Stole a ride on the ZA railroad.

If you pass go, collect 2 pieces of Loot :P

So the other day, I teamed up with the top horde guild on our server and got a look at a full ZA run. It started off shakie which I would accredit to none of us having run together, (4 of my guild, 6 of theres) but eventually we got truckin' and it was pretty smooth. (the unfortunate repercussions of a shakie start in ZA is the timed event goes out the window) Everything went pretty easy and it was nice to see the 4th boss go down. We've been close to killing him many times, but the reality is that we simply haven't invested much time in ZA (2-3 hours/week is all we ever do).

Which led to the 5th boss... The 5th boss is definitely not caketown. Some have said that Shadow Resist makes it that way, but those same people may have the Shadow Resist gear from Black Temple and not the crappy green stuff that I'll be suiting up my team with. After enough beating our head against the wall we switched out 3 of our guys (everyone but me) for 3 of their guys. This is where we freeze for a moment.

Is it right to stack the group?

As a raid leader I get faced with this dilemma often and I get it thrown in my face as if it's something horrible to do whenever I clearly do it to aid in a kill. It seems to be the one thing that people just don't understand. I get responses like...

"Well of course we can do it if we stack the group, but we can't always do that!"

etc, etc, etc and even more responses along that lines that are all deep seeded in this fear that someone's spot, a spot they feel they've earned, is now gone because their gear isn't good enough or more often than not because their class isn't good enough.

These are fair concerns and until this entry I don't know if I ever really gave these concerns much thought and I don't think I ever really thought about how to handle those concerns until now.

2 Reasons to Stack the Group

1. It's clear that significant time has been spent on the boss and without a dramatic change the group may very well fall apart without killing the boss. (this is what led to 3 of my team being removed)

2. You haven't killed the boss yet.

So by stacking the group, we killed the 5th boss rather easily. I understand why this is done and I had even offered to replace myself for a feral druid, but luckily for me there wasn't one available because the kill netted me a sweet new helm, [item]Battleworn Tuskguard[/item], which is a massive upgrade over my tier 4 helm.

I'll quickly jump back to point out that for the Dragonhawk boss when we go in as a guild next time I won't be taking the 2 Shadow Priests that are in our standard group. We simply can't have them. For the 4th boss they represent one of the worst possible dps classes due to a complete lack of any aoe element. It's not like I want the perfect team, but I'm going to have a Hunter, Warlock or Mage in both of their places and once we've killed him once then I'll start bring 1 of the 2 of them and perhaps once we are really good at the fight I'll bring them both, but I highly doubt it.

So back to ZA, we continue onto Zul'jin and myself and the other tank have been rolling back and forth to decide who tanks.. highest roll wins (interestingly enough I've wanted to dps these fights since I always have to tank and he seems content to tank making the rolls rather pointless) and thankfully I haven't had to tank anything yet.

/roll

Yup, so I'm tanking Zul'jin. Figures. A 5 phase fight that we wipe on the first time due to having too few people up in phase 5. (another aside they like to always stack their groups very melee oriented for this fight... been a while since I remember melee being used to stack a group) The 2nd time around we beat him rather easily despite the raid leader having to yell at me to stop standing in the massive fiery pillar of death. (If there ever was a reason to stack health... being an idoit is up there with a huge benefit to gross amounts of hp) While Zul'jin certainly is not a hard fight to tank at all, it was a lot to absorb and the end of the raid so I'm not going to be too hard on myself for forgetting a rather large element of the last phase on the fight. We did and I won't have to worry about forgetting to move out of fiery pillars next time around.

So how am I rewarded for my newbery? (is that a word?... is now I guess)

[item]Cleaver of the Unforgiving[/item]

There is a certain amount of irony I think in snagging that axe off a boss I scrubbed it up on especially getting it on my first kill. Perhaps Zul'jin is a more forgiving fellow than he let on :P

And that's that. A lot of much needed experience and 2 pieces of loot to show for it. I won't go into the debate as to whether I should have took any loot or the impact it had on my raid group... those are topics for another post hopefully for a post that's significantly shorter than this one.

One final note, thanks E X A L T E D, I know at least one of you will be reading this. :P