My very first raid — isn’t it cute!

First pull victory

We didn’t survive the 2nd pull

Me and another shaman are the only survivors

Thursday night I participated in my first raid! A very impromptu PuG of mostly noobs (including myself) took a crack at Magtheridon’s Lair, knowing full well that our badly-geared team was doomed to failure. But most of us didn’t care. We wanted the experience and the fun of giving it the ol’ college try.

It was weird being in a group of 25 people after all the other instances I’ve been in only had 5 people. I was in Group 5 and we had no tank. The raid leader and a few others in the group had successfully beaten Mag before and were very helpful talking the rest of us through the pulls.

We were giddy with success after the first pull! Then came the second pull — a total wipe. On the trash mobs, no less. My first raid wipe — woot! Don’t ask me why we wiped. Nobody did anything OBVIOUSLY stupid; we were just outgunned, I think.  We killed those mobs on our next try and made it into the room with Mag.

The leaders spent about 30 minutes explaining the fight to us. Very complicated. Since there were five summoners + cubes and we only had 4 tanks (all of whom were new to tanking this fight), we knew a wipe was a foregone conclusion. But I admired how everyone knew it, saw the crappy gear of the noobs, but still had a very positive outlook on the whole thing.  They even entrusted assigning a Clicking Of A Cube to me.  I volunteered to do it when no one stepped up because I figured what the heck, not likely to make it much worse, am I? In any event, we never got as far as Cube Clicking because the channelers ate us alive. I’m not even sure if we killed one of them. Probably, but it was so much chaos that I couldn’t tell.

The best part of the night was that I had a healing priest in my group named Whelz and we just hit it off whispering jokes back and forth about how it is to be a girl playing this game. She even LIKED the fact that I played a male toon because, as she said, “I bet the tools bother you a lot less.” I agreed, saying, “Yeah, until they hear my high squeaky voice on vent.”

Which reminds me: we didn’t have access to a vent server so we did a voice check on the in-game chat system… and then never used it! The entire raid was done via the text chat panel. I’m thinking that probably was NOT one of the points in our favor.

Murmur down!

On Wednesday night I had another first. I did my first Outlands instance: Shadow Labs. It was a very good PuG, I must say. We had a person new to tanking but he did a very good job despite working with FOUR CASTERS! Two warlocks, a priest, a mage, and me (elemental shaman). The mage bailed on us after we wiped twice on Grandmaster Vorpi but luckily another warlock joined us about 1 minute after the mage shined us.  So, going into Murmur we had no crowd control at all. The priest was very knowledgeable and patient in teaching us about each of the pulls. We wiped once on Murmur, but got him down the second time. A very cool fight.