First Cata Raid - Magmaw down

With our Guildmaster, who also happens to be our primary raid leader, stuck in traffic last night we meekly with great confidence ventured into our first Cataclysm raid. Along with the majority of raiding guilds out there, we opted to have a go at Magmaw, the first boss of Blackwing Descent.

Before we even started, we encountered our first problem – a lack of healers. We have enough raiders to run two strong teams, but we are short on main spec healers. What that meant in real terms was that some people missed out, something we are hoping to address in the very near future.

After being summoned to the instance (a good thing too, I hadn’t actually checked where in Blackrock Mountain the entrance was) we zoned in and headed left. The first trash pull was straightforward, a single patroling dragonkin. He was dispatched easily enough. The second group wiped us a couple of times until we worked out to get two tanks tanking each mob so that they were the furthest player from the mob there weren’t tanking (they periodically charge, stun and dmg the furthest player from them). The rest of us then stood in the middle. After we worked that out and proceeded to down the skull, the cross went nuts and pretty much 1 shot the entire raid.

OK, what happened there…..

Turns out the remaining mob enrages when its life partner is killed. So take 2. Dps the skull down to 15% then switch to the cross, burn it down then finish off the skull before it goes insane. I wonder how many dragonkin orphans we will create this expansion…

Fortunately that’s all the trash before Magmaw, yep 3 mobs…

The great red worm himself was a fun fight. Im not going to run through his abilities or the stock standard strat we used, check out tankspot or youtube for those. I do like some elements of the fight though. It is very healer intensive, some nasty tank and raid dmg flying around. We started with 1 tank, 2 healers and 7 dps (1 of which was our raid offtank), then switched our tanks so that the bear tank moonlighted (successfully) as our third healer.

For me, the best part of the fight is getting to impale Magmaws head on a spike :) Big numbers start flying as we get a 100% damage increase for that phase. Loved seeing some 40k plus crits floating around the screen!

We started our attempts by getting him down to around 75%, enough so that we got him on the spike. After you have seen that part of the fight you have seen it all, it’s just a rinse-repeat deal from there. After that attempt we had a few where we just missed a pillar of flame or didn’t get the parasites down fast enough and wiped early but overall we steadily pushed his health lower with each attempt.

Prior to the very last attempt of the night our best go had been 48%. Being the raid leader, I gave one of the great inspirational speeches in history (something like: this is our last attempt guys, let’s see how much better than 48% we can get him! Awesome, I know)! Whatever I said or whatever people heard, it worked! We had a pretty much flawless attempt and simply owned him. No deaths.

Big shout out and congratulations to the team last night, awesome work! Labyrinth of Lost Souls first Cata raid and our first Cata raid boss down!

Here is a screenshot; I even labelled Magmaw for you :)

Voros

The Lich King: Now I stand, the lion before the lambs... and they do not fear.