My second Kara raid...

My first attempt was a a bit of a disaster, a PUG that I formed, which failed
to down even the huntsman. After that humbling experience, I was a bit
aprehensive about making another, but I got a guild invite by some friends
that I'd been running with so I decided to give it a shot.

My new guildies were also new to Kara, this being their second attempt as
well. Our raid leader did extensive research on each boss battle and knew
exactly what to do even for the bosses nobody had seen before, which helped
immensely.

The first night saw the downing of the hunstman, maiden, and moroes. The
huntsman was an easy kill, maiden took a couple of shots. Moroes was a bit
more difficult because we only had one tank available that night and had to
reconfigure our druid to serve as a makeshift second tank. It took a couple
tries to get it, but eventually moroes went down.

We got Oz for the opera event. It went down according to plan, with the
warlocks (myself included) fearing the lion, an off-tank kiting the tin man
around, and DPSers taking down the others, etc.

The next night brought the destruction of curator, illhoof, and the shade.
Curator was particularly difficult. We had a strategy where I (the warlock)
would wear a full arcane resist set and serve as 'hateful bolt' target. While
this worked, it led to the problem that we were unable to burn down the
flares fast enough. It took several wipes to get it right, eventually I ended
up on flare duty with both conventional tanks on Curator, and he went down.

Illhoof also took a couple of shots. The first time we had an army of little
imps to deal with; the second time the warlocks (two of us) spammed SoC on
Illhoof and all that remained was a pile of dead little imps.

Shade was brought down on the first attempt. This was mostly due to the
extensive discussion of strategy beforehand and the leader's yelling "flame
wreath! stand still!" whenever a flame wreath happened. Two members went down
early in the fight, but the remaining 8 were able to finish him.

The next night was Nightbane and Netherspite. This took a good 2 - 2.5 hours
each to learn what to do. Nightbane was the simpler battle. I personally had
some trouble not drawing Nightbane's aggro during the flight phase and was
immediately slaughtered in the first couple of attempts. A more conservative
approach (not SoCing everything in sight) kept me alive during the later
attempts. Nightbane was hard, but not terribly complicated.

Netherspite, on the other hand, was not all that hard, but immensely
complicated. Myself and another warlock were on blue-beam duty, which worked
well, aside from the black holes that liked to show up and make a mess out of
things. Spamming lifetap on him worked well for us warlocks, and one of my
CoD's applied with the damage buff even hit him for 22k. Everyone else did
their job well in their respective beams.

The final night was prince. We fully expected to die a lot during this battle
and reserved 3 hours for the attempt. In fact, several throught we were going
to have to gear up a few more kara runs more before we could take him. Our
leader researched the "safe" area for the ranged people to stand in that was
out of infernal range. The enfeeble was not much of a problem, since we were
all expecting it. Phase 3 with it's random weapons attacks on ranged DPS
caused some chaos but everyone was good at calling out when they were hit,
and we made it through. Prince fell on the first attempt. We didn't know what
to do with the remaining 2 hours of time that evening, so we ran off to have
a look at ZA, then came back to Kara and finished off the animal boss for the
last time.

When we left Kara, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

The big lessons learned were that it helps to have done the research ahead of
time and to know exactly what to expect and what to do - we couldn't have
pulled it off without our well-prepared leader. Having a guild that
communicates and works well together is essential. Communication and
cooperation will save the day, even while lacking actual experience with the
events.

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On Jan 4, 4:18 pm, Marco Dieckhoff <di....RemoveThis@gmx.de> wrote:
> I'd advice for BigWigs bossmods, better performance and better
> displays.

I tried this one this week. I think it is nice, but all those popping
texts are a bit distracting... You never know if your raid leader has
thrown a raid warning or was it the mod until you look at the chat
log. I guess you eventually get used to it.