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.
