Just Another Night in ICC

Tuesday - raids reset and the Red Devils actually show up for the 25-man raid! Not by a huge margin this time, we only had a couple of extra players in our wait list tonight. We decided not to extend last week's lockout and started another fresh run this week. Other than a minor trash problem at the onset, you would have actually thought we knew what we were doing. Our hit list included Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Deathbringer Saurfang, Festergut, Rotface, Professor Putricide (in spite of my premature pull) and the Blood Prince Council… all one shot!


Then we took on Blood Queen Lana'thel and things went south in a hurry. We made a couple of half-assed attempts, but chaos was rampant. Tethered players neglected to run together, purple poopers ran through the raid and our carefully planned bite order was soon dropped in favor of pure panic and mind controlled players. This boss is gonna' take us a while to bring down in 25-man.


So, after two wipes we decided to go free Valithria Dreamwalker. Snyped and I were assigned to kite duty on Blistering Zombies (as usual), with Snyped assigned to the left side and me to the right. I was a little surprised to find him next to me as I was busily dragging my zombie out of the raid for execution, but that happens sometimes when we have to kite a long way before the zombie explodes. Odd that he didn't move back though… hey, why is he staying over here?? Oopsie, there goes our tank… and our healers… yikes - rot worms are on me! And… we wipe.


As we were running back, I whispered to Snyped, "You were on the wrong side!"
"No I wasn't"
"Yes you were, you were supposed to be on the left side."
"No I wasn't"

Hmmm… this was getting me nowhere, as usual. As we prepared for our second attempt, I asked our raid leader to clarify the kiting assignments. "Snyped on the left, Seabrat on the right" replied Xoroth. The next whisper I got from Snyped… "I reject your reality and substitute my own!" This is the respect I get as the raid officer - and from my very own "wingman" no less! At any rate, Snyped actually did the kiting on his "other" left that time, and we successfully set Dreamwalker free once again! It's always nice to end a raid with a win.

The Red Devils have had a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday raid schedule for quite a while now. We've also been plagued with poor attendance on every night except Tuesday. Over the past ten days or so, I conducted a poll of all our raiding members to establish what their availability would normally be for each night of the week. Based on the results of that poll, we are changing our raid nights to Tuesday and Wednesday, and dropping Thursdays and Sundays from our schedule. We hope that this change will encourage attendance on Wednesday and that back-to-back nights will provide better progression.


You can bet that I will be looking at attendance to see if people are showing up when they said they would, just like the famous Geico money eyes!