fraid date isn't negotiable for me, i plan to take my chanter to ml10 (and most likely no other of my chars) so i wanna get this done and out of the way ready for the bg steps
Just a quick suggestion - I ran these group steps a couple of weeks back, once with 2 FG and once with 1 FG. It's much easier with 2 FG. You end up doing each encounter twice (as you'd expect) but with the current respawn rate you don't have to use more than one of the wings available. Also, you breeze through the aggro between encounters, so it actually moves fast enough that you don't mind doing each encounter twice.
Of course, when I ran it with 1 FG it was not an optimal group, and frankly we were severly lacking in damage output capacity, so maybe you'll do much better with a well chosen group. Your raid - just reporting what I found when I ran mine.