0.1%: the cruellest wipe

It's an off week for the guild this week. On both of our raid nights we've got not one, not two, not three, but four people who can't make it. This has meant people playing offspecs, people that don't usually raid coming in to raid, and even a pugged-in DPS whose performance was fine for heroics but whose DPS wasn't really sufficient for Firelands, especially going for first kills. We did manage to get Beth'tilac down again (and I'll have a little more to say on the spec I used for it in a moment), even with a seriously wonky raid, but it took a few pulls.

We brought Shannox to 0.1%, but our healers had all run OOM a few seconds previously and people were falling over dead each time he AoEd the raid. There were a few things that were especially heartbreaking about that:

• Personally, I'd forgotten to swap out my practice/heroics cooldowns macro for my "real" one, so I didn't use an agility potion on that pull. Maybe that 1200 agility during a rapid fire would have made the difference
• I was taking video of it and I had a REALLY COOL raid-saving moment when the first tank died and I deterrence-tanked for a bit, giving people time to dump threat so our Riplimb tank could pick him up (he's immune to taunt). It was really neat and would have made for an exciting first-kill video!
• No replenishment. Wiping to OOMed healers makes me really sad when it's due, in part, to all of our usual sources of replenishment being gone. Not only that, but our shadow priest and our ret paladin are both pretty excellent DPS, so in addition to more mana for the healers, everything would have died faster. With our usual raid team, Shannox would absolutely 100% positively been dead.

Tonight we're still going to be without our usual raid team, but we'll at least have replenishment, since our resto druid will be back again. And instead of healing - even though he's a great healer - my boyfriend will be back in shadow, and I'm sure multi-dotting on Shannox will have him in the 25k DPS range, which will be a huge help. Shannox should die pretty handily, and then we'll be off to see Rhyolith.

Going back to Beth'tilac, though, I was trying out a spec that I was introduced to by the WoW hunter forum. It's a marks spec that's really great for kiting lots of little adds, like the spiderlings on Beth'tilac. For me at this moment, it looks like this: 3/31/7.

Dropping silencing shot is easy, since any time I'm using this spec I've definitely got more important things to worry about. The points in improved serpent sting are kind of a bummer, but the only other option is more stam. I may end up doing that anyway, just because imp serpent is so, so crap for Marks, and having a little longer before I fall over is never too terrible. Finally, the single point in Rapid Killing (which I've got in my normal spec as well) means that any time I get a killing blow, I get 50 focus, and that translates to infinite multi-shot spam on spiderlings. It kills them really, really quickly. And having the daze from concussive barrage on there means that I can reserve my traps for emergencies, and that means that not having the reduced cooldown from resourcefulness isn't as big a deal. Yay!

Finally, since it's Marks, it still does better single-target DPS in phase two than Survival does, making things easier for everyone. Awesome!

The only problem now is that I need to figure out if this spec should get it's own mini-post or if I should try to cram it into my ever-more-bloated MM guide post? I did a quick edit of that yesterday, and it's getting really long. Ideas or preferences? Add another paragraph to an already-long thing, or start splitting up the guide into different posts?