Naxxing

It's been a low-key week since we cleared everything Tues-Wed. On Friday, I did get on for a little bit for a venture into Sunwell. It was a raid in progress when I joined, so I wasn't too focused on analyzing exactly what was going on, but mostly I learned that Sunwell isn't trivial even for 25 80s. I heard Kalecgos took a couple of tries and Brutalllus just one. But Felmyst posed a puzzle. That dragon has a AoE mind control breath and we didn't have a clear sense of how to avoid it over a handful of attempts. If we go back again next week, I'll have to look into what to do.

Last night we did another jaunt through Naxx-10. It's a one-night clear, but if you are a bit slow or sloppy, it's a long night. And it was. But we got it done without too much trouble and even experimented with some achievements. (3m 2s again on Patch, heh).

Tonight is another planned attempt on Sartharian with 2 drakes up. We're hoping to experiment with some different group balances while we figure it out.

It's 2am, do you know where your content is?

Theoretically, we had all the "hard stuff" waiting for us to raid last night. We started in Heroic Naxxramas at 11:30pm and quickly polished off Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad. Then we headed over to the Obsidian Sanctum as planned.

Sarth + 2 drakes had been giving us a hard time with 10, but we had a basic plan for 25 and some optimism. It felt like the main problem with 10 was missing various abilities and synergies in our group and all that would be fine with 25. We started off our first pull by dying in the void zones and flame walls, but we still managed to see a bit of the fight with Vesperon active. We had been trying to guess in advance whether we should take 1 or 2 or all the portals to kill Vesperon's disciple and experimented with it for 2 pulls. Then we went ahead and just killed Sartharian and made it feel pretty straightforward. :)

We were only an hour and and a half into raid time, so we headed for Malygos. Bloc had never been to Malygos because the encounter was so CPU intensive his old comp couldn't keep up. So he asked what to do and we gave him the typical "first time noob" advice: you'll just die, but try to watch and learn for next time. And we 1-shot Malygos, too.

So, now what? The only Heroic content left in the world this week is the Vault. Right then, the alliance won the zone and opened up the instance, so we headed over. Well, first we swapped in a bunch of alts, noobs and stuff and went in with just 20 people. I'm not supposed to talk about what happened next -- what happens in the Vault, stays in the Vault. But it was still early when we finished that place and sharded all the Rogue loot.

And we ended up back in Dalaran because there was nothing in WotLK left to raid. So apparently all that discussion of a third raid night was pretty irrelevant. For next week, we can discuss whether it's worth pulling Sartharian with 3 drakes once or twice just to see it. There was an opinion expressed that we should perfect +2 first before seriously working on +3 and I think that may be true. But it might be worth getting a look at +3 just to see if we could surprise ourselves.

On Monday, we will try some different group composition ideas to see if we can work out Sarth+2 with 10. Other than the Glory of the Raider achievements, there's not much other progression to work on. Rumors are that 3.1 and Ulduar will be on the Public Test Realms in the not-too-distant future. Maybe we'll go mess around on the PTR and be ready to go right at release with the next instance.

Healing again

As expected I went holy again for Naxx last night. We'd discussed the use of alts and off-spec players in raids for the guild and decided our guideline would be not to when progression is at issue, but some improvisation is ok when farming familiar but lootworthy content like Heroic Naxx is currently.

I think I'm a pretty terrible healer in comparison to the experienced players. Recap showed me as pretty inferior as well. OTOH, meters don't measure healers well. I'd like to say that I never lost a tank I was supposed to heal, but I did on the Grand Widow. There was some confusion over the de-enrage and Ragonbadger got insta-gibbed while I was healing him. It might not have actually been preventable, but I should have been in constant-cast-and-interrupt mode as soon as the Frenzy hit. Dethno and Bloc went down in short order right after, but Stupidrenren picked it up from there and we managed to avoid the wipe.

Another moment that I might have erred was on Patchwerk when Bloc got insta-gibbed to 2 immediate hatefuls. Now, I wasn't healing Bloc, I think, but my Beacon on him was supposed to be helping except that Dethno didn't need any heals before he died. Again Renren stepped in but we lost 2 effective dps (Primux took the next hateful and renren couldn't dps much as bear). We ended up 7s short again. Maybe we'll get the achievement next week.

