Blogger appears to have eaten my World Cup post, so I'll have to rewrite it.  In the meantime, I will regale you with my raiding exploits....

I got to go to both ICC 10 and 25 on Saturday.  I two-healed ICC 10 all the way to Fester with a holy pally, which was a bit of a challenge and a lot of fun.  I got two staves out of it, Abracadaver and Maghar's something or other.  We did end up getting to Blood Princes, and I learned, once again, that I have no idea what's going on in that fight.  But I have figured out that if I stand in the corner and heal, I generally live, so I figure that works.

Then ICC 25, which I was really nervous about. I got rostered into raid 1 as a switch hitter (aka dps till we need extra heals), and I was very worried that my shadow dps wouldn't be up to snuff.  I even spent several hours on Friday playing with rawr to optimize my gear set.  All that work paid off and I ended up in the 5.5k range. (Yes, I know that seems low, but rawr tells me my max dps in current gear is 6.1k, so I figure I did good) .  I dpsed all the way to Dreamwalker (and saw Blood Queen for the first time, as well as facepulling some trash), and then healed the raid during Dreamwalker. I even managed to avoid the void zones.  I was feeling pretty confident going into Sindy, and well, I went splat.  A lot. I went from no deaths to 12. I was dying multiple times in the same attempt.  I was fail raider.  I even wiped the raid once.

That fight's the first time I really felt like a fail raider. I've never seen the fight before, and watching tankspot videos did not really prepare me. I had to shift my mindset from "keep the raid alive" to "keep me alive, then the other healers, then maybe worry about everyone else".  For those who don't know the fight, remember the dragon from Naxx with the ice blocks and blizzards? It's like that, but with death grip of the raid and penetrating cold waves (which will two-shot me and did on several occasions), and damaging caster things and you have to kill the ice blocks.   I finally got the hang of phase one, but kept dying every time I got iceblocked in phase 2 (I didn't have enough time to heal back up to full before the ice block damage thing or the aura or something else killed me).   We never did get Sindy down, which was a shame as we'd one-shot everything before it.  I think I'm going to try to talk my guild into a Naxx run, so I can at least make sure I have the line-of-sight issues down, and if anyone knows of a good Sindy survival guide, please point me at it.  I hate feeling like fail.