The Dedicated Few

Turnout has been a bit light for the Heroic raids lately. I'm not too surprised. I think we're in a kind of "silly season" between defeating almost everything and new content being released and it's hard to maintain focus. There's a certain risk of drama or sniping at this kind of time too. For example, it's tempting to think that people not showing up might be less motivated because they have all their gear.

Even if that's a minor factor, the fact is when new content is first tackled, everybody is jazzed up for it. It's novel and you also get the most upgrade rewards. As it gets routine and farmed, not only are the rewards fewer, but you find yourself willing to take a night off now and then. Early on, you might have rearranged your schedule to make sure you never missed a raid and later, you might not be as aggressive about it. For those of us with demanding RL, I think that's actually the right thing to do. Now is the time to farm those husband/wife points because everybody is going to be all geeked up again when Ulduar releases.

And it's almost like Blizzard anticipated this by including achievements like The Dedicated Few. Last night at 11:25, we only had 18 people online. I started the raid anyway and shortly we had 20, so we stopped there and decided to do the "less than 21" achievements. It fit perfectly, rewarding the people who raid and weren't distracted and also upping the challenge level just slightly.

Actually, the challenge level didn't seem upped at all through the Spider and Plague wings. By Loatheb, we had collected the Heroic: The Safety Dance achievement and were actually still on pace the Heroic: The Immortal. Heading to Razuvious, I realized this was going to be a tough one with 20, so I couldn't resist jinxing the run by pointing out the lack of deaths. A lot of people groaned and complained, but I wanted to make sure everybody knew so they could blow all their cooldowns if it was close. But the jinx was too strong and it wasn't close. We actually wiped a couple of times there before closing out the wing.

We wiped once on Gothik too because I miscommunciated the dps assignments and left the live side short, oops. But we 1-shot the 4 Horsemen, which was nice because we thought it might be hard. I guess it's supposed to be hard with 20 since it's not even part of the achievement.

But it took us too late to do the Construct wing, although we pushed the raid endtime 30m to try to get Patchwerk (unsuccessfully). I normally try to be disciplined about that, but not raiding last week much apparently made me too anxious to press on.

We'll plan to finish it off with 20 tonight before doing dragons with 25. I wonder if Thaddius will be tricky, I think there's a separate achievement for him with low numbers.

And maybe next week, we'll stack extra healers and make a real run on The Immortal. Just for added amusment (if we have enough people, of course).