Darkfall is deep in the summer doldrums. We usually have anywhere from 14 to 18 people on on a raid night, however roughly 4 or 5 of them are not going to come to a raid, either due to lack of level or gear or interest.
So the tentative plan we've got is to pug to fill a 25man on Tuesday, see how many we've got on Thursday, and do a 10 on Sunday. Last night was Sunday so with only 15 people interested in coming to the raid and only 3 heals and 1 tank in that group we went with a 10man.
I have to say that it was excruciating to have to pick and choose who to bring to the raid. I did my best to fill the raid with raiders and get a good class balance. Unfortunately that left out several people that either I'd really have liked to bring or who will be quite grumpy about not being there or both. I'm not looking forward to dealing with the drama from that, but I need to remember that I'm Here to Kill Dragons. And while I may want to keep people happy my *job* is to lead the raid to victory and shiny purples. Hellshot can soothe the ruffled feathers. (Sorry to throw you to the wolves Hellshot.)
That said, over the past couple of days we had 4 people leave the guild. And then Hellshot and I booted all their alts. So the guild info log looks pretty bad, but it's just 4 mains leaving. I'm always sad to see people leave, but of those 4 people I'm not actually sure that we're going to miss any of them as a raid.
Lord Rhyolith
So Sunday night we went into FL10, and actually did a fabulous job. Shannox was already down from Tuesday night. I think we were all a little bit burned from wiping so much on Beth'tilac (also on Tuesday), so we headed to Lord Rhyolith first.
We had a pretty good start, and once we worked through the add control, fire avoidance, and especially steering issues we got him down. I had been worried about the second phase, but once Rhyolith turned molten he seemed to fall over really fast.
I even remembered to take a screenshot this time.
After Rhyolith we headed over to Beth'tilac.
Poor Earthen, he really prefers to be boomkin, but with me the only tank in the raid he had to go bear for Beth and the trash leading up to that giant icky spider. It worked out pretty well though, he did a super job with the drones, keeping them in the corner and away from all the spiderlings. The rest of the bottom team was also fabulous with add control. And the top team still had the meteor avoiding dance down. I think it only took us 3 wipes to get Beth'tilac down. Two of those were web fails, and the third was spiderling fail. Once those were corrected Beth fell over pretty handily.
It was nice to end the raid on the high note of having killed two bosses in one night, especially when one of them was a new kill for us. Darkfall is officially 3/7 Firelands now. Only Shannox is a 25man kill, but I'm confident that when we actually have a full Darkfall raid in there the other bosses will be 25man kills as well.
Darkfall Officer Administrivia
I also need to make a few posts on the Darkfall forums.
One post with raider attendance requirements. I'll also try to stress that if we drop to 10man sometimes I'll try to fill the raid with an eye to raider rank, but that will come second to class balance. It's nice to bring all raiders, but we need healers and tanks along too. It's also important to make sure that we don't overstack a certain class, especially in 10man. And, of course, noting that everyone is welcome to sign up for the waitlist, especially if you were bumped from the raid due to space issues.
A second post saying that we're actually going to try to be disciplined with raid times. I think we can give ourselves a lot more time to work on the bosses, if I start raid invites at 8:45 and we plan to have the first pull at 9. Of course this means that *I* need to be home and ready to go at 8:45, which is not going to be easy.
A third post will deal with the way we're dealing with EPGP. I bumped the decay to 7% last night. There was a lot of discussion in gchat once I did that. I'm not sure that everyone understands how EPGP works. Regardless, it'll work a lot better once we start regularly killing bosses, and people stop worrying that the loot they see today is the last time they will ever see it.
A fourth post will announce how we're doing the Eternal Embers for the legendary caster staff. Currently they are going to the person in the raid with the highest number of embers. If there is a tie they will go to the higher rank person. I know several people were unhappy about that, but we do actually want someone to get the staff. And with anywhere from 1 to 3 embers dropping from bosses it won't take too long to get the first person their initial quest done.
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