"What the hell happened? Why didn't the healers heal us? You guys just watched us die!"
"Exactly! I didn't get a single heal. I just burned to death."
"Oh, come on. Here's my account. You heal next pull and let's see how many people you keep alive."
"Seriously. We were taking over a thousand damage per hit. Not even a god could've saved you from that. What exactly were we supposed to heal?"
After the whole raid resurrected and sat down to eat and drink, the melee players who had died in two hits immediately started blaming the healers.
Naturally, the healers weren't about to take that lying down.
They fired right back, and within seconds both sides were arguing.
"Enough!"
Susie was already pissed off after dying without receiving a single heal. Having to listen to everyone bicker on top of that was driving her crazy.
"You don't even know what caused the wipe, and you're already arguing about whose fault it was. What, you think arguing louder is going to kill the mobs?"
That shut everyone up.
What mattered now was figuring out what had actually caused the wipe.
Gabryell had deliberately stayed quiet. A forty-player raid needed to learn how to diagnose its own wipes instead of waiting for the raid leader to explain everything.
RedAce was a lot like ServerHeals: a whale with excellent awareness and the skill to back it up.
As one of the first melee players to die, he spoke first.
"The Onyxian Warders keep using a really nasty AoE. It hits hard enough that melee can't survive a third tick."
"Yeah, the damage is insane," DeathScum said. "If Luna hadn't used Nature's Swiftness on me, I would've died in two."
TwinBleeds added, "I panicked and popped Evasion, but you can't dodge that AoE."
DaVinci, one of the Fury Warriors, said, "I've got more health than a Rogue and I still can't survive three hits."
Ora Star, another Fury Warrior, looked disgusted.
"I swear this plate armor is made of paper."
ServerHeals, who had been the first to notice the debuff stacking on the main tank, said, "Melee should stay out on these. This isn't a healing problem. The AoE just kills you too fast."
"Exactly," MushroomHunter said. "I barely got two Rejuvenations out before you were already dead."
"If we stay out, do we still have enough DPS?" Storm asked.
"Easily."
OnlyOne said, "With this many Mages, we could probably kill the Warders with Frostbolt spam alone."
It sounded like an exaggeration, but the logic was solid.
The ranged DPS could handle the Warders by themselves, and keeping melee out of the AoE would let the healers focus almost entirely on the main tank.
Smooch immediately added, "Hey, don't forget the Hunters."
Desert laughed. "Ten Mages, five Hunters, three Warlocks. That's eighteen ranged DPS. A Warder with seventy or eighty thousand health isn't a problem. You melee stay out, the healers get to focus on the tank, everybody wins."
"Fine. Melee stays out this time. Let's see you ranged guys handle it."
There was no point arguing anymore. If the melee couldn't survive the Warders' AoE, running in would accomplish nothing except feeding them more corpses.
The healers were more than happy with that decision.
At least now they wouldn't have to scramble around trying to decide which dying melee player to save first.
With that settled, Danielly brought up the next problem.
"One more thing. The ground here slopes a little. When you tank the Warders, can you pull them higher up instead of standing down on the far side? We keep losing line of sight on you."
"Exactly," SevenDays said. "I was trying to heal Susie, but I couldn't get line of sight. And I sure as hell wasn't running into the other Warder's AoE just to reach her."
That one was on the tanks, and Carlos didn't make excuses.
"I'll watch my positioning next pull. I won't make the healers chase me around again."
Now that she had calmed down, Susie admitted the same thing.
"I panicked when the second one came in and grabbed it without thinking about where the healers were. That was my mistake. Won't happen again."
Only then did Gabryell step in.
"There's one more thing. Whatever happens, don't let the two Warders stack together. Nobody here can tank both AoEs at once. You saw what happened. Even the tanks got deleted."
"Yeah, that double AoE was disgusting," Carlos said. "Nobody's surviving that."
David and Night didn't need any convincing. They had already learned that lesson firsthand.
"Carlos, pull the first Warder farther back. Everyone else, stay well behind him. We kill them one at a time."
From there, Gabryell took over the calls.
"Warlocks especially, watch your threat. Don't rip aggro off Carlos. If you pull aggro and drag a Warder back into the raid, the two AoEs overlap and we wipe."
He singled out the three Warlocks for a reason.
Warlock threat could get ugly very quickly.
"Warlock threat really is ridiculous," DaVinci said. "I started out as a Protection Warrior. Back when I ran The Deadmines, I had this Warlock who kept ripping aggro off me. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the mobs back under control. We ended up wiping."
He sighed.
"That Deadmines run took hours. I got so pissed off that I gave up on Protection and switched to Fury."
Gabryell continued, "Fury Warriors, that applies to you too. Watch your threat. You don't have Feint or Vanish. If you rip aggro, the mob turns around and everybody standing next to you gets punished for it."
DaVinci answered immediately.
"Don't worry, Guild Leader. I'm not pulling aggro."
He had already made up his mind. If his threat climbed too high, he would stop using abilities altogether and stick to auto-attacks until Carlos pulled ahead again.
Fortunately, Gabryell's threat addon gave them a safety net.
Without a threat meter, learning these fights would have been hell.
Gabryell and Blizzard had agreed that raids that had not yet been cleared could not use boss-alert addons, but basic raid tools like damage statistics, threat meters, and raid frames were still allowed.
Without raid frames, healing forty people would have been a nightmare.
Trying to lead the raid at the same time would have been even worse.
"Everyone rebuff. Once buffs are done, eat and drink immediately. Then we pull again."
Buffing ate a lot of mana for some classes, so there was no point rushing them.
If you wanted your buffs, you had to give people time to drink their mana back.
If that was too much to ask, go complain to Blizzard and ask them to make buffs free.
Gabryell waited until everyone was ready.
"Hugo, go pull the Warder. Carlos, wait here and pick it up when it reaches us. Everyone else, stay farther back."
Using a Hunter for the pull was the safest option.
Hugo moved forward and found the two Warders' patrol paths overlapping.
He waited patiently.
Once they separated, he tagged the first one and pulled it toward the raid.
Carlos was already waiting and stepped forward to pick it up.
To make the handoff even cleaner, Hugo used Feign Death, wiping his threat and leaving Carlos firmly in control.
"Give Carlos a few seconds to build threat."
Carlos stacked Sunder Armor.
One stack.
Two.
Three.
After three stacks of Sunder Armor, Gabryell finally gave the call.
"DPS, go. Watch your threat. And if anybody pulls aggro..."
He had been about to threaten them with a DKP penalty.
Then he remembered they didn't actually have a DKP system yet.
He couldn't keep fining people gold for every mistake either.
Gabryell paused for a second and came up with something better.
"If you pull aggro, you have to shout 'I'm a noob!' ten times on Ventrilo."
The raid went quiet for a moment.
Gabryell smiled.
Aside from someone like Old, who valued his gold far more than his dignity, he doubted anyone wanted to call themselves a noob ten times in front of thirty-nine other people.