so you’d end up with someone with low stacks and someone with high stacks still left, or people’s health too low to stand the explosion that comes when the debuff is removed.. all those fun and game things which resulted in a lot of dead bodies too early into the fight. We resorted to actually calling who was paired with who and the Marks started to be a lot less mis-managed. Still incredibly damaging though. I was really glad of Inner Peace for this fight as I could tranq 3 times during it.
I also took Incarnation which I very rarely take in raids but found it worked really well as a mini-cd during phase 2 where the fire ads were up. I had Trav our balance druid, innervate me during it so I could throw out instant mana-free regrowths, and the huge benefit of a balance druid innervate is that it comes along with a 10% haste buff for the duration of innervate! My innervate doesn’t include that little bonus.
Phase 3 was a lot of running away from purple bouncing balls and I was so glad of 2 monks, because we chained my tranq and their revivals through it. If we didn’t have mobile cooldowns for that phase I think it would have been much harder. I couldn’t imagine having to stand still and cast Divine Hymn like our priests do.
We had decided we’d stay on her until 10pm and then go look at another boss if we weren’t making headway and luckily she died right on 10pm. Half the raid went afk after it for a break so the screenshot below is just the ones that stayed around 🙂

Then it was onto Krosus, who was so much easier. I had notes that our cooldowns would be used for Slam and for the Orbs that have to be ran out but I found that the orbs didn’t need any cds as long as it was run away enough and that Slam really did need cooldowns but we didn’t have enough to cover them all so we started soaking a few of the early slams so we’d have them up for the later ones when they seemed to get more damaging. I went back to cultivation so our shadow priest started stealing Trav’s innervate for the haste. I’m thinking about trying Incarnation again for next week because I could work using it into covering the slams that we were soaking.
Again no photo for Krosus, apparently if there’s no boss body, I forget about taking photos. We had one pull on Star Augus because it was basically end of raid by the time we cleared trash to him and pretty much the entire raid exploded on one of his abilities. I think we all need to read up on the heroic version of that fight before we go look at him again.
I used our normal lock to go back into the and poke around and take more screenshots without any mobs to get in the way. I do love this raid so much. I’d seriously want to live there if I was able.
Then I went and ran a couple of Mythic Pluses with guildies. With the easier affix’s (Sanguine and Overflowing) I really wanted to do a few higher ones this week, so we did a Darkheart Thicket 13 and then Eye 14. I am seriously in love with Mythic pluses, they are such a challenge that also require you to think outside the box to get through and around pulls to make that timer. Darkheart Thicket, we just made the timer in and got one chest out of there. It wasn’t too bad but the cats that jumped on me were nearly a one shot, every ability was pretty damaging.
Normally I run cultivation and germination in dungeons but I decided that we’d be up against some pretty strong and long boss fights as the 3rd affix was Tyrannical, which meant increased boss health and damage dealt. so I decided to try out incarnation. I’m actually really glad I did as it came in really handy as a mini cd on packs of mobs as well as all the bosses.

The key upgraded to Eye 14 so we decided to give that a try as well. I was a bit nervous as the last Eye I tried was a 12 and it was pretty crap, though we had wildly different affixes this time. It was actually not too bad, and we worked out way through to the last boss without too many troubles but then we got to the last boss. As the other 4 were melee, the Arcane Bomb debuff targeted me constantly and I screwed up taking it out to a safe place so I died on the first two attempts. It meant we were just out of the timer which was not a nice feeling knowing if I hadn’t screwed up we would have made it. On the third attempt I rifled through my bag and threw on a different combo of gear to change my stats to try to get more healing pumping out and was incredibly careful with taking Arcane Bomb out and we killed it.

Dys looted a crit/haste ring which he didn’t want so kindly passed to me as I’m trying to increase my crit over haste for raids so any crit gear is welcome.
I’m ridiculously impressed by the amount of healing I put out on that one fight, but it also shows just how much damage was going out on everyone. I’ve started using Cenarian Ward quite a while before the pull, it lasts 30 seconds on a person then damage turns it into a heal so if I pre-cast it really early it’ll be up again not too long into the fight which helps with getting the max amount of hots onto the tank per fight. And something I haven’t tried yet but really need to look at is using bear form and frenzied regeneration as it returns a lot of damage I take as healing so I can quickly heal up any big hits I take. It’s part of the Guardian affinity toolbox and something I haven’t been using at all, mainly taking Guardian simply for the damage reduction.
Next step is to actually beat the 14 timer and then I’ll be one step closer to getting into 15s. Since there’s an achieve for 15, that’s pretty much my focus. I’m so impressed by the people out there that are already running 20s, I can’t imagine how they’re getting through it, at 14 one mistake is pretty much a one-shot. I really hope I’ll be healing numbers like that by the end of the expansion.
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