Oomshakalaka: Leukemia

Heading into ICC for a progression night, Sholandria broke the news to us. Condon's 13 year old daughter had died Sunday morning to Leukemia. What do you say? Of course there was an outpouring of love and concern for Con and Shol. There was a moment of silence. Tears. Unfortunately, we know that no matter what we say or do, it doesn't change things or fix things.

There was this whole welling of emotions. Personally, I was angry. I wanted to rip through ICC, find a boss named Leukemia and kill him right there on the spot. Then come back next week and kill him again. And again the week after that, and the next week and the next and the next and when the Cataclysm comes and we've levelled on up past where raiding ICC serves any purpose, keep coming back anyway, every week, just to kill Leukemia.

Yet somehow, "let's go kill things" seemed like a hollow response to the death of a loved one.

So perhaps, in some cosmic, karmic way it was appropriate that our current progression is at Valithria Dreamwalker. We have tried the fight several times, mostly for a change of pace after beating our heads against the wall on other bosses. So we've seen it. Healers have to heal up Valithria while a continuous stream of adds come into the fight. Some are Suppressors, whose job is merely to apply debuffs to Valithria that slow down the healers' work. Most are just various types of undead come to kill us, drive us out.

Now that the other bosses are down, though, it's time we actually figure out how to save Valithria. We got into it and learned more about the fight. I learned Typhoon won't knockback the Suppressors, but it does slow them. Enough to kill them before they can begin channelling their debuff. We learned that there is an "enrage timer" equivelant. Eventually, the pace at which adds enter the fight increases dramatically. Too many swarm in for us to kill quickly enough before we are overrun. We tried switching up which healer was the primary on Valritha, how many entered her portals at a time to get the healing buff. Even, before figuring out the the acceleration of adds was actually an enrage timer equivelant, we had me try healing until the acceleration hit. My heal-fu simply is not strong enough.

Most importantly, I think we figured out that the if we let the tanks pull close to the center where it was easier to AoE all the adds together, and used ranged AoE to take down the Supressors, then the dps and tanking was not too difficult. So we tried bringing in a fourth healer. And it worked. While the rest of us kept the Undead occupied, those four healers were the night's heroes and we saved Valithria.

How I wish, I wish, I wish we could have done something like that for Condon.