Conclave of Wind and Chimaeron, originally uploaded by theuser.

Last night we downed the Conclave of Wind and Chimaeron, putting us at
3/6 BWD N, 2/4 BoT N, and 1/2 TotFW N, half way through the normal
difficulty content. They were both fairly interesting fights I
thought. Staying so split up for the Conclave of Wind was interesting,
even though Elizabeth and I just hung out on one platform for the
majority of the fight. It was fun though! And it was fun chatting
during low points of the fight. The Skywall is gorgeous, and I love
being there.
One platform gave a stacking debuff that you’d clear by going to a
different platform for a period of time, but you also wanted to be on
that platform at a certain time. I was annoyed that people had trouble
understanding that some people, by nature of when we were telling them
to initially go to that platform, did not have time to go at the
designated time, get stacks, leave, drop stacks, and get back in time
for the next designated time. Eventually we changed strategies that
allowed them to start on that platform earlier, giving them time to
leave and get back in time for split-damage AOE, and that worked well.
But of course, the super awesome team consisting of me and Elizabeth
was awesome anyways.
Chimaeron went really smoothly once Corey and I were actually focusing
on different groups rather than accidentally healing the same group.
This fight has a mechanic that forces all incoming attacks on players
that are over 10K health to bring the player to 1 HP at the least. In
other words, they might be higher than 1 HP, but it won’t kill them as
long as they’re over 10K. This makes it interesting because people
only need to be at 10K HP or above, not anywhere near topped off on
health, which also means that I can spend ridiculous amounts of mana
actually using Flash Heal, my fast but inefficient heal, because I
only need to quickly get them to 10K.
So far, I’m loving the difficulty of Cataclysm raids I think. We’re
making progress every night. Most fights (not all) have still provided
a challenge during which we wipe repeatedly, which is of course good
because I want to work for kills. But I like that we’re still
progressing each night. I don’t want to raid nightly, and I don’t want
to be super hardcore, but I do want to see these raids to the end. I
haven’t seen what others are saying about the current tier or raiding,
so I’m not sure if the consensus is that it’s easy or how it compared
to the start of Wrath. Remember that I only started raiding in 3.3.
Hardcore raiders who want more of a challenge have heroic mode
anyways, so I feel like having normal mode be at a pace that actually
let’s us move through it without weeks spent at the same boss is good.

Valiona and Theralion, originally uploaded by theuser.

We downed Valiona and Theralion tonight.
2/4 Bastion of Twilight Normal
2/6 Blackwing Descent Normal

Grim Batol, originally uploaded by theuser.

How long are heroics supposed to last? I know they take longer in
Cataclysm than they did at the end of Wrath. An hour? An hour and a
half? Two hours and forty minutes when gem and I queued for a random
heroic. It was our second heroic, but our first was with the guild.
After two hours we had switched a lot of players because they kept
leaving, and only one other DPS stayed with us. One tank even yelled
at me (a disc priest) for DPSing when I should have been healing.
Clearly he hasn’t heard of Atonement. Also, it’s hard to heal the tank
when I have to heal DPS that make mistakes. Anyways, we brought Collin
in to tank and then things went a lot more smoothly.
While that might have been particularly bad, I still can’t see myself
wanting to do a 45 minute heroic after work. I suspect I’ll be doing
most of my gearing during my days off.

Blackwing Descent 2/6, originally uploaded by theuser.

Even though I was undergeared in greens, my guild brought me to our
raid last night. It was my first time downing Magmaw and the guild’s
first time downing the Omnotron Defense System! It was very fun even
if I sucked! More thoughts on this later.