Weekly Raid Rant

Welcome to the Weekly Raid Rant. In this edition, we will look at the raids that my restoration shaman participated in this week.

First off was a PUG trip to Vault of Archavon (25). The good thing was that we one-shotted all the bosses in there. The bad thing was that Koralon only dropped hunter loot, and we didn't bring any hunters. As usual, nobody needed anything from Archavon.

Blizzard really need to split this raid instance into three (or four, after the next patch) individual instances. The people who are geared enough to down Koralon don't need anything from Archavon, and the people who need loot from Archavon don't have good enough gear to down Koralon. This will get even worse when Blizzard adds the fourth boss in here. It's insane to have a raid instance with bosses from four different Tier levels. It's almost like putting Yogg-Saron, Anub'arak, and Arthas in Naxxramas, next to Kel'Thuzad...

The next raid for my brave healer was Trial of the Crusader (25) with the guild's second group. This group consists of alts and players who are not picked in our "main" raid group. For the second week in a row, this group failed to kill Anub'arak. Yes, you read it right: A guild ToC run that fails to kill Anub'arak two weeks in a row.

People played like morons. Not enough dps on snobolds, mistresses, fel infernals, burrowers, scarabs, and valkyrs' shields. No cc or interrupts on Faction Champions. By shear brute force (thanks to several people actually out-gearing the place) we reached Anub'arak with only one wipe. We survived TWO missed stuns on Icehowl, several people getting killed by infernals on Jaraxxus, and a 15 minute long Faction Champions fight. The wipe came at Twin Valkyrs when they managed to heal themselves twice, and we hit the enrage timer.

I've noticed that people are getting sloppier every week when we raid in this group. Instead of improving from doing the fights over and over, people instead start making stupid mistakes and taking stupid risks. As a healer, the only thing you can do is heal your brains out and scream out in agony.

When the raid was called after just one wipe on Anub'arak (since it was obvious it wasn't worth continuing) I needed to use all that adrenaline I pumped into my system, so I went into a PUG Onyxia (25).

This PUG had all a normal Onyxia PUG has: An arms warrior doing 600 dps. A feral druid doing barely 1k dps. Mages that die immediately when the whelps come. Melee that don't run out of fire novas. And two holy paladins that healed LESS than the paladin tank did with his Judgement of Light. After a wipe, we downed the dragon on the second attempt. I ended up doing more than 30% of the total healing in the raid.

The worst healers in PUGs always seem to be paladins these days. Way too often I see paladin healers only spamming Flash of Light and not using Beacon of Light. They end up dead last on the healing meter, even when they are tank healing, and they always do less than 2k hps. Of course there are good paladin healers out there, and they usually blow the other healers away when using their spells in the right way, but they, sadly, seem to be the minority. At least in the PUGs I end up in.

Well, that's the end of this edition of the Weekly Raid Rant. I'm crossing my fingers for a patch release this week. I need new content to rant about.