Gruul Down!

So, as I've said time and time again, I'm a very casual player. Sure, I enjoy instancing and BGing and just about everything else the game has to offer, but rarely do I have a solid chunk of 3 hours to devote to playing the game at a time.

Last Night, I was tweaking around on my rogue (63 now), and the wife had gone out, and a guild mate asks me if I wanted to join a raid to go after Gruul. I actually (literally) laughed, not thinking that I would have time and/or stand a chance of healing the raid. After talking to the raid leader, him telling me that there were going to be 5-7 healers (with me included) and that the run (if successful) typically took 45 minutes, I said "Sure, what the hey."

So off we go, in to kill some trash. I'm not having the slightest idea what we're doing. The raid leader tries to explain on Vent, and does a good job of marking. It was another guild organizing it mainly but there were a good number of folks that I knew in the raid group -- a couple of our players had left to join a couple of other guilds, and several others I'd grouped up with. Four of the guys from ours guild were included as well (70 mage, 70 pally tanking, 70 hunter, and myself, the 70 priest). Normally a very solid group, but c'mon. It's Gruul. The rest of the group compisition .. I can't even tell you. There was a lot of ranged DPS, and only 2 other priests.. and one of them was shadow. I figured I had a pretty good shot of getting SOMETHING. (I'll forget later .. my highest "roll" out of about 7 of them was a 25. Not my night)

So anyway, not having a clue what to do, I'm clicking on healbot to heal the tanks where I feel like I need to. The issue is that I'm slow. My heals kept landing a half second after someone else's heal and not healing for anything but a good chunk of overheal. So, I give up on the tanks and start healing the occasional random damage as it pops up. Goes fine, we get to the first set of bosses.

It's 5 "bosses" in a room. A Priest, a Shaman, a Lock, a Mage, and the "main boss." Some king or something. (I'll look up more detail later I'm sure) We've got our guild pally tanking the priest because he doesn't hit very hard. A few people interrupting the priest, and I'm assigned "Raid Healing, and help out with the mage tanking the mage." Yep, that's right, mage tank. Some wierd trick where the mage spell-steals the mage boss's spellshield that absorbs something like 70% of spell damage, makes the mage an ideal tank. Yeah ok sure.

Well, we wiped a couple of times, but on the third try, blew through. I was third of 5 on the healing charts after that because of the AOE damage I was healing -- most of my heals landed good and solid and healed for their full amount, or close.

So anyway, I didn't get any drops, but our tank and our mage both did, so they ported out to shatt to get their new gear, got summoned back, and headed on our way. BTW, this is about an hour and a half after we'd started that we headed on in to Gruul.

Some overeager shammy pulled him accidentally and that led to another wipe. We got him down to 50% that fight though so at least the group got a pretty good idea of what the fight was like. I got killed pretty early because of the stone shatter thing he does. He basically turns everyone in the raid into an AOE bomb, and if you're near anyone (specially 5 of your group members), you take like 2k damage from everyone you're near. I have 7.5k health. Let's see, 2k * 5 > 7.5k. Yeah, painful.

Anyway, second time around, tanks pulled him and all the groups got into position. Everytime we got "stoned" i got a shield up on myself for that extra 2k or so health boost which helped drastically -- as did not standing near 5 group members, I got far enough away from most of the others that I didn't take their damage as well as mine. ALMOST died the first time but after that, everyone sorta got their position down. Sorta a shame that he tosses you randomly into the air before turning you to a bomb, so it takes a bit to reposition. ANYWAY.

Everytime the raid took AOE damage I took to healing them up, helping on the tank when there wasn't anyone else low -- I got into the mode of stopcasting -- you cast a heal, and before it "finishes", if the tank isn't down on health, you "stop" the cast and immediately begin re-castin. You can do this by jumping, moving, or whatever.. or you can macro it in. I've got it macro'd into my downranked GHeal (rank 2) and my main GHeal, so I just stand there clicking on the tank on healbot -- when the heal's about done, I click on him again to cancel, or let it go if he needs a heal. That worked out MUCH better for me than my "click on him when he needs it" approach.

So, we down'ed Gruul on that second attempt. Wicked. Pretty decent gear, I got an epic neck piece that actually had less heal than my previous piece, but a lot more MP5. The Teeth of Gruul! The hunter in our group got an epic leather piece too -- it was an upgrade in stats, but still only leather. So anyway, good times! I didn't think I'd ever SEE Gruul, much less be involved in taking him down. And I feel like I was partially "carried" due to the rest of the group, but I was #2 of 7 healers in that fight against gruul -- JUST behind the lead healer.. I was almost TOP of the healing charts. Which feels excellent to me since I'd never done the fight, never raid healed, and I'm NOT epic geared (much) at all. I had something like 1200 +heal and 175 mp5 casting during the fight. So anyway. Sweeeet. That's my story.

May give it a shot again sometime to see if I can win s'more gear out of the deal. And, it did take us close to 3 hours (which made the wife less than happy) but that's mostly because of the wipes. I think if I got in a solid group that could 1 or 2-shot the bosses then it would go a lot quicker. 45 minutes is probably pushing it, but an hour and a half or so shouldn't be unreasonable. It's a very short instance, other than the 15 minute long fights. hehe.