But in general, people I was trying to heal stayed alive. That doesn't really mean I wasn't useless, I don't really know how many people would have died if I hadn't been there at all. I have a sneaking suspicion the other healers would have been fine without me. I kinda expected that in advance, but the idea was with a 6th healer, we could avoid any delays during looting/afk -- at least I could keep running ahead and healing the tanks so they could keep clearing trash.

As a curious aside, I didn't actually die a single time for the whole run. Looking at recap after, I think I might have been the only person who could say that too. I guess there's something to be said for being the worst healer -- you don't ever draw aggro and die for sure.

We had a decent pace going for the evening, but started to slide a bit as it got late. We had a new MC-er for Razuvious (Draelnor in for Kyoka) so that took and extra try or two. We've ended up stopping there each of the last few weeks, so we pushed through the Military Quarter just on principle. There were some ready to press on further, but we called it there anyway. I'm trying to really stick to the raid end time to avoid burnout or too much pressure on people who have to get up in the mornings.

Tonight we should be able to do the Frost Wyrm wing quickly and head to the Obsidian Sanctum for more Sarth+2 practice. I'd actually like to be tanking for that, but maybe we need a 7th healer more. I guess I'll find out at 11:15pm tonight server time.

Sarth + 2 = Hard

Two drakes is really a lot harder than one versus Sartharian. Just adding Vesperon's debuff to the first phase of the fight versus Tenebron made it extremely difficult to survive. In fact, over 3 hours of attempts, I think we only made it past Tenebron once or maybe twice with a few deaths.

The main difference is the -25% hp debuff, which pushes everybody down into fragile territory. If mobs get loose, they pwn the healers quickly. The dmg builds up quite a bit so that I'm very vulnerable to a spike when I'm holding Tenebron, the whelps and possibly a handful of enraged blazes. And Dethno is vulnerable to a spike as soon as Tenebron goes down and Sarth enrages to +25% dmg.

It's also one of those typical Blizzard "mean to the tanks" fight. I don't know of any other battles where I'm expected to tank a boss level mob, 8-10 additional mobs and still find and taunt other randomly spawning mobs off the healers (the blazes). While moving to dodge the flame walls. While maintaining max threat so the drake dies in the available time. I'm using an ability every 1.5s for the entire fight and best of all there's no regular rhythm to it, it's mostly reactive to the circumstances -- the sequence changes depending on which flame walls we get, who draws aggro, etc.

I sensed a certain amount of frustration as we beat our heads against the fight, too. I think we weren't being creative enough. It's too easy to fixate on "solutions" like, "our gear isn't good enough," or "we need a shammy for heroism," or some unavailable approach. The morning after (now), I'm thinking we should have been trying to find ways to work in some more of our abilities. For various reasons we had talked ourselves out of using AoE or Frost Nova, which we have more of than a typical 10-person group. Once or twice when mobs were getting loose, I felt the absence of a real AoE taunt that Pallies don't have and Warriors do. A couple of times, I was tempted to suggest swapping up the tanking roles just to explore and in hindsight, I wish we had.

There's a tricky balance between practicing the same strat for efficiency and execution improvements and exploring new ideas or just trying weird stuff. We don't actually have a lot of practice grinding out really new content, so we might not have found the right balance here. We typically try to reason out (or read up) on a reasonable strat and then practice it until we get it. Sometimes it works such that it feels like no progress for attempt after attempt and then it suddenly clicks. But other times are like last night, where we might have been making it harder than necessary by being so fixated on our approach.

It also worried me that 2 people got really tired about an hour before the regular end of the raid time. That's unusual and suggests that we weren't having enough fun. Maybe we need to incorporate a regular schedule of every so many pulls, we try something goofy just to stay fresh and focused. Goofy could mean strats we didn't think would work, like taking the portals or using a lot of AoE and fighting both drakes at once. Or something crazy like kite-tanking one of the drakes with a mage & iceblock, or having a non-tank tank Sartharian until Tenebron is down. Even if it's a disaster, we might learn something, or at least get ourselves a laugh.

