January 1st, 2010
Once again, the intrepid Red Devils have concluded another successful year of raiding! 2009 was a year of change, particularly for hunters. The Beastmaster spec was nerfed into oblivion and Survival became “the” spec for raiding hunters. We went from a shot rotation to a shot priority and managing cooldowns became the new skill to master.
The Red Devils successfully cleared Naxx, then eagerly jumped into the new raid content in Ulduar, the Argent Tournament and finally into Ice Crown.
The hunter community lost what I believe was our greatest asset, BRK . In a desperate bid to save his marriage and family, he quit WoW (cold turkey). So loved was BRK that Blizzard chose to immortalize him with an epic gun from Heroic 25-man ToC, the BRK-1000.
I found myself stalked by a hacker for a while, but was finally able to secure my account and get my grubby hunter mitts on an authenticator (every WoW player should have one!).
I even managed to cut the power to my house (again) and this time it was winter instead of summer. At least I got to use a chainsaw to do it! [insert man-like grunts here]
But enough of memory lane and on to our final raid of 2009, the Ice Crown Citadel! After a rather frustrating Tuesday night trying to down Marrowgar with a less than ideal group, it was decided to make a more serious attempt. This would require us to be more selective in our invites, even going so far as to leave some of our lower performing members on the bench in favor of higher performance non-guild players. Fortunately (surprisingly?) we actually had enough acceptable level guildies online and only pugged one spot. It was a night and day difference from the previous night. We one-shot Marrowgar and then downed Lady Deathwhisper for the first time in 25-man!
The gunship battle was a piece of cake, though it did get a bit hectic due to the lack of experience with the fight by some of the members. Then we found ourselves facing Deathbringer Saurfang. The raid leader decided to try a new strategy, tanking Saurfang on top of the portal near the ship. The idea was to use knockbacks on the Bloodbeasts when they spawned. Unfortunately, we had precious few players with any kind of knockback ability and we found ourselves struggling to control the Bloodbeasts. I observed several occasions where one of the critters would instantly zip right over the frost traps directly to a player (possibly a LOS bug) resulting in a chaotic scramble to get the damn thing under control. To make things worse, the ammo switching addon I use was malfunctioning and kept trying to drop the ammo with each switch. This seriously hampered my ability to turn and kite, an essential element of this fight for hunters.
We ended up making three attempts (not counting several resets when we ran back to the gunship) before it got late and we had to quit for the night. Nonetheless, I count the night as a huge success with three of four bosses down in the first wing of Ice Crown and a nice conclusion to the Red Devils 2009 raiding season!
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