The end is upon -you-, Kel’Thuzad.

First things first: I was accepted into Nautilus!

The guild isn’t actually big enough at the moment to field an all guild raid team, even for ten mans, but we have enough people with various classes that it’s a case of grabbing 3-4 people from LFG, until we’ve recruited more people.

It’s better than where I was before (Raid wise! Not saying anything bad about my friends from Akatsuki :3), especially given most of the guild members are fun and friendly.

Boring stuff out of the way: Did 10 and 25 man VoA today. Wewt.

More exciting stuff now: I finished Naxx! /dancedance. It took a few wipes, a lot of alt/main swapping, and far, far too many dips into Viper, but I did it! I’ll spare you the constant stream of boss screenies this time, and instead just show the major ones.

We’d done the two most difficult wings last night, and we continued the trend of working down in difficulty by beginning with the Plague Wing. Noth died. That is all the information you require. It’s Noth.

Heigan was… an embarrassment. I died on the first fast dance. I got caught in an eruption, and meant to Shift-1 for Mend Pet. Instead, I hit Alt-1 for Disengage, and lept back into an eruption. Because those keys are so close together, amirite? /facepalm. Fortunately, about half the raid survived long enough to kill him.

Loatheb was good fun. It’s fun watching the majority of your hits crit. I imagine it’s a lot less fun for healers, who only have a 3 second window out of every 20 to, y’know… heal.

So, we’re left with one quarter to go: Arachnid. It’s meant to be the easiest one in the instance, right? Anub’Rekhan is meant to be a cakewalk… but still, half of the party managed to wipe on him. D: At this point, I was having pretty severe mana issues. Our Ret paladin from Plague Wing had disappeared without a trace, so there was no replenishment to be had, and at 12.5% of your mana every minute (well, with 100% uptime), that really adds up. So there was rarely a time when I had enough mana to take care of those blasted corpse scarabs. Not fun at all.

The Grand Widow was another fun fight. The tank for the worshippers made a slight mishap, and killed one of them before they needed to be killed, so she was in her frenzied state for the last 30% or so.

The final boss of the Spider Wing is Maexxna, a lovely big spider with a wealth of nasty abilities. Cocoons, spawning baby spider adds, poison, raid wide stuns – the lot. Hatehatehate. But, she died, and I think apart from my death on Heigan, I survived for the lot. We one shot everything, so things were looking good.

Then the Frostwyrm Lair opens up and one of our healers DCs. D: We’d already been running with 9 people for the Spider wing, and Sapph isn’t exactly a cakewalk, so we were in pretty dire need of more people.

In the end, Skolian, who had been our MT, swapped over to his Lock, and let the OT DK pick up tanking, and Lexzie, the enhancement shaman, swapped over to her druid. We picked up a fourth healer and a DPS, and tried the fight. We wiped three times, I think (I think twice with three healers, then once with the four), before beating him – without Heroism, no less.*

Much to my joy, he dropped a Cloak of Mastery, which I know Rilgon is going to kill me for D: **

After another brief shuffle (Healer going onto tank since OT was leaving, another guildie coming in), it was off to face the big boss himself – Kel’Thuzad. I have no idea what the hell happened our first try. We sort of got through the waves of adds, though at the end the mini skeletons were quite numerous, then there was a flash and stuff happened and we wiped.

Second try was much better. The undead at the start didn’t overwhelm us, and KT himself isn’t particularly difficult. However, I think this fight (and Sapphiron, actually, though that was totally my own fault – I was lax in swapping over to Viper during air phases.) were where I was most taxed, mana wise. I think I only did nearly 1.8k DPS on both fights, which is a bit ouch. Goes to show that Blizzard are serious about the need for Replenishment.

Effectively, this is my first proper raid clear in WoW. It was pretty difficult at times, but it was also probably the most enjoyable experience I’ve had so far in the game. I was also rather pleased with my personal haul of 3 shiny epics, though the Resto Druid that we’d had since the start was sitting on quite a mountain of gear. It actually got to the stage where he was pretty miffed when we politely suggested he may want to start passing on some things so other people could get a chance at loot. Heh.

I’ve still got OS10, as the very least, to do this week, but the next two nights I have work, so I doubt I’ll get to do it until Sunday, if I do it at all this week.

*Much to my amusement, when we pugged 10 man VoA last week, one of the party members kept insisting our last member be a Shaman, because we needed Heroism. For VoA. The most difficult raid instance in the game, amirite? We did Sapph and KT sans Heroism, you can bloody well do Archavon!

**Also, has anyone noticed what I consider to be poor itemization in terms of DPS Capes and Two Handers? It seems everything has Agility and no strength, which has Hunter all over it (Everything is Hunter loot!). Tonight, for example, the DPS DK actually asked me “Is that your main?” when I rolled for the cape, clearly disappointed I was rolling on it. And the Claymore I got last night, according to WoWhead, is a good Paladin weapon… despite complete and utter lack of strength. Waitwhat?

Blizzard. Fix it. I don’t object to sharing pole arms with druids, or capes with druids/rogues, or everything with Enhancement Shaman, but seriously now D:

Faulsey (Draenei Hunter), Raids | RSS 2.0 | Respond | Trackback |