First raid healing - Wyrmbreaker

So last Friday we rounded up the band and headed into the Bastion of Twilight.  No real prep or setup, just waltzed in and started working on the trash.  It wasn't too bad, and with a liberal use of CC we managed to get through it with minimal incident.  This is when we stepped into the grinder that was the Wyrmbreaker. 

 

Wrymbreaker Abilities

 

I'm still not entirely sure what all of his abilities are, but the fight breaks down like this.  Wyrmbreaker will beat on the tank with two to three buffs on him.  In addition, a proto-drake will breathe firey death on the raid, and can have a single buff on him.  These buffs are determined by the captured drakes that are 'active' when you enter the room.  Our first week had a cage of whelps (may or may not always be active), the Nether Scion, and the Storm Breaker.  One gave the boss an AoE shadow knockback ability, and the other increased his attack speed.  The whelps increase the damage done by the proto-drake's fire, to the point that it became unhealable.

 

What you have to do is release the drakes to reduce/eliminate the buffs dropped on the boss.  The drawback to this is that they are almost immediately mind controlled by the boss, so you have to tank/heal through their damage.  Fortunately the boss get's a debuff that increases his damage taken by 50% per drake released, so you have a shot at making that six minute enrage timer. 

 

Now, I don't know if we just happened to get the worst possible combination or not, but let me tell you - this was damn tough.  I 'think' we almost got one drake down, but by the time that happened the mana pools were running dry.  We were using a Holy Priest, Paladin, and Druid to heal - and we just didn't have the gas to get through it.  Part of this I'm sure is due to a lack of gear.  At the time of the encounter we had at least one member who couldn't qualify for a random heroic, and several others who were boosting stats with PvP gear.  We had to use an ele-shaman to focus the interrupts, and we're not an AoE heavy raid comp (Doomkin and..???).

 

I'm hoping we can get one night in this week, but being Christmas I'm not holding out a lot of hope.  A few gear upgrades might see us through, and we should have some more flasks and such created for this week.  What I know for sure is that we certainly didn't walk in and roflstomp the boss - and that was a good thing.  I'm looking forward to content that is challenging for more than a week.