At least, in the end, we brought Bloc in to show off his new lag-free comp and did Sarth+1. It took 2 tries -- Bloc had never seen a flame wall render on his screen before, but boy did it feel easy in comparison.

Tonight it's back to Naxx for a full-speed 1-night clear (I hope). I think I might be healing tonight since we now have 3 functional warrior tanks and Tuesdays we're usually initially short a healer anyway (Hawksy). Should be fun.

Sick Bay

Who's brilliant idea was it to schedule a bunch of holidays in the middle of cold and flu season, anyway? Everybody in the Beros household is sick to varying degrees from sniffles to full-on flu. Worst, for RL management purposes, it's Mrs. Beros who's been hit hardest with the flu, which throws everything out of sync around the house.

Last night was supposed to be a raid night, but when I looked at the clock in my 2yo's room and saw it was well after raid start time but my phone hadn't buzzed with a "where are you?" txt, I knew something was up. The optimist in me thought maybe Bloc's computer had been delivered and the raid was going ahead with 3 tanks, but the pessimist wondered if the raid had fallen apart due to other no-shows. In this case the pessimist would have been right. At least my RL issues hadn't principally caused things to fall apart.

I still felt bad that I hadn't been able to warn anybody about my being late. It caught me a bit by surprise. In the late afternoon, it was clear that my 2yo was exhausted and usually that means an early bed time and no troubles with raid time. Mrs Beros had even made it downstairs to rest on the couch. But then the little one crawled onto her mommy and they both fell asleep. Which you'd think would be a good thing (and cute, too) except that the 2yo woke up full of energy an hour later and Mrs Beros didn't. So that meant a 90m+ bedtime routine that ran well past normal raid start time and my wife couldn't take over for me, as she'll do on normal evenings.

When I got on to apologize, I found out that we hadn't even had more than 15 people sign up for the raid, so there was never any real chance of going. If I hadn't been on sick duty Saturday night and all day Sunday too, I would have been able to get online and notice that, but oh well.

It seem that Sunday night may not be the best night for our 3rd raid night of the week. We'll see if Thurs or Mon are better. In the short term, we can also work on clearing everything in 2 nights -- which should be fairly doable, I think. Although long-term, when 3.1 & Ulduar are available, we may want to find a reliable 4-day/week schedule. Practically speaking, given that there are a few people who seem to prefer to keep raiding to 3, we may want to increase the size of our raid force again. I think we have the dps, but it looks like we might need 1-2 more healers. We have a handful of alt or off-spec healers available, but I think all the people who can do this also play important roles on their main in the raid.

We'll try again tonight and with any luck, RL will be kinder to all of us who had issues last night.

As a funny side effect of the raid not going last night, I actually was able to run a couple of heroics including Violet Hold, which I had never seen before. So that's something at least. I'd rather have been wiping and learning Sarth+2, though.

Some old school

Got on late, as usual for a Friday night, fully intending to do some Heroics. But I got distracted by the discussions of Sunwell or a Naxx pug. Then old friend Runabout asked if I could come help with a very old school lvl 60 raid quest: Blightcaller. I haven't been able to help him much with his leveling, guild or anything since he started playing again, so it was nice to have an actual opportunity to help since I had nothing else going on.

So I ran over there and pwned Blightcaller with some lowbie help. And laughed that it used to be a moderately challenging 20-person raid quest. Although, I do remember that it wasn't actually hard at all once you even had some MC gear.

Then somebody mentioned Onyxia and that reminded me I was planning to go try to solo Onyxia one of these days. I gave up on soloing it since the lowbies wanted to come and so did a couple of Noctambulists. Well, a few were going to, but only Aishi stuck out the call for reinforcements for Wintergrasp. We pwned her in no time flat and I don't think there was a healer in our group, which bodes well for a solo attempt some other day.

At that point, the people who had gone to support Wintergrasp reported it winning, so Leoruuc pulled together a 25 person pug to run the Vault. Which was pretty fun. It drops more loot than I realized too, we should do that more often. After we finished, we realized we had around 10 guildies in the pug, so we dropped down to 10 and did it again. No loot this time, though, just hunter gear Arikado already had.

