Prologue:
I thought it was going to be a crap night.
Despite catching the train an hour before my usual one so I’d be ready when I opened my laptop and logged in I had several strange issues ranging from the anti virus nabbing 100% CPU (sorted by killing the rogue process which then sheepishly restarted itself in a well behaved mode) to having two copies of WoW running, patient one of which was invisible but stopped voice chat from working, adiposity not even for listening! Killing the process did NOT work this time, I had to log out and log in again which took an age! I didn’t manage to get in and running properly until about 7:30. I don’t like delays in starting a raid and I was terribly embarrased at being the cause of this one. Fortunately that was the only computer issue I had.
Overall:
The night started well, several one shots and then it deteriorated slightly on Sapphiron and then quite a bit more on Kel’Thuzad. It was 11:30 (UK time, 00:30 the next day European time) and we were thinking of calling it. The raid leader did a ready check to poll how we were feeling about a last attempt, leavers would not be punished, and we tried one last time. I voted no BTW, as did Smythy, I couldn’t see us doing any better, tired as we were. Anyway we downed him, so that’s my first Naxx clear!
Overall I think the raid was a strange mix of good and scrappy, our playing degenerates as the night goes on, and, of course, that’s where the newer and harder bosses are.
The raid leader had made sure his aggro setting was turned up last night. I think it can help pull the raid together, though it’s a real balancing act. I wanted to swear a couple of times when he was shouting at us to decurse the only player that’s 10 yards out of range (Push To Talk is a blessing in disguise). But I personally can just about live with it, he’ll stop shouting when we get it right.
Strategy:
Gluth:
I was once again on the Zombie Chow kiting and discovered that if you’re careful you can use the “Decimate” phase to shed those painful 1 minute stacking debuffs and start afresh. Make sure you’re nowhere near a grate so you don’t get tapped by a fresh zombie and run away from any you do see. You’ll only have to do this for a few seconds to shed the last remaining seconds of the debuff, your fellow kiters shouldn’t be able to live without the heals (mine were). I guess an ideal strategy in a raid setup like ours, where we have a hunter and mage, we could get them to alternate kiting the first zombie after the decimate while the other kiter gets their debuff count reset to zero. Hey, for all I know that’s what’s happening.
Grob:
I boo booed on this and accidentally cleansed the very first player that got injected. I don’t think anyone noticed. Fortunately the raid survived and I didn’t do it again. I tried the self cleanse trick when I was in a safe spot, it saves a second or two, every little helps :).
Sapphiron:
Of all the Naxx encounters I find Sapphiron the hardest, much more hectic than Kel’Thuzad. You’ve got to keep moving, either to get the Curses off out of range players or to get out of the Blizzard, or to get behind the ice block. Usually the blizzard and one of the other two.
Kel’Thuzad:
This isn’t a terribly hard fight to heal, with one exception, it does take a lot of team co-ordination, and a dash of luck though. Phase one is fairly straightforwards, though I learnt that if you leave your pre-pull totems in the doorway they’ll instantly pull a couple of abominations, so remember Totemic Recall as you start to run in.
In phase 2 a player (or sometimes 2 melee) will get hit with a 4 second DoT that burns off 104% of their health, obviously this will kill them unless they get a heal in 4 seconds. For resto shaman I found a tactic that says Lesser Healing Wave (around 1 second for me) works, not for me, I wasn’t fast enough. Another tactic says keep the Tidal Waves buff up using Riptide and then use your (now) much faster Lesser Healing Wave to get that quick heal in. This does work, but requires a lot of management making sure you always have Tidal Waves up, and I mean ALWAYS. On the last attempt I went the third strategy I’d read – don’t use Riptide at all on the normal raid damage, that way it’s always available for use on the DoT. Because it’s an instant cast it saves a whole second of reaction time and heals for just enough to keep the Frozen player standing. If you keep the raid near 100% at all times you only actually have to heal 4% to keep them alive. Worked for me.
This all falls apart if two players get Frozzed at the same time (it had better be the melee who have to stand close to each other), one of them will nearly always be the tank :(. Ideally you would have two healers not only reacting fast enough, but also targetting seperate players. We’re not that good yet. Instead we have to chose, and of course we chose the same target. This is where luck comes in. On our successful attempt it was the Raid Leader that died fairly early on so a bit less DPS. Our tree battle ressed him for the final phase. Result: SUCCESS! Though it was close.
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LOOT
Apparently Blizzard aren’t telling me to offspec Enhancement, the 4 horsemen’s chest dropped a T7 chest piece token for me, so now Flowersz can have one of each spec, MainSpec, OffSpec and ForFcukSpec.
We had a fair night on loot, most of it seemed to go to a good home which is so much nicer than having to sell to a vendor for 6g. Several players who had been treated unfairly by rolls and drops in the previous two runs got stuff, a nice feeling.
The Rogue Raid Leader seemed fairly happy at receiving [Kel'Thuzad's Reach], I wonder if it’s any good?