Assessment

We've done two raid nights since the big blow up at Black Temple.
Thursday, Mal Katai returned to TK. We had been told we were doing Al'ar but it turned out we were doing Solarian instead. The trash went pretty well save for a bad pull on the big birds in Al'ar's room where we got three birds.
I volunteered to be the Charge dummy. I stand away from the raid and let the birds charge me and then fly back to the tank. Since these guys mana burn like a Shadow Priest on steroids, I find keeping any kind of threat rotation going to be difficult.
We get to Solarian and proceed to engage. The encounter is progressing nicely when one of our Hunters get Wrath, and doesn't move. We wipe. We regroup and pull again. the same Hunter get's tagged and doesn't move.
"Sorry guys, I was watching the hockey game, and not paying attention."
At this point, the Dora threatens to remove him from the raid if he does it again. Again? He had wiped us twice, he should have been kicked then.
We pull one more time. This time when he gets tagged he moves, and we were able to defeat the encounter. Yeah! 3 shotting Solarian. By now it was too late to go after Al'ar or Void Reaver so we call the raid after one boss.
Fast forward to Sunday night and we have SSC on the docket. I'm thinking this will be a good barometer of where Mal Katai is at.
We had 4 tanks: 3 Warriors (Devona, Brindall, Lanorah) and 1 Paladin (myself). Instead of my normal spot on a Priestess, I was on pet duty. I threw my shield to get some initial aggro and went to town with Consecrate to hold the mobs. Brindall as usual tanked the Collossi single pulls.
Brindall and I switch into our Resist gear and we get ready to pull Hydross. We take him through the transitions, and easily one shot him.
Next up is Lurker's trash. Instead of my usual spot tanking a Shatterer, I get assigned to the Greyheart Technicians. This got me somewhat upset. The Technicians hardly need a tank at all. What was happening was that Brindall was assigning the Warriors and giving me whatever mobs might be left over. I made a comment to him in Officer Chat, but I didn't want to get into a full fledge discussion in the middle of a raid. I did what was asked of me. After the raid was over, I didn't make a post on our forums or start something in Officer Chat or Guild Chat. I sent him an email expressing my disappointment at the way he doled out assignments. This was done privately, and kept just between me and him (and the several hundred people who read my blog) . I felt I needed to communicate my concern over how he handled things and make sure I had not done anything that might have caused him to do things the way he did.
I was assigned to my normal Guardian on Lurker. I went with a threat heavy set and never lost aggro to the Island DPS.
Lurker was another 1 shot.
We move onto Tidewalker. Brindall decided to switch over to his Holy Paladin alt.
It took two tries to kill Tidewalker. We didn't have our normal Druid tank (Blankz), so we tried Lanorah. Lan got burst down and we wiped. I pointed out that Devona would take less damage than Lanorah because he had more armor. Devona did a great job and managed to stay alive (even when two of his healers got Watery Grave). The AoE DPS was very good and the Murlocs died very quickly. Dotslover did a great job of giving me a healing target. Three max rank Holy Light will generally do it.
I have more trouble with the North group than the South, because the North group has to pass through the whole raid before they get to me.
I picked up some DPS boots off Tidewalker for a minimum MKP bid.
Brindall went back to his Warrior for Fathom Lord. I was given my choice of tanking the Shaman or Fathom Lord himself. I chose Fathom Lord. The Shaman can do some ridiculous burst damage.
I was the cause of our initial wipe. I was moving FLK into position when I took a normal melee swing plus a Cataclysm Bolt. Cataclysm hits you for a percentage of your max hit points. It hit me for over 9000. Basically I took about 13k damage in one second. I died.
Our second attempt went better. I didn't get killed but we lost too many DPS to the Spitfire Totem. The Officers had said over and over and over about how important it was to kill the Spitfire, but the Totem just didn't go down with only Ranged DPS on it.
Our next attempt went even better. We still struggled a bit with Spitfire until the Priestess went down. Once the melee team got over to FLK, the Totem didn't stay alive very long.
Unfortunately , we were really close against the enrage timer. We 30 seconds to go, Brindall called out for DPS to ignore the Spitfire and pour everything they had into FLK. We had him at 1% with 5 seconds to go on the timer.
He enraged.
I dodged.
He died.
He dropped a Frayed Tether of the Drowned. Lanorah and I both bid 5 MKP (20% of the max amount of MKP you can have). We decided to roll off for 5 MKP. I lost the roll. I could have started a bidding war, but I need MKP for Shoulders and Gloves and the Tier pieces tend to go for very high bids. I hope it will drop again, but it's not that much of an upgrade over my Barbed Choker of Discipline. It is an upgrade, and I do want it, but I wasn't going to break the bank for it.
It was a close call, but we still managed to kill 4 bosses in SSC. It doesn't look like the players we lost hurt us all that much. We're still basically in the same spot we were in before the drama at the Black Temple.