Then I hung around doing the usual JC & cooking dailies for a bit before calling it a night. Maybe tonight I can inspire some heroic runs. Or maybe I'll get distracted into a Naxx run or something. If I end up getting on late again (it's possible, I hear it's some sort of holiday that couples with fewer than 4 kids get to celebrate) and there aren't any runs or spots open, I think I might actually go level my daughter's warlock. I haven't done any alting in a very long time and why not?

Heroic Malygos

But first we had to finish Naxx. Once again, we were moving a little slow with a sloppy wipe on trash heading to Gothik. Then we wiped on Gothik again. I think that happened last week too. I don't have much insight as to what the problem might be as it's happening on the Live side. On the Undead side, mostly I'm sitting around marvelling at how fast the mobs are being destroyed by the dps. I don't think I technically need to even tank anything, they don't live long enough to kill anybody.

After the wipe, Ragonbadger whispers me that it doesn't look like he's needed on the Dead side either and he can go help Live. As is the normal method for strategy adjustments, it gets whispered to me, I raise the idea on vent and implement. It worked like a charm and we won easily. At the time, though, I had the funny sense that I was stealing credit from Ragon's insight into how to improve our strat. I intended to mention it after the battle -- that seems like the ideal way to give credit to the good idea person without them getting blamed it if didn't work. But I forgot to say it.

The reason I forgot was that immediately after the battle we had a rotation issue to deal with. Eyvindur had been fighting with a corrupted version of warcraft all evening and we did the fight with 24 waiting for him to fix it. Because we couldn't wait forever, we contacted Leoruuc about subbing in after Gothik. I also wanted to do that because Leo graciously volunteered to step out last night. Hawksy doesn't usually make it on Tuesdays and we had an extra healer.

However, the timing ended up poorly. Eyvindur got on just as Leoruuc agreed to come. Eyvindur then didn't understand why he was being replaced. Much discussion ensued. Everything was straightened out by the Four Horsemen, but I forgot to credit Ragon with the improvement on Gothik.

Then, IIRC, we wiped again on the Four Horsemen, but at least I remembered to DI Barantir, so we got a quick rez and did it properly the second time. No further wobbles from there as Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad weren't hard.

But that made it later than we would have liked to start on Malygos in the Eye of Eternity. We described the new strategy -- Dethno tanks Malygos around the rim, leaving his tail in the center to max our access to sparks. This requires more moving, quick reactions to the sparks and a lot of careful threat management. But saved us a lot of time on Phase 1. We weren't totally tight on the first try, but still got Malygos back to 8% at the enrage.

On the second try, we were very tight and although we still ran right up to the Enrage timer, we had him down fairly easily even though we had 3 people d/c for most of the fight.

Which was very cool, even though I fumbled my shield button, died at the last second, and didn't get the quest item (doh). It was so quick, we were actually about 30m ahead of the normal raid finish time. We tried reconvening in the Obsidian Sanctum, but it took 15m to loot and move everybody over. And looking at all the trash made me feel tired (and I wasn't the only one). Since everything would respawn and we'd run late getting even one pull at best, we decided to just call it a few minutes early and come fresh on Sunday. With 3 full hours, I think we'll figure it out to do Sarth+2, which will be another nice progression marker.

Tonight I think I'm going to take my weekly rest night. Tomorrow is both Valentine's Day and the 100th day of School celebrations in my 5yo's kindergarten class. :) But now that I finally hit exalted with Sons of Hodir and 450 Jewelcrafting, I think I really am going to work seriously on running all the Heroics I haven't done yet on Fri/Sat. Unless I get pulled into a Naxx pug -- Construct Quarter with 8, anybody?

Leisurely

Leisurely was the pace we were moving at through Heroic Naxx last night. I think it's ok not to push, push, push all the time, but maybe we'll have to work on keeping up the pace more next week.

We got slowed down at invites by having 26 people and too many healers (is that even possible?). Then we had a rash of dead people during trash, loot discussions, overpulling while all the healers were discussing loot, more rezzes, afks, d/cs and occasional losses of focus.

