Like a boat upon the rocks.

Last Saturday's run was rough. The entire evening was spent trying to down Shade of Aran. I think the lowest in health we got him to was 25% (on our first go). After that he got no lower than about 30%. He's a tough bastard!

Here's a general outline of the way the fight goes: Aran casts Fireballs, Frostbolts, and Arcane Missles one right after another. You want to have the Fireballs and Frostbolts interrupted (Arcane Missles get called out so healers can focus on who's getting hit, but we don't interrupt them because we don't want Aran to use his mana *too* fast)--Rogues and Warriors are really good for the interrupts, and it's best to have about three people interrupting due to the cooldowns of the abilities.

Aran also casts three special versions of these spells: Blizzard, Firestorm, and Arcane Explosion. Blizzard's somewhat self-explainatory: a huge wedge-shaped fall of ice starts rotating around the room (clockwise, I believe), and if you get near it, there's a chance for you to be ice chained to the ground and get pelted by ice (plus you're slowed). Arcane Explosion is kind of scary: Aran sucks everyone into the middle, casts a mass slow effect, and after about ten seconds does an Arcane Explosion for something like 7k. You have to get the hell out of that as soon as he draws everyone in. And finally, the worst one, Firestorm: a storm of fire errupts in the room and *no one* can move. You can still attack in place and do abilities and all that, but you cannot move your character from that spot, not even to turn. You have to stay like that for fifteen-ish seconds, which is probably why there's a bit of a warning before he casts it (so you can get into position to kick his butt!).

At about 30% health, Aran summons a bunch of water elementals to help him fight. These guys suck, because they're casting Frostbolts all over the damn place. They kind of randomly choose their targets, so the healers have a tough time keeping up when they appear. There are two saving graces about these: they have lowish health, and they are only there for thirty seconds to one minute (can't remember).

When Aran has low mana (hopefully this happens *after* the elementals have disappeared, but it's not reliant on that event), he polymorphs everyone, sits down, and drinks to restore his mana. After getting back up, he casts a mass Fireball. This is usually the time when we all eat shit, assuming we've made it that far.

After all of that, I guess he's a walk in the park to kill, but we haven't been able to do it yet. One of the issues we had last week was we only had two Rogues for the interrupt cycle (no Warriors--Paladin main tank), so we had a lot of healing going toward the spells they missed. Another issue was that Dusk's cat form DPS is nowhere near scale with a Rogue, so as the only other melee DPSer, she was not contributing a lot to the fight (other than causing Aran to bleed *a lot*).

Here's hoping this Saturday goes a little better than last week.