Last night was an interesting night raid wise. It seems like we reached some critical mass of gear to make the content largely doable. Either that or we simply spent too much time fighting with the harder encounters first. We’ve been able to down the first boss of Emerald Nightmare since our very first hastily thrown together raid on that Friday of the first week it was open. However for the last several weeks we have had a slightly shifting raid composition as folks filtered in and out of the group, including several different tank and healer teams. Last night however felt like things have started to solidify, and it really feels like a fairly solid team. The biggest problem that has been facing us was the shifting from boss to boss trying to find the next one that worked for us. On our first outing we gave Spiderbird a shot, and decided that maybe that fight had too many moving parts. Then for whatever reason… we collectively decided that Il’gynoth was the next best target. After a few weeks of wiping to the eyeball, we decided to shift focus back to Spiderbird at the tail end of last weeks raid and then were shocked we managed to get it easily to the 30% range before shit fell apart. So this week we came back and focused on this boss and after about four or five attempts we managed to push it across with a victory that felt pretty solid. Sure we were down several people at the point of the kill, but we had enough that after a little bit it felt certain we would get it. Granted we were about 45 seconds away from the enrage timer due to the missing dps.
From there we moved on to working on the Ursoc encounter because it seemed largely to be a tank, healer and coordination check. On I believe our second attempt we managed to get the victory after a bunch of shifting bits around to figure out how to handle the charges more effectively. As a tank however I have to say Ursoc is a bit of a heart attack. I was constantly praying that I would have enough rage to hit my next reactive ability to help curb the insane damage that was coming in. The constant tank swaps were a little strange to get used to as well, but Art and I managed to largely figure it out, and with it… another new boss kill. From here we moved to Dragons… and on our second attempt hilarity ensued. Several of us were down… and we THOUGHT we were wiping…. so Kylana started going into the whole spiel about how we could improve on the fight. However the remaining living tank and the dps and heals that were still up just kept on pushing forward. Apparently we were a lot closer to victory than we realized, because in the middle of this speech about the things we need to tighten up… we saw the Dragons of Nightmare killed message pop across our screens. It reminded me so much of the time we killed Sindragosa… with everyone dead. Thalen had fired the last shot and then gotten frozen… and the boss was dead but we all had to rez up and run back to be able to loot the body. Because of this fact I didn’t get a screenshot of that kill, as I was running back at the time. We put in some tries on the Eyeball but ultimately called it since it was getting close to our normal stopping time. However I will absolutely take three new boss kills in one night.