Witch Doctor

Another “game first” has been added to my list! Yesterday Mr witch Doctor and myself went into Karazhan for the first time.

Not with just the two of us, of course. Some long time friends of ours had asked us to come along with their guild. Coincidentally, none of them had ever been to any raid either. Hmm, Karazhan with ten raiding virgins… I’ll admit I was slightly apprehensive.

Group one consisted of two protection Warriors, a Warlock, a holy Priest and a holy Paladin. Group two consisted of a fire Mage, an arcane Mage, a Boomkin, my Hunter boyfriend with his trusty pet, and yours truly.

We cheered as we cleared the first trash pull.

We cheered as we downed Attumen. Everybody seemed to have done their homework and the fight was a piece of cake. Mr Witch Doctor got himself a nice pair of bracers, and the Paladin a pair of gloves.

Moroes next. There was some confusion as to what was to happen to the adds, so when one of them wasn’t tanked I quickly pulled healing aggro and died. Luckily I’m a Shaman. So when one of the tanks finally picked up the add, I reincarnated and happily continued healing. Moroes went down without too much trouble after that. The Warlock got a belt and one of the Warriors a nice trinket.

We were feeling lucky so we pushed on to Maiden of Virtue. At this point we were happy to have Mr Witch Doctor with us, since he was the only one who had been reading up on boss fights up to this point! After listening to his strategy, we spread out around the room, and the tanks started the fight. I’m not too certain what went wrong after that, but the Warlock, the Mages and the Boomkin died one after the other. I spammed Grounding Totem whenever the cooldown was up, which probably saved me from getting Holy Fire’d, but I think that maybe we were spread out too far because the others in my group didn’t seem to benefit from it. Miraculously, both of the tanks, all three of the healers, and the Hunter and his pet survived. His mana depleted rapidly so at a certain point he could do nothing but stand there and auto-shoot. With him being the only damage dealer the fight seemed to take forever, but… we did it.

My anonymized WWS report on the Maiden Fight. “Try 1″?

That’s right, we one-shotted Attumen, Moroes and Maiden. Nobody (except Mr Witch Doctor I suppose) expected that we would do so well, but we were happy that we did!

And the fact that Maiden decided to drop Totem of Healing Rains for me was of course just the icing on the cake.

Some interesting observations:

• Boomkins are awesome. All buffed up and with his moonkin aura my spell crit was as high as 24%!
• With a Blessing of Wisdom, a flask of mighty restoration, and my own mana spring totem and water shield, I had more than enough MP/5 to outlast all of the boss fights. I think I only chugged one mana potion all evening. And I didn’t even use any mana oil.
• Normally, when I’m main healing 5-man instances, I cast Healing Wave approximately 90% of the time, followed by 5% Chain Heal and 5% Lesser Healing Wave. As expected the numbers looked quite different yesterday: 60% Chain Heal, 35% Healing Wave and 5% Lesser Healing Wave.
• The healing meters showed that all three of us healers really put in our weight. I’m especially impressed with the Paladin, who was slightly undergeared compared to the Priest and myself. I think we did an awesome job together.

All in all it was certainly a good evening. Next time I will be better prepared, and read up on strategies for all of these bosses. And on all three possible Opera events. And on all the other Karazhan bosses. And on Zul’Aman. Just in case…