<Fidelity>

Garrosh Hellscream has been vanquished, and we’re all free to brandish our Conqueror of Orgrimmar titles and ride around on our ZLINK war puppies.

I’ll be the first to admit that we dropped the ball on Garrosh. Sure we had a few attendance hiccups and had the odd over-heated router, but nothing out of the ordinary. The major issue, whose fault rests squarely on my shoulders is that we persisted with three healing for far too many attempts. Sometimes you have to push through resistance to a particular strategy, or try something different sooner rather than later and I was lackadaisical in getting that done.

Having said all that, Garrosh is a great fight with lots of movement and positioning requirements, moments of extreme raid damage, and some DPS hurdles to vault to avoid the fight spiraling into a chaotic mess. Our eventual kill was rock solid; we knocked that sha infested goon about until he begged us for mercy.

Our week started with just over 70 Garrosh pulls under our belt, and the will to turn the sting of our defeat into roflstomping our way into Orgrimmar. We slimmed down to two healing for protectors, norushen, pride, juggernaut and nazgrim for a myriad of reasons. Overall speed is the most obvious one, but also for the joy of killing a boss faster than you’ve ever killed it before! Secondly, to keep the DPS on their toes and strip away some of the usual over abundance of over healing. Our first night ended with Siegecrafter dismantled, and only two bosses left standing.

The following night we made quick work of the paragons gone wild, and got to work on Garrosh with two healers from the first pull.

Phase 1 was like clockwork, and with 6 DPS, very quick. Bio quickly relegated Hydona to engineer duty… because, well, you know Mages… On our very first peek at Garrosh, phase one was a mess… and early on during our second look I still have notes that read, “Me – Ironstar” follwed by “Hagrim – Ironstar”. It wasn’t until about pull 20 until we were reliably getting into phase 2, but by the end of our first full night we were more than halfway through.

That’s when our progress slowed, as we grappled with dealing with phase 2 with 5 DPS after the third transition phase. Hats off to our DPS for getting as far as we did, with Esta leading the charge to tighten up the transitions. It is straightforward to avoid going over 25 energy for the first transition, meaning you don’t have to deal with the empowered whirling corruption. After the second transition, you have to deal with them either way. However, if you push the transitions hard enough, you can avoid getting empowered touch of y’shaarj and only have to deal with that in the final phase (as well as the empowered desecrate). We did succeed a couple of times getting through phase 2 both avoiding the empowered touch of y’shaarj and dealing with it, but it was touch and go getting through all the adds in time, and getting reasonable positioning on the desecrates. We managed to get Garrosh down to 14% and 16% on seperate occassions in phase 3, but pushing through the last part of that phase seemed a tall order.

So after having a quick peek at how two healing felt at the end of a long night we were determined to finish him off the following week. So with 9 Klaxxi paragon corpses torn asunder, we marched on Garrosh.

Jondayla and Noondez, our intrepid healers for the evening, put on their game faces and hammered out a plan with Hydona and Alrius for healing cooldowns. We swept away the cobwebs in the first couple of attempts and by the third for the night we were looking confident of a kill. Now with 6 DPS, we made quick work of the transition phases, but that didn’t even matter. We had enough DPS now that we didn’t even look like entering a third transition before the end of phase 2. Hydona was now able to pick up their and and burst it down with elemental vengeance, rather than see it scurry for the tanks. The adds melted quickly, and we had more time to focus on positioning, and less risk of adds doubling up. We chopped through the desecrated weapons and had more space to work in. Most importantly by phase 3, we were in great shape.

When phase 3 hit, we invoked heroism, chugged our potions and lay into Garrosh like never before. After an empowered whirling corruption we dispatched the minons and beat the sha out of our fellow raiders, interrupting them as we went. With the extra DPS the last phase went like the blink of an eye, so much so after the second empowered whirling corruption, we ignored the minions and finished off Garrosh.

Thanks to all the <Fidelity> raiders and our friends that have helped us along the way for their persistance and deterimation. It was a little overdue, but it was great feeling to have Garrosh dead with half the raid week ahead of us. Enjoy all the news and excitement of Blizzcon, and get ready for heroic modes next week!