First night of Firelands: pretty OK

Well we started in on the Firelands last night. We decided to work on Beth'tilac first and didn't quite get her down. It was pretty much always the same problem though, coordinating the upstairs tank and healer. I probably should have paused for longer between pulls and really talked with some of our upstairs healers, since there must be something going on that was causing them to not go back upstairs and heal the tank, but I'm not sure what it was. I wonder if maybe the healers didn't have a good sense of how short the smoldering devastation cast is and were trying to help the raid healer downstairs. That would be an easy trap to fall into, especially since the boss starts spitting fiery poison on the raid the second the cast is done. Tonight I'll consider having them set Beth as a focus or something, so they always know when she's done and they need to get back upstairs. I'll also have them try to stay right next to the upstairs tank so they've always got an eye on her and can see when she goes back up.

It's kind of a frustrating encounter as a hunter. Our taunt is on an 8-second cooldown, and the spinners only melee for about 2,700 or so, so we spend a lot of the time tanking spinners that we have to wait for others to kill. We also spend a lot of time struggling for the focus to use trap launcher to frost and explosive trap the mobs of spiderlings. I'm considering swapping to Survival for the encounter tonight, since that will help with trap cooldowns, serpent spread will help kill the spiderlings, and entrapment will be just as handy as it was on Cho'gall.

That is pretty much my hunter guide for Beth'tilac by the way:

1. Taunt Cinderweb Spinners
2. Kill Cinderweb Spinners that are at range from you, and raptor-strike the ones next to you for the damage reduction
3. Trap Spiderlings
4. DPS Drones if you have downtime

I also had some pretty bizarrely good luck with drops from the trash. The BoE bracers dropped and I actually whined about them not being the crossbow. So later on, the crossbow dropped too. You would think the loot gods would punish me for my impertinence, but I guess not!

I usually play with sound off, but I guess it has gun noises because it used to be a gun? Also it's bugged such that I can't reforge the mastery on it, which is truly annoying, since the bracers brought me back under the hitcap (they bizarrely have less hit than my old bracers from Chimaeron). I guess this is because the mastery is actually haste, and since the tooltip doesn't match the actual stats, you can't reforge, which means that the most elegant method by which I could hitcap myself is off the table. Sigh!

In other news, I downloaded the trial version of Fraps just to see if my system can support a WoW raid and video capture at the same time. I'm not sure that it can, but it would be neat to make some hunter videos if possible.