Raid recap

We had 20 people turn out ready to raid Naxxramas on Tuesday night. Sadly, we could only take 10 right away. We formed up the initial group based mainly on the group that had worked together in BC to beat Zul'Aman. However, there's a very good core of additional players who we're going to build a second raid group around tonight. On Tuesday, it didn't look like we quite had the healers to confidently build 2 separate groups (6 is probably best) so we are going to share the instance with two groups this week so that we can have some players from the first group help fill in any gaps in the second group.

Ragonbadger will MT the second group and Uglykid will help organize the raid that goes tonight. This has tempted me to label the groups as the "Bear" group (the one based on ZA running the last two nights) and the "Badger" group since we seem to have a few people obsessed with badgers around the guild these days. ;) That was to avoid any perception that one group is the first/main group and an "other" group that might be expected to have less progression since I think we have enough solid raiders to progress with both. For the first group, after considering healing options, we went with 2. The raid was Dethnotronic & Beros tanking, Sariana and Leoruuc healing, Wiseman, Kyoka, Islowlykill, Sherider, Uglykid and Barantir for dps.

Dealing with groups, raid maintenance (signups, DKP, WWS) kept me from getting around to blogging yesterday (plus the usual RL: work, family, etc.), so I'll review both runs for reference.

The first trick on Tuesday night was to find the way into Naxx. I flew around it 5 times before I spotted the entrance on the bottom middle of the ziggurat. After forming up and heading in, we had no real issues with trash in the Plague wing.

We wiped once on Noth the Plaguebringer, but got him on the second try. We weren't really trying to 1-shot everything. We'd look up the boss's abilities on Wowwiki before pulling, but expected we also needed to see what they looked like live. The basic plan was read, then dive in and wipe, then plan the strat and get to work. Heigen the Unclean took a few more tries since we all needed to learn the pattern of "dancing" to avoid the eruptions. Dethno got the pattern down right away, so I just followed him. I think it was tougher for the dps to do their jobs and manage the dance, but we got it in a small handful of attempts.

We wiped again discovering the gauntlet that leads to the final boss of the Plaguewing, Loatheb. Then we spent some time working on Loatheb, but got a bit discouraged by his apparent dps requirements -- 6.7m hp in 5-6m meant a dps rate about 1/3 higher than we were managing. We left feeling like we might need some more general gear upgrades before beating him. Or it might be possible to get by with some raid stacking (e.g., subbing out weak OT dps for somebody who can crank).

Instead of beating our heads against it, we went and tested out Patchwerk. Our first pull was marred by discovering he summons a slightly wider set of uncleared trash pulls than expected. On the second pull, we found it was hard to keep up with the healing requirements. That got us to the planned end of raid time, so we called it there.

We re-formed on Wednesday evening with Hawksy in for Leo (who will heal tonight's group) and Barantir respecced Holy to go 3-healer for Patch. That did the trick and we got him slow and steady on the first attempt. Then we went and learned Grobbulus. It sounded complicated, but we got the hang of the tank kiting pattern and planned exploding zones pretty quickly and got him down on the third attempt. Ugly had to run afk to take care of his baby, so Auroen came in to learn Gluth with us.

We read that Gluth is one of the harder and more technical fights in Naxx and we struggled at first. It sets up like a 3-tank fight, but you don't have 3 tanks in a 10 person raid. Two tanks normally hold Gluth because he does a stacking Mortal Strike debuff that reduces healing by 10% per stack -- at 7 to 8, you're not getting much heals. But then a steady stream of fairly hard hitting, high hp zombies spawn in the back of the room and have to be kited around for a long time. We did a bunch of tries with Barantir trying to kite them in his holy spec, but it was tough to go a long time without him getting hit, stunned and pwned while also keeping the spawning ones off the healers. Part of the challenge was that hunters can only keep up the frost trap half the time to slow the zombies. A shaman could keep slowing up all the time, but we'd lose the ability to tranq Gluth's enrage (which might or might not be an issue anyway since he doesn't hit that hard).

Dethno and I noticed that as we traded aggro, you could run away from the boss and help with the zombies some because Gluth doesn't hit that hard so letting the Mortal Strike stack up a bit isn't fatal. So we invented a different strat: Beros holds Gluth and lets MS stack up while Dethno kites zombies. At 7 stacks, Dethno calls for 2x frost novas from Wiseman and Sherider to hold the zombies while he pulls Gluth off me for 10s to clear the debuff and re-collects the zombies. That's a lot of work for Dethno, but he nailed it and we got Gluth in the first try with that strat.

We promptly wiped on the next pull and on rez at the GY, Islowlykill said there was free loot in Wintergrasp since the alliance controlled it. So we went there instead on a lark and killed Archavon the Stone Watcher. He's easy but drops class specific loot so while we got him on one try, the rogue and feral druid leggings weren't really useful to anybody.

This group now takes a few nights off (unless helping the group going tonight). We'll plan to go back on Sunday night and take on Thaddius, who looks easy on paper, and maybe work on Loatheb, who doesn't. The general schedule is intended to be 4 nights/week, 3 hours/night, Sun-Wed. 3 hours isn't too fatiguing and I think the Sun-Wed schedule will work out well too. It gets us a couple of nights with a fresh instance, a couple of days off and a couple more right before the reset. It also leaves Fri/Sat open for people to do other things like spend time with their S.O. or PvP. The "Badger" group can pick a different schedule next week if they'd like to since we'll have 2 instances going. I'll have to remind them to think about planning.