Post Mortem Examination: Helegrod (level 65, Spider wing) - Sunday 17 April 2011 8pm

In one word: successful.

While we did wipe on Zaudru once he went active it was mainly due to us being caught out of position to get into the alcove, once the adds started coming there wasn't much that could save us.

Generally speaking i thought the raid went well we responded to all of the problems we faced throughout the raid considering we only had a strat for the final boss, and the first time round the execution of stuns/raid ball movement during the silkspinner waves was pretty good for our first proper raid.

I'm always a big fan of tight comms, so if there's anything i'd like to see going forward that we'll likely need is better calling and chat between raiders so we're all on the same page. Mainly to do with This buff is up, adds coming from here omg! who's tanking/mezzing what etc. So it's a pretty broad area we can improve in.

I think we were ready to give DN a go, but i don't expect we'll pass it first go - that said if we just run spider wing all the time we stand to learn nothing, while it is very zergy with alot of adds, they are pretty much the only thing that makes spider wing hard it lacks the mechanics and coordination required of DN which is really the other area outside of comms where will always need to improve and learn!

My 2 cents

I really thought there were a lot of positives coming out of last night's raid (once we got organised - we still need to get a few more people who can sign up and commit regularly at the relevant times to avoid the need for pugging those last few slots). Reading around the web you get a bit of a sense of the relative difficulty of fights and I've read of a number of raid groups coming up against that fight and failing repeatedly - this is in contrast to stuff like the helegrod drake or giant wing which it seems everyone is able to faceroll through. We showed that with a bit of advance planning we can coordinate well enough to take on a fight that does beat some raid groups, and I think that's a big positive.

Some other positives were:

• Hunters doing a great job in an unusual class role.
  
• Not a single champion dying even though they were going all out AOE on gazillions of targets! I don't know how we managed to pull that off, but it must have been some combination of good healing, good tanking by the guards and good survivability tactics by the champs. Well done .
  
• The whole raid moving around as a unit pretty well.
  
• Multi-target mezzing happening quite well.
  
• Minstrels doing a great job of chipping in with fears when the mez targets got into the body of the raid. We need to keep this in mind and coordinate it as an actual tactic - if you end up with your mez target in the middle of the cluster, don't try to re-mez it there, call for a minstrel to fear it and then remez it when it's outside the ball.

One of the biggest lessons learned from my perspective is that with multi-target mezzing during a fight, target marking is simply too slow - we need to set positions/target priorities up ahead of time and then apply the markings after the initial mezzes have been done.

Anyway, that was a fairly simple raid so we shoudn't think we're all super l33t or anything, but it's not the easiest raid ever and we did good and had fun I think. Thanks for coming!

Yup, all in all I think that went rather well and given the number of mobs, it could have gone rather badly. All did there jobs well and I have little doubt, that given much the same group, we would get it all done, first time without any wipes. So really, given the low rewards, not really worth doing again.

I too was a little surprised I didn't die, hitting 10-13 targets at once, I suspected to get hit a massive amount, but for the most part, was fine. No doubt a combination of good tanking, healing, having my main target dropped by most of the group helped.

If guess if there was a downside, it was the time it took to pull the group together. With luck that will start to happen faster and be a more set group.

Anyway, onward and upward.