Lord Lakmaeran, Raid Encounter

[MongoJerry]

We charged forward, or rather Kyan charged forward, and battle commenced. Casters were told to hold their fire at the beginning of the fight while Kyan build up aggro on Lakmaeran using sword attacks. Taunt has been changed in this patch in that it gives the warrior barely more aggro than everyone else on the mob's hate list. This means it no longer does any good to spam Taunt multiple times at the start of a fight (even if one could -- it has an 8 second cooldown timer now). The only way for a warrior to build up aggro is to use his or her regular attacks, so the ranged attackers had to remain gentle throughout the fight to make sure not to pull aggro off Kyan. Similarly, individual healers had to make sure not to heal Kyan too often or risk drawing too much aggro on themselves.



Whoops! Some of us got a little too close.



Lakmaeran liked to cast his lightning shield, but the priests in the group would quickly dispel it. Meanwhile, a battery of healers on the hill kept Kyan at full health. The gnome next to me died, but hey, he wasn't my responsibility, and he was only a gnome anyway.



We ever so slowly and gently damaged Lakmaeran while gently continuing the heals on Kyan.



You'll notice that in all these screenshots, very few people are ever firing at once.



At first, I was one of the more active healers and I congratulated myself every time I managed to be the first to dispel a given lightning shield. But as my mana drained, I started holding off on my heals. I kept a lock on Kyan and would have cast a heal if he had ever dropped to less than half health, but the other healers were doing a great job and never let his health get down that far.



By the time Lakmaeran had been whittled down to 20% health, I was back to having full mana. I was ready to jump back into the healing rotation if any healers started shouting that they were out of mana, but none did. I healed my partymates but otherwise kept myself in reserve (and also walked around taking screenshots).



As Lakmaeran's health dropped below 10%, Rynin reminded the raid group repeatedly to keep the firing rate at the same steady pace. He didn't want us to ramp up our firing rate in our excitement and end up disastrously pulling Lakmaeran off Kyan. Incidentally, Kyan later said that other than in the initial moments of the battle, he never cast Taunt. All of the aggro he had built up was due to his regular attacks.



Now, I am making up stuff to say so that I can post a pretty screenshot.



And after nine and a half minutes, Lord Lakmaeran was dead. As far as we knew, it was the first raid-level boss to have been killed on our or for that matter any server. What'd we get? Pride, a sense of accomplishment, and not much else. But for most people in the raid, that was enough. Thanks to everyone involved in the raid for the terrific experience. Thanks, obviously, to Connacht for organizing things. Thanks for Rynin for some good raid-level tactics and coordination efforts in the final battles. And thanks to everyone for not giving up when things didn't go right the first few times. I had a blast and look forward to more raid encounters with this crew in the future!