/sigh (aka MaNiC mOnDaY ~ Want)

Last night was what I would call.. a learning experience. We headed out to SSC to take on The Lurker Below. We've tried this fight a couple of times, but never quite managed to get him down. We did a little better last night, I think we had him down to 54% at one point, but we have yet to defeat him. This is another one of those encounters that looks really simple, but just a few seconds of inattention on the part of one person can have disastrous effect on the raid as a whole. We had a pretty good group, I think.. but on every attempt just one thing would go wrong, and we couldn't recover. If the tanks were doing well, one of the platform groups would go down. If the platform groups were doing well, we'd lose the main tank. If anything, perhaps we were a little heavy on melee DPS, as there was quite a crowd on the main platform, which is what made things difficult if we lost a platform group. The melee DPS had their own mobs to worry about, and they generally couldn't spare the time to rush out to one of the outer platforms to take out the mobs there on the add phase. So the main platform would be clear, but while Lurker was out, there would be one or two ranged mobs just picking people off through that whole phase. We also had problems with keeping people online, and in the raid. It doesn't help the cohesiveness of the group when every time we start the encounter, we have to explain the strategy again to whoever is replacing someone this go-round. Ah well, one of these days we'll get him! He's got a nice ring, that I hope to one day add to my collection!

Tonight is back to The Eye to see how many bosses we can get down in one night there. I want to go for my shot at T5 shoulders, but we'll see if I get a nap tonight or not!