First Time for Everything

Since the raid leader for the ICC10 raid I was in left the guild and did a faction change (he didn't like the state of raiding in the guild, and I don't really blame him), I decided to do some raid leading on my own.

I've never been a raid leader before. It has never really interested me to take the responsibility to get people together, finding replacements, explaining tactics, and police/guide the members of the raid. It just sounds too much like WORK to me, and it is stuff I do eight hours a day, five days a week already. Doing work on my spare time as well didn't sound all that compelling to me.

But since I want to do ICC10, and since my wife has been shut out from 25-man raiding, and since I knew there are a couple of great players who do not have the time to raid several days a week, but still want to do some casual raiding, I got ten people together and went into Icecrown yesterday.

Getting healers for the run turned out to be harder than getting tanks, and since I wanted to have a shaman in the group, I decided to go on my resto shaman instead of my paladin tank.

I have to admit, it was a challenge to raid lead for the first time while being a healer instead of a tank (which I have a lot more experience with). As a tank, I always have to be aware of the mobs and the surroundings, which means it's easier to guide the rest of the raid. As a healer, I was focusing on health bars and sometimes got tunnel vision staring at the colored squares in Grid. Well, at least I could be certain to what hurt or killed anyone in the raid...

Four of the people in the raid hadn't done ICC before, so I had to explain all the fights in detail, which slowed down the pace a bit. But even with almost half the raid being new to the content, we only had one death on boss fights up until Festergut. On Festergut we had our first wipe, but we downed him on the second attempt.

Rotface turned out to be too hard for us this time. With so many newcomers, healers not used to the fight, and a tank who hadn't done the kiting before, our tries quickly turned messy.

It was getting late, and we had four tries on Rotface before calling it and going to Naxxramas to do the weekly raid instead. With more practice, both for the kiting tank and for the rest handling the small oozes, and with stricter healing assignments, I have no doubt we will down Rotface as well next time.

It was a fun raid. I enjoyed leading it since the raid members were doing what they were supposed to, even though they've never done the fights before.

Next time, there will be a lot less explaining of tactics, and we will be able to steam roll the Lower Spire and get more time on the rest of the instance.

Thanks to the people who joined the fun and didn't make me look too bad :)