So, this week’s raid started off awkwardly. Another guildie has decided to try running a Friday/Saturday night raid at the same time we are. And one of my raiders has vanished – nobody has heard from him in over a week. I thought I’d swap in one of my healers as dps and we’d be ok, if underpowered, but due to poor communication, she had thought her weekend was free and agreed to help out the other raid Friday. I bashed my head into the wall, got her to agree to come with us Saturday, and started asking everyone I could think of to come. Everyone who had a geared character not already raiding was already helping out with this new raid.
Finally, one of my raiders came up with the suggestion that her sister get on her boyfriend’s mage and come help us out. It was good enough for me, so at raid time we had 10 people. Yay!
Friday nights are Blackwing Descent for us. It took us three attempts on Magmaw and three on Omitron. I’m hoping we start one shotting both fights real soon now. There’s no reason why we can’t. Magmaw dropped a pretty leather chestpiece; I took it as it was a slight upgrade over the one I had and no one else could use it. Then Omnitron dropped awesome shoulders for me! Those got me excited. They look amazingly cool, I’ll have to get a screenshot of them. They have little feathery wings and are awesome.
We had lots of time left so we went downstairs and started attempts on Maloriak. We’d tried Chimaeron the previous week and were looking for something different. Several hours of work and things were starting to come together, but we ended the evening without downing the boss.
Saturday night we headed for Bastion of Twilight where we blew through the trash and one-shot Halfus, on the most difficult combination that we’ve defeated yet. So proud of my raiders! Then we conferred. We’ve been working on the twin dragons, but people were eager for another shot at Maloriak; we’d gotten much farther on that fight than on the twins. We decided to go to Maloriak by way of Conclave of Winds so we could take out our other farm boss.
Conclave was a bit harder this week due to our dps makeup (had swapped out a hard hitting hunter for a less geared elemental shaman). Twice we executed the fight perfectly, only to screw up our timing and have a boss revive three seconds before the last one went down. The third time, we watched health bars, coordinated carefully, and got them down. Yay!And hurrah for belts nobody wanted. They went into my disenchant pile as I explained I was going to get Power Torrent and then we’d coordinate enchants; someone else in guild was about to buy Landslide so I don’t need to get that.
And then off to Blackwing and Maloriak. Our hard work the night before paid off and we two-shot the fight. Yay! 5/12 is definitely progress, if slow. With an hour left, we went and worked on Chimaeron for a while but it’s not coming together quite yet.
So Reversion and I have been discussing what would be our best plan for progression. Should we keep downing all our farm bosses, or concentrate on new fights? Perhaps if we went to Bastion on Friday nights, we’d get more work done on the twin dragons. The other major raid in the guild is focusing on Blackwing Descent and it’s worked well for them; took them a while to get down Magmaw and Omitron but they’re on farm now, they got Maloriak down Monday of the week before we did, and they worked on Atramedes this week. We’re working on Chimaeron and the twin dragons, but I’d drop Chimaeron for Atramedes in a heartbeat. I like working two raids at once; it keeps things from getting dull. But I can see the point of focusing attention on one raid.
I’m wondering how other raid groups handle this!
I’m in favor of continuing the farm bosses then moving on to new ones. The more we do them, the easier and faster they’ll get, and the points are still much needed. If we get to the point where we can blow through them in an hour or two, that leaves all kinds of time for new stuff.
I posted a picture on Friday of those shoulders. Our resident resto druid won them last week too.
We currently are facing the same situation. We originally decided to focus on one raid instance so that we could get the tier pieces. Our issue hasn’t been lack of skill it has been attendence. Last week was the first week we actually got to raid more than one night a week.
I think the best bet is to keep the bosses that you have on farm, on farm. Maybe spend the first half of a raid night on a farm boss then the 2nd half on progression. That way you start each night with kills that pump up the raid group.
If folks still need gear, I think it’s a difficult choice in the how to split your raid time. Once we started de’ing more than half the gear that was dropping, we switched our progression bosses attempts to the beginning of the raid week (when we had the best attendance of the core raiders) and left the farm bosses for the last day of the raid week.
I’d agree with farming the farm bosses. We’re a ten man guild and have gone from 5 bosses down in BWD in one night with our “core” team to struggling slightly with a few less-geared and experienced raiders due to some holidays/exams/timeouts. Sticking to farm bosses at least for the start of your raid week means more gear and experience for everyone.
In apathy we have spent 1 night in BoT, and 1 in BWD.. Night 3 is wherever we feel like pickin up where we left off.. And of course we cant forget our “Four Winds Fridays!”.. lol
Yeah, if we had more nights it would be easier to get progress but we just can’t commit to that these days. Two nights a week and we’re up to downing 5 bosses, isn’t too bad. With a third night we’d have V&T down by now and be working real hard on Chimaeron and Atramedes. But that’s not us so hey, we’re happy with getting there slowly.
We’ll get to the point of clearing all but the end bosses in 2 hours in each raid and then the choice will be what end boss will we work on.
