It likely comes as a shock to realise that this webpage is updated largely infrequently. Presently we have killed 5 heroic bosses and only two appear on the front page. Willing to hire a photographer so I can get them up here. Also looking for members! Turns out killing this many bosses wears people out. Who would have thought it blizzard.
The farm (sorry I meant grind) is starting to really kick in. Farming has never been so literal and with the ridiculous amount of bosses released this tier I am looking forward to a cataclysm-esque collapse in raid numbers. Dogs are dead.
So yes, spine was the cockblock that everyone else said it would be. Shocker. Although we by no means breezed the madness encounter it did not require the degrees of finesse required in the previous fight. Once he was dead and we had sorted out the loot (a long time given our loot distribution!) we started to set up for a screenshot. At this point we realised that we already had a photo of this exact spot, so we decided we would go and take one looking at the end boss of Mists of Pandaria! I gave up trying to organise a decent screenshot. Somewhere in the above screenshot is a complete random who is not even in the guild, "Wheres Waldo" style. Expansion over? Bring on the pandas and kungfu!
So, nerfs aside, tonight was not going as planned. One maintank had to suddenly work (wtf real life?!), the only standbys were more healers, and we were light on mages (our go to corruption interruptors). We also had a lot of warlocks and hunters (don't seem to do so well on spine). All of this forced some serious changes to our strat, 7 healers are in, two mages soloed each corruption, an alt warror took over kiting and at the last moment our most undergeared dps was called to plate when she shouldn't have even been in on progression. Turns out that was what you need to kill this boss. Amusement entailed raidcalling who was meant to be using the damn lightwell, some fantastic play from the mages, excellent kiting and some true raid carrying DPS from the guys lucky enough to roll a class who can dominate this boss. Jokes aside, we ran right to the wall and beyond time for the raid. Each try was good and progress was well deserved. I did not expect a kill tonight, truly proud of this raidgroup at the moment.
I actually enjoyed this fight, until the boss actually landed. Then it became a case of, "is there fire where you wanted to stand?" followed by "is there also fire on the backup location?" followed by "wtf there wasn't this much fire last time?!?". Either way it was enjoyable, our new recruits get to gear up while we progressed on it and aside from some "communication" issues for stepping into the blasts it was pretty good progress. Then we suddenly killed him. There was fire, it was not in the way, so the boss insta-died first pull of the night. Even our teamspeak spies from other guilds were surprised, but as we have long said. First pull or last pull are always the best!
I have no real complaints here, it was certainly not a difficult fight conceptually, and the raiders know what to do and just did it. Meeting the dps check was slow and steady (assisted by the monthly nerfs no doubt). We dropped healers as we started to settle in and as the tanks completed their four set bonuses. Wait what?!?! You see, we didn't do any of those silly 11 alt runs with 3 mains in strategies. We didn't do crazy exploits on LFR. We are only now completing 4set on our raiders and it shows. Those superproguilds who came in on the first week with fourset on 90% of their guild have had an astonishing advantage, it's something we simply cannot compete with. Boss died, we didn't screenshot it. What were we taking a picture of? A ledge?
So by the time we heard that this boss was stupidly easy we had already put serious time into the preceeding two bosses. I'm pretty stubborn about these things and we just kept beating our faces against the wall that they represented. Obviously having gotten here, and annihilated it, they were clearly correct that it was easier. I wouldn't have done it differently though. Lightning was fun, Minilisa seems to be a lightning magnet. Or possibly healing repellant. Either way he needs to bribe someone to stay alive!
It was the nerfstick. Also more gear on the healers and dps let us put out with the exact same strategy that we used months ago when we first tried. Certainly we performed better than we did, but it was gear that killed Warlord Zon'ozz. Balancing for heroics seems to assume dps that we seem unable to meet, looking at other kills, our raiders need to produce at least 10k more dps than a 10man guild and about 10k more than they already are. 10 seems to be the magic number.
We spent a few weeks after the Christmas-NewYear break trying out different bosses looking for a target. Initially we felt that Warlord might be worth some investment after we came to a decent strategy that seemed to work for us. Turns out the healing there is interestingly hardcore and our dps wasn't up to killing the tentacles fast enough to compensate. So we moved around the instance, passing on the glitchy exploit strat for hagara and settled on Yor'sahj. In 10man, this gets solotanked. It is frankly ridiculous that both 10 and 25man share a loot table, but the tanks in 25man get hit for over four times the damage. BRB farming more gear, boss nerf, got a kill, bittersweet.
The week after normals we down first boss heroic! Shannox flashbacks! It should be pointed out that left side totally owned and carried right side who clearly need to shape the fuck up. Inhouse rivalry is always fun! Merry Christmas! See you in the new year!
We pushed hard to clear this in a week, and the effort paid off. Certainly the raiders did a good job of learning encounters promptly but our base heroic gear level from firelands clearly helped carry us. Speaking of firelands, we didn't get enough time to clear in there, though progress on heroic Ragnaros was slow, it was present. Frankly most of the time it felt like we were fighting player computers as they lagged or disconnected at key moments, looking at you here million fire add spawns!