Magtheridon!

Thursday night Mal Katai headed into Magtheridon's Lair for the first time.

It took a little while to get everything together and organized. The instance starts with trash pulls of Warlocks in a circle around Mag's room.

We actually managed to kill all the trash without wiping, although we did lose some people to shadow bolt volleys.

Because Mag is a new fight we spent a good portion of our time talking and explaining. Once again, though, we were short on healers.

Brindall was leading the Raid. I was assigned to the 4th channeler while Brindall took channeler 1 and 2. To see a Warrior hold two mobs like he does is really impressive to me.

Our first pull was an "oops" pull. How you "oops" pull in Mags in beyond me. The mobs don't proximity aggro but they react to aggressive actions. We spent too much time trying to figure out what happened, and some people were uncomfortable with the fascination other players had with figuring out who made the mistake.

I read a really good book once, and the 'moral' of one of its stories is "Let him who has never screwed up be the first to jump on the case of those that do screw up." Let me see.... just checking here..... nope, contrary to popular belief, I'm not perfect. I've screwed up in a raid, so I have no right to give another player a hard time over their mistake.

Fully Raid Buffed I was able to hit 19k Hit Points. No other tank in MK has over 17k as far as I know. As each Channeler dies, the remaining ones get stronger and stronger. Putting on on Channeler #4 indicates to me a strong belief in my capabilities as a tank.

We made 2 attempts on Mag. Our main issue seem to be loose Infernals killing our Healers, then our tanks dying. I don't believe we ever got Mag to under 90%.

It was interesting to watch Brindall's reaction to Mags damage. He saw that Mag was hitting really, really hard, and instructed the 3 healers assigned to him to basically spam him with heals.

In my opinion, that strategy is sound, but it demonstrates why I prefer the Effective Health argument. With 3 Healers spamming him with heals, the only effect of high avoidance will be overheal. Our healers are really good, but they can't predict the future. The heal is coming anyway. Unless they are able to cancel their heals at the last second, the heal will land and if the hit is avoided, then the heal will be overheal.

I was a Raid Healer for about 2 months right before BC came out. Canceling heals is something that even skilled healers miss from time to time.

Is overheal necessarily a Bad Thing? Only if the healers run out of mana before the boss runs out of hit points.

Now we have sampled Magtheridon, Void Reaver and Lurker. We should really pick one and stick to that boss until he is eating the dirt. Mag would be an interesting choice. It will take several weeks to learn him, but if we and get him down, we could easily turn our farming night into HKM/Gruul/Mag and move on to SSC and TK for progression. On the other hand, we could probably get Lurker or Void Reaver down sooner.

It will be interesting to see what our leadership chooses.