We also hesitated over whether to try repeating achievements and I think in the future the answer will be 'no' in advance. We'll know which things we'll try the hard way and speed pull everything else. And I think we'll avoid waiting on afks, d/cs, etc. Worst case, somebody misses a piece of loot because we did a fight with 23 or 24. Probably people won't afk before bosses they really care about. And hopefully people won't start afking before other bosses too much.

We almost called the whole raid a bit early last night because we got a handful of tells from people asking to be replaced. Maybe that's to be expected as Naxx becomes familiar and unexciting. My first thought was to get replacements. My second thought was to call it early. My third thought is that if that starts to happen, then we drop down to 20 people for the last couple of bosses and start working towards the achievement that way. If we can knock off a couple here, a couple there, we can figure out what's hard with 20 and make finishing that achievement a little easier.

On a positive note, we set kill speed records on many bosses and were within 2s of the achievement on Patchwerk. We've heard that when you can do that, you are also likely to be able to do Loatheb w/o killing Spores. We tried Loatheb without Spores, but we think we killed one by accident. However, I'm no longer sure it didn't just despawn. If it got killed by Dethno with his bare hands via Retribution Aura, that'll suck since we'll have to lose the haste buff next time. It feels like we're really close on the Safety Dance, but we're still a ways off on no-shock Thaddius.

Tonight we'll try to tackle the instance with more focus. Knock off Gothik & 4 Horseman, then the Frost Wyrm wing and KT. Then over to the Eye for a solid set of pulls on Malygos. I think we're ready to beat that dragon. And with luck, we'll have a whole night on Sunday to work on Sarth+2, which I think we are also close to.

Twilight Assist

The plan was dragons last night. First some more Malygos practice, then back to Sartharian with a drake up.

However, for me, the plan started to fall apart as early as 8am in the morning. That's when the cleaning lady didn't show up. Which meant that Mrs Beros and I were trying to get the house in some sort of order around the usual bedtime routines. Suddenly it's an hour before raid time and Mrs Beros says, "now that the kids are in bed, can you wash the floors?" Besides the fact that the first rule in the Beros household is that you don't make Mrs Beros mad, I can always use the chance to earn a few more husband points. And while the guys think I'm whipped, I know the ladies like a guy who does chores (well, not-so-young ladies do, milfs, as it were). And since we're supposed to start with Malygos, I have a solution.

I had just been exchanging some emails with Themouse and he had said how much fun it was to do new content (based on our wipeage versus Herioc Sarth+1). Malygos isn't brand new, but it isn't farm mode, so I jumped online to arrange for him to have my spot. Malygos is a 1-tank battle anyway and I figured Dethno could practice moving the dragon around the sparks and we'd have him try that next Heroic Malygos. It turns out there were a few other no-shows, but subs were found and they set off.

I got my house in order and managed to rejoin the group online around the time they got Malygos down. While it can be frustrating to wipe on content we'd beaten before, having a chunk of newer people learning/practicing Malygos-10 means more people familiar with the fight for Heroic Malygos this week.

I subbed back in for Themouse, who was locked anyway, and we headed over to the Obsidian Sanctum to try Sarth+1 with 10 again. Last week, we wiped for hours and then gave up and didn't even bother killing the dragon w/o drakes when it got late. So it wasn't like we expected to 1-shot it or anything. Except we did.

I'm not sure why it went so well, but it didn't feel that hard. I'm guessing it's all the practice dealing with flame walls, blazes and everything else that we've had over the past week. But I was able to hold the drake, whelps and most of the blazes (Dethno collected a few during the complicated parts) and still dodge the walls and void zones without even feeling too stressed about it. And then we just burned him down with no deaths at all.

So next week, if we want to get our minimum daily requirements of wiping, I guess we'll have to go with Sarth+2 versus 10 of us. I hear you have to be pretty tight to do 2, and pretty creative to beat 3. I heard (nee ) used a Voidwalker to hold Sartharian for the first part of the fight while their tanks took on the drakes. That's just pretty damn cool.

Tonight is more Heroic Naxx gear farming. We'll take our weekly shots at Patchwerk in 3m, Safety Dance and No-shock Thaddius. We'll have to see if we're brave enough to try Loatheb w/o spores or killing the 4 Horsemen within 15s of each other.

