Beasting new content

Yeah, it's nerf city in BT these days. We started with Reliquary of Souls, which is a fairly complicated battle. Practically, that meant we wiped once. Then we headed over to Teron Gorefiend. Not too many people had practiced on the simulator for how to react when the ghosts come, but we lucked out that one who had invested "several hours" (Tsuki) got ghosted first and handled it easily. Dethno got it second and having seen it before also handled it easily. Then we cruised through the trash to Mother Shahrazh and one-shot her as well.

As expected, we hit the first major bump at the Illidari Council. There's an awful lot going on in that battle. We did get a few looks at it and got them to ~80%. I felt pretty optimistic about the fight, but I guess I also felt pretty optimistic about Archimonde and we never managed to get that together.

The plan is to go back Saturday and see if we can get another win. It'd be pretty cool to actually get to pull Illidan before the expansion releases.

Bloc whispered me during the raid a slight touch of disappointment that we hadn't been doing more BT previously. I can see what he means since it seemed so easy. We could have taken a night or two we spent on Archi and come to BT, but it was hard to guess what was going to be the best investment of time. I think my original idea of working up from the old world raid instances to the T5's to build momentum worked out pretty well (we've been overfilling lately). Maybe we would have had the enthusiasm anyway, but it did seem to fire people up about raiding and it's nice to spend the majority of the time succeeding.

My experience with l8raid over the past year and change is that the hard part of raiding is keeping enthusiasm, morale and attendance up during the hard parts. We never seemed to quite have a big enough core of willing-to-wipe-all-night players. For awhile we had a big enough pool of people to choose from that we could always fill in enough people to field 25, but that meant always having new people, always re-explaining, regularly worrying about the gear or raiding knowledge of the new players. Over time, I know those worries wore out some of the core raiders, too.

The original idea for Noctambulists for WotLK was that we'd take advantage of running with 10 and form regular, consistent groups each night. Imagine showing up 5-10m before raid start time and knowing exactly when, where and with whom you were going to be raiding that night. Just the thought of not scrambling to find another healer, or explain to the overfull dps who was going to have to take the night off -- that happened again last night and I didn't enjoy it.

There will still be some challenges. First, forming up those groups of 10 runs the risk of somebody feeling left out. Second, we don't really have a lot of people who seem excited to be RL and we'll need at least 2-3 of them. Third, based on turnout from nights like last night, we're going to be back in the 25-person territory again pretty soon.

With luck, it'll sort out ok. Having a couple different 10-person groups means we can have one for people who want to raid 4 times/week and other groups that run slightly more casually and everybody can find their comfort zone. Also, the guild website has decent raid management and signup capabilities, which means we can pre-organize the 25s a little more easily. And if we suddenly find that 25-person Kel'thuzad is kicking our ass and we can't fill the raid, we can break back down into 10s and go raid the next 10-person instance instead of grabbing scrubs or sitting around for an hour or so waiting for people to log on.

More raiding, more winning, less waiting around, less uncertainty. That's the long-term plan.

The short term plan is back to BT on Sat. Sunwell was proposed for next Tuesday and was a popular suggestion. I'm even tempted to try a bonus raid on Sun or Mon. Maybe some extra BT on Sun? Maybe another crack at the Vials bosses for people on Mon?

Midnight next Wednesday is just not that far away...