Ever had one of those nights of raiding where you feel like you either ran strait into a brick wall, or got hit by a big truck and not quite sure which it was? That's how I feel last night after 11 rounds with Mimiron and Firefighter. Last night was our nightly foray into Ulduar and while I knew Firefighters wasn't exactly easy I had no idea it would be the giant obstacle it appears to be right now. After the first several attempts we hadn't even made it into phase 2 and figured out we wouldn't be able to two heal the encounter as the occasional tick of fire and the dot from the napalm was a great deal to heal on top of keeping the tank up. We had several people die from the Napalm alone while the rest of the raid was being healed. Which means we hadn't quite gotten the swing of exactly how much we needed to spread out. We also were having trouble with the fire filling up too much of the room because people were spreading out too much and not keeping the fire controlled in parts of the room. We ended up needing a third healer and once we got her to switch to her healing spec we had enough healing and eventually started getting into phase 2 with very little trouble at all.
But phase 2 continued to be a big problem for the remainder of the evening. We did get into phase 3 a few times but too many were dead because our inability to control the fire well enough presented too many problems to keep everyone healed. At one point I had no choice but to cross through a couple lines of fire because the tank and several others were actually out of healing range, and it was a problem we didn't correct for the rest of the evening.
I was greatly surprised by just how difficult Firefighter still was. It clearly wasn't a DPS issue as we did eventually establish we could burn through phase 1 very quickly. The health of the stages isn't the issue so it boils down to the human performance issues. It's the mechanics of the fight that continue to make Firefighter extremely difficult -- even in 251/264 gear. I don't mind a challenge; in fact I like challenges very much so I'm looking forward to the next go around with Mimiron. Obviously we'll need to discuss the fight and make sure everyone is crystal clear how they need to react to and control the fires. Because once we do that I think we'll get past this fight and be able to move on to the General.
