Tomorrow the nerf bat comes. We don’t actually know how much or how exactly, yet, but the official Nerfing comes soon. I kind of like the short cycle between announcement and nerf; it keeps the commentary and qq’ing it a minimum. Everyone gets to focus, say what they want to say, and then boom, it’s over, time to get on to the next news. Like patch 4.3. There’s a lot of news there.
Since we only had a week between the announcement and the execution, I knew we weren’t going to get Ragnaros down. Going into the weekend we were still 5/7, though I knew Staghelm was in our reach. Went in Friday hoping to stomp those 5 out flat and have a whole night for Staghelm; it didn’t really work. Our ret paladin was out and we brought in Bocat, our friendly guild shadow priest. She knows the fights and is great and we killed the first four with no problems. Then we hit Alysrazor and trouble. That fight is hard and having one person who isn’t in the normal roster can really throw the rythm off. She did great; we just didn’t have the team synergy we needed.
Saturday night, who shows up, unexpectedly, but Grom? Yay, we’ll have the full crew. We went in and two shot Alysrazor. Bang, dead. It was great. On to Staghelm. We started by pushing more stacks than we had last week, and kept adjusting as we went. We actually started doing more scythes on the third scorpion phase than the second, because all our cooldowns were back. The fight felt increasingly stable; we were getting to the point where the orbs were killing us every time, but we were getting TO that point, which was progress. And then one attempt we managed the orbs right, we stacked back up, we blew cooldowns, and Staghelm died.
Finally. That kill was hard. I think our second kill won’t be as bad.
We even went and did a couple pulls on Ragnaros. Maybe could have done more but I was tired and we need time to digest that one.
So. Back to my point. The nerfs are coming and I am ok with that. Yes, I know we could down Ragnaros the way he is now, with more time on him. But we did get to 6/7 and that’s actually enough to be the number 10 Alliance guild on our server, which is kind of sad. I had a random rogue whisper me asking if we were recruiting, so that was kind of cool. We’ve got a solid core group and I’m looking forward to 4.3. I don’t feel like our first Rag kill will be devalued because it came after the nerf. It’ll still be a kill for us, will still take work, will still require us to push ourselves more and more. I’ve been kind of a hard nose in recent weeks, pushing raid members to improve. I try not to be too mean about it but I feel like our team is good enough to be more than server 25th on a low population server. I want to still enjoy raiding with our team, so I still value having fun as most important, but it’s not that fun to wipe and wipe without progress. We haven’t had that happen this raid tier. Maybe we would have on Ragnaros. Maybe the nerf is saving us from raid drama. Who knows.
I just can’t get worked up about it one way or another. I might be losing geek points for not engaging in drama, but… I’m more concerned about raid roster next week, whether I need to max out my vps tonight or not, and how we can hit the ground running in 4.3.
Let’s kill some bosses.
One nice thing to think about it how we’ll really be able to work on heroic kills before 4.3, we didn’t get that chance at all with bosses before 4.2.
Yeah, and it’s a sign of how well our raid has progressed. Every single person has gotten better, some amazingly so. We have great synergy now, we understand each other, and we’re in great shape as a raid. I’m going to have to start reading up on heroic modes. Some of the fights that we one tank we may have to two tank; or maybe we’ll be relying on your new dps spec even more.
One really cool thing about FL heroics is that you can upgrade a lot of gear using dropped “Firestones” or whatever they’re called. For instance, all the BOE gear that drops in FL is upgradable – trade your lvl 376 version and a stone and get a level 3million version. Before we start heroic modes I want to tell everyone to look over their gear and let me know who is eligible for upgrades.
Grats again guys!!
Wow, 10th on the server, Alliance side? Not that I doubt you guys, but that I think it what Blizz was talking about when they gave their reasoning for why the nerf was coming. Not enough people making the progress as they intended, probably because some of those fight mechanics are crazy…well, from my understanding. 😛
We’re about 24th overall. Which means there are at least 240 people on the server who want to raid, are raiding, and have downed at least 6/7 bosses. That seems pretty good, to me. (Ignore the alts and such for the moment. Probably some of those 240 people are alts).
Yeah, some alts but also some raids with subs. We have had 3 or 4 more people than are usual roster in with us to see at least a boss or three. Probably there are more subs than alts. And if you look at the number of folks that have seen 4/7 and 5/7 you have a rather large number.
But I can see why they want more to see Rags before he is obsolete.
I don’t know if they are much harder than the last tier. Nef and Chogal were no slouches. And we were at about the same level of progression back then compared to the rest of the server. We have been at or near 7-10th place Alliance since really early on this expansion.
yay for another one down, onto the main show!~
I can almost certainly upgrade everything through heroics. Unfortunately, rl is busy busy, so as usual i’m way behind in vp stuff. That’s one reason i hate having to miss any night… I can always use those boss kills 🙂
Well your dps has been improving steadily so nobody’s going to be calling you out on vp gear! And it was really obvious the other night just how much we need you on Alysrazor – we wiped for an hour, but the next night we two shot it once you were back. And Baleroc… well Bocat did an awesome job taking the first crystal. She ate the whole thing! But if we hadn’t had her to fill in it would have been less pretty.
Sorry I couldn’t keep out of the tornadoes…now I feel bad because I slowed you down 😦
But on the bright side, I got another “I’m the first one dead again” screenshot for my “Raiding Memoirs” album 😀
Please don’t feel ad – without you we’d have been slowed down a lot more! The first four kills shuld convince you of that! Alysrazor just needs lots of stuns and we were melee light.