Incremental progress

A little over an hour of practice on Sarth+2 didn't get us there, but we did start to see some solid beginnings. We started to have a few pulls where we got Tenebron and all his whelps down without much in the way of losses. But couldn't quite manage to work through Vesperon reliably.

I'm not quite sure if it's adjusting to the healing demands of the -25% hp debuff plus the increased dmg on Dethno (MT) or just lasting that much longer while dodging flame walls, void zones and Lava Blazes.

On the plus side, once we decided to kill Vesperon and just do +1, it felt very easy -- not a single death in the fight. So there's definitely learning going on.

On Malygos, we tried the split-sides dps strategy and that did solve the sudden-tank-death syndrome we had been running into last time. We were able to consistently make it into phase 3, but kept hitting the enrage timer at ~10%. We need to shave off some time on getting to Phase 3 and that might mean going back to the harder Phase 1 strategy of moving Malygos around so that more people can get the spark buffs. I think it was taking us 4.5-5minutes to get through Phase 1 and if we can get an extra minute there, we'd make it (30s might even be enough).

We'll get to try both of them again next week. It's almost tempting to schedule them even sooner in the raid week, but it's probably still better to farm up more gear in Naxx first. We'll get to one of them late on Wednesday. Right now, I'd be inclined to try Malygos first since that did feel very close.

Tonight it's 10-person raiding again. The Bear group will practice Malygos more (hopefully just once :) and take another shot at Sarth +1 with 10. I probably missed my chance to try to beg for a quick Construct Wing run in Naxx-10 to try to get the Repelling Charge off Thaddius since I bet a lot of people are locked to cleared instances already.

Maintenance days

The last couple of nights got busier than expected, so I didn't get on much. Last night I just dealt with a few little maintenance issues: JC daily, cooking daily, Sons of Hodir dailies (6k to Exalted and the better shoulder enchant), fished up some Dragonfin for more +str food.

I did the Wyrmrest daily because I noticed there's a "complete in <2m" achievement. It takes me 4-5m or more to do the daily, though. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong. Then I did the Aces High daily in Coldarra for more Malygos dragon handling practice. And then I called it a night.

I forgot to get around to trying to get some more Flasks of Chromatic Wonder made. I'm going to try to use those for the Sarth & Malygos progression fights we have coming (resistance seems useful there). Maybe tonight I'll actually start working on all the Heroics I've never run. I doubt I'll ever clear all the boss achievements, but I'd like to at least run every dungeon at some point.

Heroic Achievements

Over the past 2 nights, we knocked off the "easy" achievements in Heroic Naxx. I didn't know for sure, but I didn't think we'd struggle to do withe 25 what seemed pretty straightforward with 10. We even added the 'Momma said knock you out' achievement versus the Grand Widow which we hadn't managed with 10.

The next ones will probably take a bit more practice: Patchwerk <3m, Safety Dance, Thaddius with no shocks, Loatheb with no spores, 4 horsemen beat simultaneously. The first 2 seem the most reachable. We were 19s slow on Patch this week and only 2 dead on the Safety Dance. Maybe for motivation, we'll have a rule that if you die on the Safety dance next week, you have to sit out for that boss battle the following week. Of course, you know that if we impose that rule, I'm going to die on that fight for the first (non-wipe) time.

The really hard ones will be really hard: beat everything with 20 or fewer and nobody dies on any boss battle. At least for the 20 or fewer fights, we can do them a few at a time some night we're willing to annoy 5 extra people by sitting them out. The 'Immortal' achievement/title is probably going to take really tight play and stacking the raid sky high with healers. Maybe I should start keeping track of our 'no death' fights to see which ones will be hardest.

After KT last night, we went and wiped for an hour or so on Sartharian + 2 drakes. It felt like we were a bit out of sync, I'm not sure we would have beaten +1 drake trivially. But it was good practice and we did get better. It was tempting to simplify down to 1 drake, just win and go do Malygos on Sunday. But a few people whispered me that we should stick with pushing for progression and take another crack at 2 and I think that was correct.

Part of that is expecting that Malygos will come around pretty soon. I was pretty pleased with the sudden transition to easy kill with everybody alive we did with 10 on Monday. It made me feel that a few hours of practice and we should be able to beat it on Heroic the same way.

