10K Giveaway Contest #3 - Raid Tales

[Handull]

To preface this story I want to add that the cleric was lvl 59, the wiz was probably lvl 60, but the rest of us were low 50's at best. This was also my first time fighting the reavers and being past the locked door in CoM. It was a smaller raid, but it was a nail-biter for sure and a ton of fun for everyone who was there.

The beginning: What might have started out as a joke from Mordavin lead to a full 12 main raid of the reavers in CoM. Starting out with a lower level tank and one cleric didn't go so well, and lead to a wipe after killing the first reaver and his first repop. As we gathered up the corpses and reorganized, a few more people came over, and we had a solid force ready to go. We quickly got into the rhythm of killing these guys and went straight for the top, the three rooms in the sky, skipping over the room of 5 reavers up the lift. The final spawn of the zone dropped easily and we evaced out to EJ to head back in to find the remaining reavers.

What happened next: At this point we lost a few people, including one of our clerics, and were down to an 8 man force. Luckly will still had our rogue, main tank, and a great cleric to keep us going. We went back in and quickly cleared the first room again, moving to the back hallway. It took a while playing around with the lift to find ways to safely pull the non-reavers in that room (though a straight pull just might have worked), but once we got up there the reavers started falling without a problem. We were under the impression that Lord Rak'Ashiir would pop after all 5 of these mobs had been killed, and we were happily killing the 3rd repop of the 3rd reaver when, you guessed it, the Lord popped on us.

The fight: At first I was very worried, and was on my toes ready to evac, expecting his AoE spells to drop us quickly. To my surprise, he seemed to be a pushover. Within almost no time he was down to 70%, and it seemed like we had this in the bag. At some point, though, he dropped his first AoE nuke, and everything changed. I mean sure, I'd watched the tank's HP drop a once or twice by 25% due to a nuke, but all of a sudden the melee half of my group was down to 2% HP, 30% HP, etc. I got one more heal off before they started dying...

"Camp Out": At this point I told the main healer to camp out, and I started spamming Sup Heal on the tank to give the cleric enough time to get out of there and rez us all later. He was part way into his camp when he stood up and yelled "burn hin down". In the panic to heal the tank, I hadn't checked the mob's HP, and he was around 36%. I switched over to nukes, and we were going big or going home. He was quickly down to about 8%, but it seemed like just not enough. The druid and the wizard were out of mana, and while the melee's that were left were slowly bringing his HP down, you could see it also creeping back up. So there we were, down to bones of the raid. Main tank barely hanging on, cleric trying to keep the tank on his feet, and the druid and wiz waiting on mana to nuke. Everyone else was dead! The mob was at 1%HP, but no one else was left. The mobs HP ticked up to 2%; all seemed lost. Then I remembered something. Something I hadn't really needed up until now at all. The Mod Rods the mage was handing out before! Being at full health, I quickly clicked my Mod Rod, cast the last nuke, and landed the kill shot!

The Aftermath: Unfortunately the cleric died in the final moments of the fight, but it didn't matter, we had the loot, and now just had to med up and do a bit of a CR. Of course it wouldn't be that easy though... Suddenly the two non-reavers in the room popped, and the three of us reamaining, low on mana and the tank sitting at 9%HP, had to act fast. We were able to quickly root the mobs, reform into one group, and evac to safety!

After the very satisfying corpse run we handed out our shiny new Atramentous Shield and went on way adventuring across Norrath. The final team of 8 consisted of a druid, cleric, warrior, sk, paly, mage, wiz, and rogue.