Saturday I was invited to finish up Naxx-25 with another guild and jumped at the opportunity. I came in to finish Thaddius, the Military Quarter and Sapphiron but we didn’t manage to down KT before they called the raid. They went back in last night to finish it up and invited me back BUT Sundays are my normal Naxx-10 night for Vae Victus, so I declined. I managed to snag Mantle of the Corrupted from the Four Horsemen which is rated better than my T7 & T7.5 shoulders, not taking the set bonus in to consideration.
One of our Hunters couldn’t make it and our normal Ret Pally was Holy so we were 9 manning Naxx-10 while short 2 DPS. It wasn’t pleasant at all. We cleared the Arachnid Quarter, Patch, Grobb, Gluth, Noth & Razuvious before calling it a night. Going from farming Naxx for 9-10 weeks to struggling on certain bosses was a bit dissapointing but with some of us switching roles in the raid, it was expected to run in to a few snags.
We lost our Prot Warrior OT to RL issues so rather than recruit a tank this close to 3.1, our Resto Druid opted to step in and OT on his DK. This left us without a very well geared AoE healer so our top-DPS Survival Hunter is AoE healing for us on his Shaman. At the moment, we’re 2 spots short with Ulduar only weeks away and a guild that was fully geared and really to steamroll Ulduar-10 is now back somewhere in the middle to try and gear and OT and healer.
The DK isn’t scrub geared and has some experience tanking heroics, etc., and did good last night in Naxx. The Shaman has already cleared Naxx-10 and 25 but could still use some upgrades as well. I picked up a few upgrades last night and hovered around 2700-3000 DPS so there is room for improvement for the 3 of us.
I put out a recruitment ad in trade and on the SoE realm forums but so far no one has responded. The Prot Warrior said he would be back in May but I don’t want to wait around just in case he changes his mind at the last minute. It’s not like it set us back to square one but it really threw a wrench in to our spokes and a majority of our raid is not happy having to farm Naxx even more to gear up the 3 new positions.
Aside from the uncleared Naxx, the DK managed to snag an upgrade or two and I picked up quite a bit.
Grieving Spellblade from Grand Widow Faerlina.
Agonal Sash from Anub’Rekhan.
Sullen Cloth Boots from Patchwerk.
Ring of the Fated from Noth the Plaguebringer.
Equipping everything brought me to about 1.3% below hit cap and I was saving my emblems for the trinket but I broke down and picked up Ward of the Violet Citadel to reach cap again.
I was kind of happy with my performance last night but it was a learning experience. I knew the fights from farming the place for awhile but I’ve never really had to manage a pet before (outside of when NOT to throw out my Shadowfiend). Doing something like not pulling your pet back for Locust Swarm or timing your Life Tap poorly can hinder your performance and that is just something that I’ll have to get used to.
I have the exact opposite problem. My guild was running 3 ten man nax runs per week along with our 25 man content. With all this nax going on people are got burned out. Now we are down to one ten man nax per week and 20 people that say they would rather level alts or do achievements. This whole 10/25 man thing is killing raiding for a lot of people.
I tend to side with Blizzard’s stance on the 10/25man current situation. At this time it seems the 10mans are not what they were supposed to be, which was a way for smaller guilds to see content without needing to be in a big raiding guild. Instead it seems more 10mans are geared towards ‘the 10 top members of your guild’, with some 10mans being a lot harder then their 25man counter parts.
Ideally there shouldn’t be a reason, in my mind, for fully 25man ready guilds to really be doing 10mans on an official basis, it’s just a side affect of the ease at which most 25s are cleared which leaves only 10mans left to do most weeks.
Hopefully you’re on a realm that’s healthy enough to let your members ‘roam-free’ and basically form their own 10mans outside of officially scheduled guild runs so they have the choice to burn themselves out or not, that seems to be the best option for my own guild these days.
Last night was… interesting to say the least. I still don’t think having to cancel two previous runs helped anything, took everyone a moment or two to get back into ze groove.
I love how the shit always hits the fan at last moment.
@ Bel – Yeah, I figured since we haven’t gotten to raid in 2 weeks that people would be rusty and not having 2 DPS was a concern.. it just didn’t seem like everyone was giving 100%. I’m sure it’ll get back to normal eventually but I felt like we went from being on top of the hill to climbing back up.
@ Facemelter – I think the lack of content and the lack of difficulty is killing raiding, to be honest. We have one big raid to do and 3 single-boss raids. Sure, there are hard modes, but its still a lack of variety. By this time in TBC we had two more decent sized raids in SSC and TK:Eye but we’re all still jumping around Dalaran waiting on Ulduar. I think Achievements were put in as a cop-out to keep people interested in the game rather than adding additional content. Just a thought, though.
@ Joetest – Our server is low/med pop but our guild only focuses on 10-man raiding. Since VoA is too situational, all guild members are free to pug VoA as well as OS. We only have one Naxx-10 team because those are all of the people in our guild give or take 1 person. We arent a larger guild that is only doing 10-man raiding, but I could see where that would cause problems.