Radiant, H-Maloriak, and breaking some rules

This week saw a lot of chaos thrown into our little raid group.  Our MT and Spriest were basically raiding from boats due to the rain they've been getting.  Our rogue and shaman are in Alabama, and had some tornado scares.  Oh, and our Boomkin is traveling for work.

What this boiled down to was a 4 hour raid week, which isn't much.  We did manage to get some things accomplished though, and break a few of our own rules along the way.

First - Radiant

I had a chance to look over my logs from last night, and what I'm seeing about Radiant isn't blowing my hair back.  Now don't get me wrong, 540 Spirit for 6 seconds is great, but as I mentioned earlier this week, it's not enough to even cover the cost of the spell.  What you're really getting is a lower cost to your Holy Shock, not a full time buff.

On average I was getting a 60% uptime on Radiant.  This means I'm not casting HS off every CD, but that's to be expected.  There's no point in casting it if no healing needs to be done, and sometimes you just don't want to use your GCD for that.  Say right after an electrocute on Nef.  I'm going to be pumping out Divie Lights, not worrying about getting Holy Shocks out.  Now once the raid is stabalized, I'll go back to that setup.  While the 2 heal combo punch of HS/WoG is great, sometimes I need more than that.  It's a decent bonus though, and I'm hoping I can nab some shoulders off Cho'Gall to give me that 5th piece so I can have options. 

Oh, and on that note.  Hunter/Shaman/Warrior tokens need to stop dropping.  Our shaman, who we picked up maybe 2 weeks ago, now has all three shoulder and helm sets.  It's annoying.

Breaking some rules

I don't know if they are rules, so much as guidelines, but originally we wnated no more than 10 raiders in the guild.  What has happend though is that between RL stuff, patch days, etc, we've had maybe one full raid week every month since we started raiding.  So Monger snagged us a backup DPS, and maybe a backup tank as well. We don't have (in my opinion) a backup healer on par with Monger or I, but we do have three other players that "can" heal.  Our boomkin does a smashup job on healing Nef and Halfus (and she's done H-Chimaeron), and our shaman is putting forth some decent healing as well.  I question our Spriest, but in a pinch he's ok. 

So hopefully adding these players gives us options and not drama.  We'll see.

H-Maloriak

We finally pushed this guy over last night, though I managed to die to an ice-ball AFTER he was dead.  WTG nub.  We three healed this fight (Disc, Shaman, Pally), and it worked out well.  While it's possible that we could cut a healer on this, I don't know that I'd want to.  Personally once we find a pattern that works, I'm loathe to change it.  Plus if you get a healer frozen in the blue phase, you're probably in real trouble.  

The black phase is all about your team moving out of the goo.  You can't heal through them standing in it for more than a second or two.  The fight is REALLY long though, so you have a lot of time to use cooldowns.  You can generally get a Divine Plea off between cauldron colors as well.

I really like the fight, though him clipping his own casts for releasing the adds does suck.  It can get a little hariy for a few moments.

Next week I'm hoping we can put the double dragos down.  Mmm.