[Ardnasc]

Most of the encounters we are attempting and hope to attempt in the future are 'scripted' and require each raid force to come up with a strategy that works for them. In general they all require each and every person to know their class and not only pay attention to instructions from the raid leader but to make suggestions (preferably in forums like this one - Not during raids) on how the raid can make better use of them. Our raid force is different from raiding guilds and we tend to have folks with us that can only raid one or two nights a week. Our mix of classes can be and frequently is not what would be considered 'optimum' - but we can and do still manage to progress and win!

I mentioned in the raid channels the other night that we need more people - we really, really do! We have come sooooo close to winning on a few targets lately but, we lacked the numbers of folks needed to handle the scripts or to manage the amount of DPS needed for the target. Please encourage your friends and guildies that may be interested in raiding to give us a try. If you see new or returning folks please help them out and encourage them to look into joining us when they reach level 75.

One technique I'd like to get folks to use now is 'Healing assists'
(Clerics please feel free to add to this). Basically what happens is that everyone that has a heal spell sets up a social or hot-key that actually uses the mob to tell us who to heal. It goes like this:
/assist Mob-name (ex: Xi-T)
/cast 5 (or whatever slot number you keep your fast heal spell in)
/assist Elg (or whoever is MT or Main Assist)

What this helps with is keeping healing on whoever is being hit by the mob regardless of who is the MT - this is important is the case of targets like Xi-Thuul that mem-blur and switch targets a lot. Just hit the hot key frequently to do your part in keeping the folks in the aggro table alive.

I'd like for people to feel free to suggest any other techniques we might use to increase our chances of winning below.

For those nights when we lack the numbers to take on any of our 'serious' targets I'd like to work on flagging and faction. While we no longer need to worry about flagging for Demi, ToB or Deathknell we still do need faction for TSS, and flags/keys for Soltaris and Crystalos. For these nights where we work on Soltaris flagging I plan to do as we have in the past where everyone who shows up on time gets raid dkp for the evening and we break up into groups to do the missions. For TSS faction and Crystalos golems we can do a lot as a raid force. As I see it even though we do not need to 'flag' for PoR raids I do think we need to progress thru the events leading up to the flag to learn how to handle the scripts (the developers have twisty minds but tend to use similar techniques that build on the previous encounters).
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Have Fun!Ardnasc