The Thrill of Progression

I liked all the comments and info from my last blog i decided i would write another!

This time i want to talk about how much i am loving WoW at the moment. Right now my guild is on 4/5 MH and 5/9 BT and we just the other night managed to get that number 5 in BT, Gurtogg Bloodboil.

It has been almost 3 weeks since we killed Teron Gorefiend for the first time and the week after we killed him, we didnt have the raid attendance to even get to him in BT. Everything before last week has been so grueling to try and raid. My guild seemed to be in a downward slope that was not picking up. We were no longer doing ZA cause people didnt feel like it. We were wiping 2 or 3 times on bosses in Mount Hyjal, having to push it into a 2 night clear instead of a 1. We were getting facerolled again and again on Naj'entus and then on Supremeus. It was bringing me to the breaking point watching all the farmed bosses become harder every time we did it.

And then, last week happened.

On tuesday of last week we decided to start off things with MH. We had our solid pally tank online and one of our core healers came back from a 2 week vacation in the bahamas. So we started the instance and unlike the couple of weeks prior, managed to one-shot the first and second boss. This made me happy to be sure but these are farmed bosses we have been doing for months now so i still really wasnt clicking my heels yet.

We then moved on to get our asses handed to us by Kazrogal again and again and again until we finally killed him. Apparently moving away from the raid when mana is low is just too hard to do. And this put me right back into the mood i was in of "omfg i hate this crap".

So the next night we decide to finish up hyjal, i was not feeling well and didnt really care what happened but thankfully due to our raiders getting their acts together, we 1-shotted azgalor and pushed immediately into BT.

Now, i expected that night to probably wipe on Naj and then Sup a few times and maybe make it to Akama if we were lucky. But then our maintank prot warrior had to leave and i got put into the maintank spot. So now i was feeling a little better that i actually got to do something BUT still had no confidence in my healers to keep me alive. It was about 3 minutes into Naj'entus when i realised that maybe things were looking up. Not one person had died, not one spine has been missed, not one bubble had lasted longer than 8 seconds. We proceeded to kill Naj'entus in a oneshot.

Well we moved quickly over to supremeus, chainpulling all his trash and making quick work of the room and then rolled right into the boss with almost no downtime. He went perfectly. 3 people died during the course of the fight (mostly do to OMFG VOLCANO!) and once again my spirits were lifted. So we rolled very quickly through trash (on a roll in that department) and got to Akama. About 7 minutes and a /facepalm later, we decided to go ahead and push for gorefiend tonight.

This is where everything began to seem different. We had only killed Gorefiend twice. Once was our guild first, the other was a very close call after several nights wiping. When we moved in there to do him, the right people constructs before and after the new people did and suddenly Gorefiend was a 1-shot. He went down so fast and so pro that i would have thought i was watching a world acclaimed guild do it.

On my server (medivh), we have alot of very good endgame guilds and even they dont always 1-shot Gorefiend. Sometimes the wrong people just get chosen and it sucks. So saying that my guild managed to do it without even calling the boss on "farm" status, was uplifting.

We called the raid after that kill on a good note and they went on to ZA and i went to bed. (They ended up getting a bear).

The next night we decided we wanted to give Gurtogg a try for the second time. We had spent about 2 hours wiping on him before with very little improvement after each wipe. This time however my guild came in with their gamefaces on. It took us 2 hours and about 7 attempts but we finally managed to get him. The try that we did get him it ended with only 2 people dead and hardly a hiccup throughout.

Our slump finally appeared to be over and since it was still early we said "oh why not, lets go see what RoS looks like". Here is what we learned within the first 25 minutes to RoS.

1) There is a gauntlet before his room. Took us about 10 minutes of constant respawns before someone finally decided to check out bosskillers.com and tell us this

2) The boss aggros as soon as you get on the ramp. (2 wipes in a row without even looking at the boss)

3) You cant heal during phase 1....... lawl

So after getting to phase one without adds and learning that we couldnt heal i finally said screw it and alt tabbed to read up on boss killers. I read through phase one and phase two and got the basic understanding of the fight. I then proceeded to explain these parts out to my guild (since i am a speed reader and they werent even close to finishing reading the strat).

This is where it got impressive. After my initial explanation of P1 and barely P2, we nailed P1 with absolutely no deaths and then we rolled into P2. I had explained what to kick and what not to kick and my rogues responded with near perfect coordination. First attempt in P2 we got RoS down to 25%. Second attempt 20%. Third attempt 7% (which is probably my fault because i failed at having enough rage for a spell reflect so a rogue kicked the deaden).

We had to call it there because we were already over our time cutoff and people had to leave but FINALLY after WEEKS of absolute despair every time we had to go do a new boss i have a renewed confidence in my team of raiders. It isnt just myself either, everyone now has a spark in them and when servers reset yesterday we cleared all the way to Gurtogg, 1-shotting everything. Tonight we will handle Hyjal hopefully just as good and then we move on to down Gurtogg and RoS. After seeing their performance on the first night of screwing around, i have no doubt that my guild is capable now of finishing black temple.

Its times like these that i really love this game and being a maintank. The heads have been removed from the asses and its gametime!