So the Sunday plan will be something like 5 pulls on Sarth+2 (then doing Sarth+1 if we don't get it) and then off to work for serious on Malygos.

I got a nice upgrade to my tanking gear by way of a new sword from the run last night too. It added enough +def that I was able to set up the 2 sets of tanking gear I had been planning for. One set is all +stam and mitigation and aimed at being the MT for something big hitting. The other set is loaded with +str and +block value to do both OT dps and AoE add tanking (a more common role for me).

I'll be able to do even a little more tweaking if I can get a better +def trinket from either HoL or Thaddius in Naxx. I don't know if I'll get to Naxx this week, but maybe I can jump into a run Fri or Sat to do the Construct wing and take a shot at the Repelling Charge. From there, I think all further upgrades are fairly small.

Learning curve

Not every encounter in WotLK is trivial. Well, not for us at least. We went back to Malygos with the regular group last night and managed to wipe at <10% to the enrage timer 3 times in a row. But then on the fourth attempt, everything went exactly according to plan. We finished phase 1 ahead of schedule, didn't lose anybody in phase 2 and had 3.5 minutes for the dragon phase. We had been limping in with ~9 people at 2-2.5m on the previous attempts. Then nobody at all died during phase 3 either and we closed it out with plenty of time to spare.

The goal was primarily to increase our familiarity with the fight to have a shot at getting Malygos down in heroic mode this week and I'd say we accomplished that.

Then we headed over to the Obsidian Sanctum to try Sarth+1 with 10 to match our Heroic Sarth+1. I think it's a bit harder with 10 than 25 because there are a lot of mobs to tank. Sartharian, Tenebron, the Lava Blazes and the Whelps.

Fights like this make me wonder why anybody wants to MT, when the OT gets to have all the fun. Well, I guess sometimes fun means wiping your raid repeatedly while you figure out how to organize what you have to do. But I've done that before and I'll probably do it again.

First thing to deal with is getting ahold of Tenebron when the drake lands. It should be simple because it flies to a specific spot. However, she's untargetable until she actually touches the ground and there's good chance that you get a Flame Wall within a second or two of landing. I tried pre-consecrating, but that didn't always overcome healing aggro. Then I made a macro to target so I could spam the key while moving out of the Flame Wall if necessary. It still can be a dicey transition.

Next is building some aggro while dragging Tenebron over to the portal where the whelps are going to spawn. We considered some different tanking options, but basically it looks best if I have 2 healers and tank everything I can: Tenebron, the whelps and the blazes. During this part, the blazes are going to spawn and aggro the healers. Barantir was healing with RF up to bring them to him. Sometimes I seemed to be able to pick them up easily, other times the consecration didn't seem to pull them.

For a few pulls I tried retargeting loose mobs and taunting them to keep them grouped up. However, this sometimes meant slower aggro gen and eventually I managed to click the portal while grabbing mobs and that was a curious way to wipe the raid. Instead, I put an icon on me and told everybody to group up on me and hope the consecrate worked because I wasn't going to re-target. That worked pretty well, but perhaps I should make a couple more fight-specific macros to taunt directly off Barantir and Hawksy and re-target Tenebron. I have pretty much every key mapped to something, but I think I can switch the '[' and ']' keys from emergency heals to healer-specific taunts.

We did eventually pull off the hard part and make it through Tenebron and the whelps. On the very last pull of the evening, we got to what should be the easy part of just trying to win the Sarth battle. But we didn't get into the basic wall/blaze/dps rhythm cleanly and it fell apart. I wouldn't be surprised if people were fighting mana issues by then. Or sleepiness issues.

We called it feeling pretty optimistic that we'll get it next week. It'll probably be next Monday when we get back. Tonight is more Heroic Naxx with an eye on some achievements. Several of them require mega-dps output, so I put up a guild note asking everybody to do extra prep. Nothing in basic Naxx seemed to require full flask/elixir/food buffs, but I think we'll need every edge we can get to beat Patchwek in 3m or the other dps races.

