Gruul'd

So even though I missed our guild's run on Gruul yesterday (boo busted 'puter), a few days prior I managed to get a raid spot with an allied guild at the last minute. It was to be my first time, and I didn't even have my unstable flasks yet. >.<

I had seen some videos, read some strats, but of course nothing prepares you like the real thing. There are very few trash pulls, thankfully, fairly straightforward stuff there. Bunch up on the Brutes, interrupt the casters.

First major encounter of course is High King Maulgar and his Pals. There's a lot more coordination that needs to happen here than your average instance. Hunter misdirects, Mage tanks, even a Hunter tank in our case. Lots of weirdness and folks scrambling into position. Luckily for me, it was just following Blindeye's tank in and melee'ing from behind, watching Omen and Earth Shock'ing to interrupt the heals. From there it's just following kill order, watching threat, etc. Ahh, the life of a no-pressure DPS'er. :P

The first attempt was almost insta-wipe as we had our positioning wrong, but the 2nd shot was much smoother. Unfortunately I hit the dirt at some point, popped Reincarnation, then promptly died again. It's not a party until a Shammy goes down! We managed it on either the 2nd or 3rd try (can't remember), but it was all sorts of fun, total chaos as folks scrambled from one mini-boss to the other. I seem to recall a near-wipe on the successful downing, with backup tanks picking up HKM, only a few healers left and ONE DPS'er around to finish off at ~2%.

After HKM comes some more minor trash (bunch up on the Brute, LOS the casters around the corner), then its on to Gruul The Dragonkiller hisself. He's actually not a terribly complicated fight, basically tank/spank with some tricks in-between... Like rocks falling on your head and flinging you into the air before shattering the ground under you. Good stuff. With some helpful mods (DBM FTW) and paying attention, though, it's definitely do-able. Just don't get frozen next to a healer! We had all healers marked with raid symbols just to be able to spot them easier.

I personally seemed to do better on Gruul than HKM, although I think I did die on try 2 of 3, but overall not bad. Average damage for the whole instance was reported at 733 DPS, number 5 on the damage meters. <3 those raid buffs! Probably coulda been higher if I didn't spend so much time AFK'ing during large portions of HKM (squished blueberry).

Sounds like our own guild is going to take another shot at Gruuls in a few weeks, hopefully the computer will be back in action by then!

In other news, I'm now wearing a goofy Mardi Gras decoration in the offhand... yup, I broke down and got Vanir's Left Fist of Brutality, and slapped on Mongoose.

I look ridiculous.

Oy.