March 28, 2024

Wednesday night is raiding night since some shuffling happened a few months ago, it’s been working out better than Sunday raids.  Last night was particularly good.

Marrowgar, one shot
Deathwhisper, two shot
Boat, one shot (still the best encounter by far on the ‘fun’ scale)
Deathbringer, four attempts I think.

With enough time left to get in the weekly raid (Razorscale) and still finish early enough to get in a guild daily random run done (Hall of Stone..) with one of the guild who’s only recently started playing regularly again.

I promised some thoughts on healing the Deathbringer on normal.  It’s not a trivial fight but now we have a strat it’s coming together.  We’re using the “let people die” approach, the logic behind this is that the more marks which are up the greater the rate of gaining blood on the boss resulting in a shorter time between new marks.  At 30% he hits a frenzy which increases the damage rate.  Typically trying to keep all marked players up resulted in having 6-8 marks during frenzy, which is brutal to heal through and trying to get a decent triage failed.  Normally seeing two go down together (10% health back on the boss), and from there it’s all downhill.

Now the first two marks are left to die, unless it’s someone we cannot afford to lose (the current swapped tank for example).  Providing dps are on the ball nuking the blood beasts this results in 1-2 marks on hitting frenzy and I think 4-5 marks by the time we can get the kill.  On the kill I think we actually lost two after the frenzy but managed to pull it back.

One problem which caused the first few wipes was our healing make up (tree heavy), which resulted in the first two marks taking a long time to go down due to the size of the ticks the HoTs were delivering.  So the toon marked for death must clear all healing buffs and the healers need to be on the ball and ideally avoid AoE heals (Wild Growth for example) until the mark is dead.

Towards the end of the fight the healing (from a tree perspective) turns into “make sure there’s a hot up and nourish the hell out of the marks” with the occasional WG for the rest of the raid as necessary.