I'm expecting we'll actually go slower this week than last in Heroic Naxx, but we should still finish it up by tomorrow night. Then we'll work on Herioc Sartharian +2 drakes. I also want to save a decent chunk of time to work on Heroic Malygos as well, maybe the whole 3rd raid night (probably Sunday).

That means I may not get into non-heroic Naxx this week. That's too bad, I could still use upgrades to my trinket and sword. They'll come eventually. In the meantime, I may spend some time this week beating up on the dummies in IF to test out some ideas about setting up multiple gear sets. I have pretty much 2 full sets of high-quality tanking gear (T7 plus equivalent) and I think I want to set up one as full mitigation & stamina for actual tanking and a second as all strength and block value for AoE tanking adds and OT dps. I want to make sure it makes an actual difference to dps before I spend a few hundred gold on re-enchanting and re-gemming and figure out where I need to be on defense for the OT/dps set. I shouldn't need to be capped, but I may want to carry my higher-def shield to swap in just in case I'm in that gear and end up as MT accidentally (e.g. Thaddius). If it works out, I'll end up carrying ~4 sets of gear around with me again, just like the old days. :)

Naxx-8

Due to some scheduling confusion, we ended up running Naxxramas instead last night. And we found ourselves starting with only 9 people. So we decided to run with 8 instead, clearing the achievements for the bosses in the Spider and Plague wings to do this.

There were a few wobbles on Anub'rekhan of all bosses when I realized I had never tanked it before and didn't really know exactly when and where to run. Plus the healing demands are different with a pally tank who can't intervene to get away. But after we got that down, it was smooth through the first 2 wings.

It was a quiet run on vent, probably because everybody was having to work just a little harder than usual. I know that dealing with the trash pulls with just one tank was occasionally more stressful. For me, the boss fights were about the same, just a little slower. I suspect the healers had to work harder on the boss fights, or maybe it was just like back a few weeks ago when these fights all just took a little longer.

We went to 10 for the Construct wing and took a crack at Patchwerk in 3m. It was 3m 30s, so we weren't really close. Everybody agreed we could use a shaman. I also wonder if everybody is running Naxx maxed out with elixir/food buffs. Maybe I should remind everybody to do that for Tues and see if we can do Patchwerk in 3m with 25.

Then we cruised through Grobb, Gluth and Thaddius. It's possible we could do all of those with 8 too, maybe we'll have to try that next week. Thaddius dropped the Repelling Charge that would look really good added into my gear, but Bloc had the DKP and it looks good in his gear too. He offered to /roll it, but if I don't respect the DKP, who will? We're off DKP in Naxx-10 as of next week anyway. Which makes sense, I think we sharded almost everything and nothing was an actual sought-after up except that trinket. Someday, I'll fill in the last trinket and upgrade my sword.

Tonight we'll try to get organized for Malygos & Sarth+1 again (non-heroic). Hopefully, the scheduling confusion won't persist and we'll have our solid 10 again. If that goes smoothly, we can go back and finish Naxx, but I'd rather focus on the progression fights and miss out the end of Naxx if we have to choose.

Not running heroics

I got on late again, common for a Saturday night, and most people were already rolling along with their runs of various kinds. I did some raid prep, fished, farmed meat and cooked. Knocked off the Sons of Hodir dailies to get a little more rep, then the Wyrmrest ones for dragon riding practice.

Someday I'd like to do the Wymrest temple on that has a 2m achievement on it. I haven't been remotely close to it yet. I'd like to get more automatic on Aces High too, for Malygos practice, but I got distracted chatting with Nitnoid about the latest issues with OotC and their new guild Rising Storm and got shot down a few times.

A few people, all dps, were eventually interested in running some random heroics. I was up for that but the guild healers were all engaged. We discussed pugging a healer, but one of the reasons I haven't actually run very many heroics is that I haven't actually run anything in a non-guild group with WotLK released. Maybe I should just get past that, but every time I think about going to LFG channel to look for a group, I end up just deciding to do something else instead.

It won't come up tonight, though, it's a raid night. Darson can't make the raid, so we might need another healer for Malygos (Sundays are often not good for him). I'm sure we'll get it together. Maybe we'll get Sarth+1 with 10, too.