Heroic Naxx Pwn3d

Apparently all I do is raid lately -- I didn't actually get online on the non-raid days this week. We rolled through the easy and known Spider & Plague wings on Tuesday and into the Construct wing. Finished that Wednesday. So Sunday, we had one known boss in Military, Gothik, one unbeaten encounter in Military, 4 Horsemen and the final Frostwyrm wing to go.

It actually took a minute to fill the raid on Sunday. Seems like we might want to recruit a couple more players after all. I had been being discouraging to people asking to join thinking that we didn't have regular raid slots. I didn't want to end up having unhappy people around who joined to raid and then didn't get into raids. But perhaps I was too conservative.

But once we got going, Gothik went down easily. Note on boss: we split the raid 13 & 12, which is closer to even than we do in 10 (6/4) but appears to be necessary in 25. Then on through to the 4 horsemen. This time, I was prot, so I wasn't going to be the one trying to tank & self-heal one of the caster mobs. And to guarantee it, I immediately volunteered to tank Baron Rivendare, which is my usual role when we have 10.

Bloc and Barantir went to go tank the caster mobs. On the first pull, Barantir got insta-gibbed. While wipes are never fun exactly, it as at least good to know it's not trivial to tank (although he tried to blame his fiancee or some such for calling him on the phone, sheesh). Then we got 2-3 pretty good pulls with obvious minor improvements to do wrt to moving together, timing switches, etc. And then we won.

After loot and a short break, we went off and pulled Sapphiron. Got him to 50% on the first try and down fairly easily on the second. One minor wobble on the first try was that I pulled aggro right before the first air phase. More on that in a sec.

We thought Kel'thuzad might be more of a challenge, but he went smoothly in 2 tries as well. One try to get people used to not standing in the void zones, coping with the mind controls, and for me to keep taunting Bloc's big bug adds off him -- there are 4 of them and when they all come from the same side, it's hard to get them under control 2 and 2. The second pull was smooth and simple and a win.

There were a bunch of really nice tank drops through the run. They all went to Bloc and Ragonbadger. None of them would have been major upgrades for me, but my gear is probably going to continue to lag some. It's a natural consequence of me trying to build 2 different gear sets entirely through raiding. I don't run enough heroics to stack gear from those or emblems.

But that's ok, it appears I have enough gear to tank what I need to -- 4 horsemen, Thaddius, etc. In fact, I've noticed that while my gear means I'm lagging on hp by a couple of k (33k vs 35-36k) and I bet I'm lagging on mitigation, my threat/sec appears to be significantly higher.

For example, on Thaddius, I regularly crept right up and would have gone past Ragonbadger if I hadn't Salved myself. I wasn't paying attention to the meter on Sapphiron, which is how I pulled aggro there (I pulled Sarth of Dethno the other day, too). I'm not sure of the source. Some of it is that I've been stacking block value to increase my Shield of Righteousness dmg. But I think a chunk of it is simply class mechanics. I've read a couple of things on pally threat gen and I think we're slightly OP there right now. It could be an intentional thing (even at same gear, pally tank mitigation trials slightly). It could also be a mechanics bug. I think Judgment of Light may be occasionally producing crazy threat numbers -- it may be that all healing is getting attributed to my threat, so any fast hitting/casting raid members are cranking me up.

Either way, I'm good with it (although I obviously hope it's intentional or at least not getting nerfed). I'll keep an eye on the threat meter when I'm OT and it means I'm always ready to take aggro if the MT takes a late spike (like on Thaddius). I do wonder if my basic squishiness will hold up to Malygos tonight. I hope so since I'd like to be part of the first kill, but I suspect I could convince Ragonbadger to take my spot if I'm getting clobbered. It appears to be a 1 tank, 3 healer, 6 dps fight, which is annoying to us (4) tanks. But I guess we can rotate through who gets to tank it.

Progression to do:
Malygos-10
Sartharian+1 - 10
Sartharian+1 - 25
Malygos-25

I think next week, we'll shoot for clearing Naxx-25 in 2 nights and try to save some time for the 10-progression attempts. Maybe the week after, we'll try focusing entirely on progression in the 25s. That reminds me, I have to put up the calendar raid invites for tomorrow. Always so much maintenance to do, no wonder I never run heroics.