March 28, 2024

Some interesting experiences and thoughts on comments made over the weekend. The AB guild did what is becoming regular weekend event and spent a few hours kicking some raid content. This isn’t as simple as it sounds as getting 10 players online all at the same time is “interesting” at times as we’re a small social guild.

However the new weekly raid quest is a good incentive.

So this week Anub in Naxx needed a kicking, nice and clean, we almost got him down before the first locust swarm and finished him off before it finished. No problems, easy, we can zerg this stuff. This is only partly true. So we moved on to see the big dragon where we were painfully reminded that tanks need time to get threat so smacking the dragon before this is done is a bad thing. We lost dps on the pull and to a nice, but unfortunately timed crit while he was dropping the frost bomb (mage got insta squished on the land).

However through some frantic running around, lots of popped cooldowns, combat res and dps mashing for all they were worth we got him down. Not the cleanest of kills, not the ideal method but a good reminder that for raid content gearing is only part of the story, there are some parts of the encounter which cannot easily be zerged.

Bosses in Naxx can kill dps with a single swipe. If you catch a crit then you’re going to be watching from the floor, tanks get to survive that but only at the cost of lower dps. Dodging the frost bomb is still essential, the damage is very painful, so run and hide, there’s no shame to it. Threat is an issue.

KT went partly the same way, though this was largely due to the raid build. At this point our mage had to bail or get an earful from his raid leader, so we 9-manned KT, with one ranged dps. So that’s two healers, one ranged and six melee. Anyone who’s seen KT will know this is sub-optimal, particularly when most of the raid have never seen the boss before. Frost thingies locked out melee a couple of times (makes the tank’s job “interesting”), purple zones of evil caught dps thanks to lag and so on.

However, and again this is the biggie. The boss died on the first shot. By my count five of the raid had never seen KT before, and of the rest most of us have actually seen him less than a handful of times.

So the Naxx scorecard : AB – 3; Bosses – Nil

Were the kills flawless, no. Is AB an uber raiding guild, no. Did overgearing help, hell yes, did the players pull things back and learn the fights on the fly and get a kill. Hell yes.

Coming soon… musings on tanking, threat and 40-man level 60 raids done at level 80.