Yup! Looking forward to that! I do think we’d have cleared our farm bosses faster, and done a bit better on progression, if we’d had the hunter instead of swapping in various other dps. Chimaeron – the one time I did really well with heals, I went OOM at 32% which means if we’d had a bit more dps we’d have been at the “enrage” and my mana wouldn’t have mattered any more. Everyone needs to improve just a bit more – healers getting better at triage, tanks being more survivable, dps doing a little more – and we’ll really start rocking.
Before you spend time trying to figure out where you should spend your time – take a few minutes to figure out what your goals are as a raid group.
We all know that it’s “possible” to take down the end game bosses without the best gear, but then we should also know that we’re not Vodka/Paragon/etc. So, typically every piece of gear we can get our hands on is worth it.
Our goal is to (hopefully) kill Sinestra while she’s relevent. We raid 9 hours a week, so here’s how we split our time.
W – 4/6 in BWD for trash epics (pays for our raiding) and the few upgrades we need off those bosses. Shards also help, since we’re getting a lot of BiS gear now that needs epic enchants. After BWD it’s over to BoT for 2 hours of H-Halfus.
Th – Start with Halfus for 1 hour, then clear BoT and Vortex for the shards.
Sat – H-Chim for 1 hour, then Nef (only 2 kills on him, neither one clean).
For you, I’d suggest the schedule that our casual group runs. They are laid back and about where you are with progression.
1) Everything farm
2) Anything new
Killing bosses keeps morale up, gets upgrades into the group (especially if you don’t have a set roster), and helps give the feeling that the train is moving. Bashing your head until you hear a squishy sound is a recipie for disaster IMO.
Good luck with it! I’d personally try Atramedes, as the fisght is fairly straightforward, and I personally love the mechanics of it.
Thanks a lot for that comment. That’s very helpful, actually – a good way of breaking it down. We’ve got similar goals, well not as lofty; Reversion and I want to see raid content while it’s still relevant, this expansion. Maybe not down everything on heroic but we’d like to kill Chogall before 4.1. It’s not that big a goal, maybe, but it’s do-able and still requires work and dedication.
We are really good about changing instances fast – it rarely takes more than 5 minutes to get from Bastion to Blackwing, or vice versa. So maybe we won’t be as wedded to one raid per raid night.
I wouldn’t change what we’ve been doing. I like being able to say at the end of a raid night “well, we killed two bosses we have on farm and made good progress on a new fight … tomorrow we’ll go kill the other bosses we have on farm and hopefully this one too.” A night with no kills is no fun. Having them spread over the two nights makes it a lot more enjoyable.
Also, sometime when we’re feeling frustrated and discouraged, we should give Al’Akir a go just for kicks. ‘Flame walls’ plus wind blast should totally be good for some laughs.
Yeah, I agree. One alternative would be to down all the farm bosses one night and then spend 4 hours on progression…. ug!
I would much rather do something like 2 hours each time on farm and 2 on progression. Breaks things up and lessens burnout.
We don’t have a clear plan, but so far (after the first sucky weeks) we’ve been staying in the same place. For example, this reset was:
Friday: kill Magmaw, Omnitron, Maloriak, work on Chimaeron
Monday: kill Chimaeron and Atramedes (first kills, woop!)
Tuesday: kill Halfus and Valiona and start working on Conclave.
(Of course, the European realms went down right after Halfus so we didn’t have a chance to finish that.)
I think we’ll keep doing this – clear farm bosses and progress on whatever’s left before the end boss. We’ll probably focus on Bastion now to get to Cho’gall, then decide who to try first, Cho’gall or Nefarian.
Also, on Chimaeron (feel free to ignore me, but I’m giddy since we finally killed him and found a strat that worked): if you have people (even DPS) *not* healing on Feud, tell them to. We failed miserably on the first night (always dying on the first Feud) and killed him within 2 hours on the second. We timed our big cooldowns (priest’s hymn on first Feud, my Tranq on the second, moonkin’s Tranq on the third), the enh shammy used Healing Rain and Chain Heal, everyone used their self-healing or bandages. I tried out a spec with 3/3 Nature’s Bounty (and no Furor), and despite the mana issues those fast Nourishes were amazing. It felt so, so much better than before. Good luck!
(Oh, and after Chimaeron, Atramedes is such a breeze to heal! I got so relaxed I kept forgetting to run out of the sounds waves.)
Hey now, that’s not true, we got Magmaw before you guys did, although you did beat us on Omnitron. Taking forever to get our group together, and still haven’t had a 2 day week from the whole group, lol. grrrr. It is nice that we get to push each other like this though.
You guys got maloriak down first too so you guys aren’t lagging at all! didn’t mean to imply you were either!
hehe, no worries. I’m still a little jealous you got Throne of the Four Winds’ first fight down. 🙂
Good lord, you even have the funny letters in your name on here. hehe. It forces me to directly target you if I want to /bonk you, because I can’t ever remember the darn alt code.