[Offtopic] Vashj Down

In non-techie news, Fire and Blood downed Vashj in our first full night of attempts on her. The fight is a real test of communication, organization, healing and awareness, and it was great to see consistent improvement in every single attempt. Congratulations to all of those who were a part of the raid last night. Really great job, all.

My role in the fight was DPS and offtanking in case one of the other tanks got blown to hell or something. In P1 and P3 I pretty much went melee-only. In P2 I focused on bringing Naga elites to the center to be DPSed down and then went to beat them, as they were causing some issues by not being picked up early. I did get the benefit of one of the melee-heavy groups, and as a result my DPS went pretty insane for a while. Our raid doesn't have issues with DPS, especially melee DPS, so when we managed to get to P3 with all of our raid intact it was an easy kill.

But that's the trick, of course - getting to P3 without anyone dying. And it's a very big trick. Even with the good melee DPS we have, it was a challenge to kill the naga elites before the next one spawned. It was a challenge to kill the strider before another one would appear and start wreaking havoc. It was a challenge to keep all of these people healed through random lightning, tainted globs, strider beatings, cleaves, etc while attempting to pass a ball around. For a Druid - especially a feral - there are a lot of unique advantages and benefits to the fight. LotP heals a surprisingly large amount given that everyone is taking small amounts of damage from static charges, entangles and lightning. Entangles are easy to get out of with powershifting, which can be advantageous for tanking Vashj and making sure she does not have much time to multishot. The more battle rezzes, the better, as losing just one or two people can be a wipe in p2. Self-healing is good, huge HP as a feral is good (I used a hybrid set of my tanking/dps gear for survivability, which was good as I ate a cleave)

And of course, if you get caught away from Vashj in the slime, you can always moonfire her to death. :)

Congratulations to Fire and Blood!