Whoa that looks awesome!

Whoa looks buzzy!

Falgorholm, land of the giants. 
It's hard to tell in this pic, but I am very high up and very far away, lol.

Looking awesome!

Haha random!

Here's our guilds raid coordinator (He's on the left, I'm the skeleton on the right) with his badass raid gear.  It's also the only shot I took of the area that a raid I'm about to wax on about was at, hah.

Prepare for a short glimpse into raiding everyone!
A raid consists of up to four groups of 6 people each.
It generally lasts 2 to 3 hours, and can kill up to three raid targets, depending on how many times we get our asses kicked.
(Oh yes, there are deaths a plenty, lol.  Plus side is that you can't delevel in Vanguard, so people don't really mind all that much).
But I'll be talking about just one target:  One of the raid mobs on the Isle of Garuzamet.

For starters, the fights takes place next to a tower on a loooong rail-less stone bridge about 300m high up in the air. (Can get a rough idea from the screenshot above).
So even if you fall and somehow manage to survive the drop, there's a mass of angry monsters down below that will finish you off in a hurry, lol.
Our raid groups were set up in four groups, one with the main boss tank, two groups full of casters and one piddly little group with three healers (including me).
The boss himself has like a jillion HP and throughout the entire fight regularly casts chain lightning.  It's exactly how it sounds; if you get hit with the lightning and are a somewhat squishy character like myself, you lose about a quarter of your HP.  You'll go all sparkly for a few seconds and everyone runs from you like you've got the plague because if they are too close, the lightning will 'chain' to them.  And if they're a caster.. that's like half their health gone in one smack, lol.

But we're just getting started :D
Every 10% of life that this boss loses, he summons what's called a Spark.  It looks like a blue ball of electricity and it's so nasty that it takes both of the caster groups kicking the crap out of it in order to safely take it down.
And what's extra dangerous about the spark is that as long as it's alive, it slowly blows people backwards away from it.  So standing on this long skinny bridge with death below and trying to avoid people with chain lightning and not get blown off the edge by the spark makes for a lot of interesting navigation skill practice, haha.

Ah but it gets better!
Every time the boss summons a Spark, he then teleports away to some other part of this bridge that's so long that you can't always see where he went... and takes the tank -Only the tank- with him.
That's where my group comes in.  We had two of the healers stationed at either end of the bridge, and me in the middle. 
As a wolf Shaman, I'm the fastest healer by far, so it was my job to run after the tank and help heal as soon as one of the healers stationed at the edges saw him appear with the boss.  Because the boss hits like a truck and solo healing isn't gonna work for long =p  So I got to navigate around Sparks trying to blow me off the bridge and avoid chain lightning and try to get to the tank in time to heal him before he got slapped around too much on his own. 
And to top it off, I was the back up healer for the other groups should their group healer get picked off (fortunately that only happened twice).

Ah but then here's the real kicker :D
When the boss gets down to 10% life, he starts summoning Sparks for every 2% life that he loses.  Which means that if most of the raid doesn't stop bashing on him in time, we'd end up with Multiple sparks.  And that pretty much means guaranteed death, lol.
We were lucky in that our illustrious raid leader knew about this and made sure we didn't get owned by a bunch of summoned mobs and in the end we finished off the raid boss without a single raid wipe :D

We were so confident in fact, that we decided to try another raid boss in the area... She was Amazing... she has this skill called Incinerate that if it isn't stopped by one of our raid spell casters, will one shot kill Everyone. And even when we did manage to counter it, she was casting a circle of flame that radiated out from her and filled your screen in all directions with FIRE.  One of these fire castings would take a third of everyone's life away.  She was casting them every 10 seconds or so... So yeah, we didn't manage to even get her below 75% both times we tried to kill her before she turned us all into a little graveyard, rofl.

And that people, is what a raid is like from a healers perspective ^.^

Definitely do remember those :D

Moar moar yay yay!

Little smart assery by me on the global chat in Vanguard =p


And then a picture of the actual City of Brass:

Trine, from Splice ^_^  Finally got up the courage to just Shade the dern thing. There's always got to be a first time, right? =p