I’ve led too many casual and not-so-casual raids in my days and from my perspective, this is a very good start.

The guildies who attended stayed for the duration (except the one who stepped out for the third healer) and appear to be wanting to continue next week, despite the apparent lack of success.

A pugger, after hours of wiping, wants to be invited again because she liked the way the raid was conducted.

Different strategies were used and everyone (from your post) seemed willing to try different approaches.

Do yourself a favor and base early success or failure on how much you progressed as a group, not the number of boss kills. It seems to me the group came together to a certain extent and that’s usually a very good sign of things to come.

About the player who did not come because he felt tanks and healers were not geared enough. I am sorry to say but my experience tells me this type of player will only show up when the perceived odds are in his favors. A flight risk in my opinion.

Good luck!

Oh well. Maybe we will get lucky and get an easier combo of drakes.

We had to try everything to see if we could squeeze out more DPS.

We simply needed a higher average dps. Swapping out our lowest one helped, but not enough. Swapping the second lowest might have gotten us closer but we had no super heavy hitter hand. Plus the lowest two were our paladins. We were doing the HoP trick to clear stacks. It worked quite well. I called for one when mine were at 14ish on the first phase and then cleared it with a macro. Then we tank swapped when the first add was down and that put me on the second add with just 4 stacks.

So our best attempts were more or less identical strats so what yall were using. We had him in the teens or below 4 or five times.

I am looking forward to seeing what the new combo of drakes is. I will have to sneak in there again tomorrow and check it out. Having seen two different combinations now and learned enough about 3 of the adds I feel we have a great chance of learning a new set from scratch and then getting him down.
If everyone in the raid goes out and gets one or two upgraded items we will likely get him down.

I went in there last night in a thrown together guild group that had bear and pally tanks and tree, shammy, and pally heals. We got him down pretty quick with the pally tanking Halfus and bubbling at 12-14 stacks and retaunting. This let us go on to the Timewarden with a tank that only had a few MS debuffs and a fresh tank on the boss. From there its just a DPS race with tank swaps. Not standing in the fire should be a given for raiders.

I would rather have raid-aware people who know their rotations in 346 blues than stupid people wearing nothing but purple. Any day. And I’d rather take someone in half greens who treats the other raiders like human beings, than someone wearing more gear who puts other people down.