Professor Putricide

Last night's raid was dedicated to wiping on Professor. Well, after we zerged Sarth 3D for the mount (which is soooooo last week, according to Daxie.)

We made significant gains during our time with the end boss of the Plague wing of ICC:

We cut our transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 from three unstable experiments to just two.

We pushed through Phase 2 to Phase 3 three times.

We wiped at 1%.

Then we wiped at 2%.

Then we killed him.

...and there was much rejoicing!!

This fight, much like Dreamwalker, was one that I've seen from start to kill with The Ebon School. We endured together; we labored together, and last night, we saw all our hard work pay off.

One of the things that has really helped us (and me personally) is becoming more aware of the environment and sacrificing DPS to get out of "the fire" or the line of fire (malleable goo.) I can honestly say that I've become a better raider as we've gotten our act together on this boss.

An example of getting better is throughout last night's attempts, I was working on my personal Damage Taken ranking. Of course, I was doing the dance how our raid leader was calling it, DPSing my brains out, and doing whatever job might be required of me, but through it all, I tried to be conscious about avoiding damage while doing all that.

The results for the night were pretty good on the Damage Taken meter. I ended up 24th a couple of times and moved from being consistently in the top 10 to consistently being in the bottom 10.

The next item up for me is my DPS. I have a 5945 gear score, and I struggle to crack the top 10. Yes, we have some great DPS in The Ebon School, and yes, I'm aware of the "hybrid tax,", but still, I need to figure out if and how I can put out more DPS. So, tonight, I'm making a trip to the dummies as well as possibly adding some different addons to track my DoTs and lag.

I've already been to shadowpriest.com and gleaned some useful tidbits from it. One such tidbit is using Shadow Word: Death when I'm on the move. Now, I've taken SW:D totally out of my rotation, but with ICC's highly mobile fights, it makes sense to pop it if I don't have another instant cast spell that has a higher priority while I'm running.

Also, I learned that reapplying DoTs should never be early. By overwriting DoTs, I not only miss out on the last tick, but also have to wait x amount of seconds before the reapplication has its first tick. All that equates to lost DPS and the possible need to get a different DoT tracker addon.

I currently use PSP for my shadow priesting, and come to think of it, I just use it to see what I should be casting next; it does have a timer attached to it, so maybe I need to just pay more attention to that part of it. Something else to add to the target dummy session.

So, in short (well, actually long...), I need to take it to the next level, which means some practicing is in order. Now I just need to figure out what an acceptable time frame is to compare my DPS on the dummies. OOM? 4 minutes? 5 minutes? I'll just have to play around and see what works best.