raid report: lurker lessons

Ahhh. Learning content. Far better than farming the same old tired farming bosses for items. Even when I'm fighting a boss that has a gear upgrade for me, after a few downings of said boss, it gets old. I want to head onward to newer and more challenging foes! The only reason I'm even bothering to kill these guys over and over is so my guild can go on to the next.

Even trash mobs feel more exciting and vibrant on a new boss encounter. The pulls are particularly more fun for my warlock since pulling aggro on Gruul and Magtheridon trash mobs is fairly easy to do. On the trash surrounding Lurker's pool, there are enough targets that I can throw up all my DoTs on the primary target and then begin to load them up on the next target, with just enough time leftover to Drain Soul the primary target. SSC trash also actually drop useful crap too: flask tokens, nether vortices, and epics, oh my! Tonight we had the random drop Feral Druid Staff drop for us twice. It's a welcome change from killing trash in Gruul and Magtheridon, who barely have loot tables at all. Karazhan foes drop epics, but they are very specific and theres a good chance that nobody who can use it will be in your 10 man.

When it came to the actual Lurker, we failed.

Dying to Lurker's Spout must quickly become dying to Prince's Enfeeble/Nova for us. It just shouldn't happen. Ever. But every once in a while somone makes a stupid mistake and gets blown off the platform and killed. Lurker and his adds aren't really that hard at all, but the fight is fast paced enough that every person that dies during the fight has a huge effect on how the rest of the fight plays out. The breaking point seems to be at 5 people. Once any 5 people die our entire raid just begins to fall apart. Not immediately, but its a point of no return from which the encounter goes from being "easy" to "battle of attrition", where more people just keep dying and dying.

Our main tank was previously in a guild that did SSC, so he is particularly pissed off that we keep making newbie mistakes on the easiest boss there. Current things we need to figure out:

1) Not dying on spout
2) Lettings tanks get aggro on the melee adds before DPSing -- they do an 8000 damage cleave (on cloth)! One one attempt the rogue group engaged him before the tank even was nearby and just got slaughtered by a cleave and a few attacks.
3) Getting better at CCing adds. Those melee adds just love to make a beeline to our healers when they arent under control and attack + cleave = death.

A lot of it is us just doing really dumb shit that we shouldn't do, and should know better than doing by now.

In the end we found out that once guys start respawning on the platforms, the pirranas also reappear. Luckily we found this out during a wipe recovery, and not during an encounter.