The flex-o-rama group has made the decision that we’re going Garrosh or bust! This week, wing 4 was scheduled. When we were standing in front of Garrosh trash, I gave the group the option of going for a few earlier easy farm bosses, or spending the rest of the evening wiping on Garrosh. And I got an immediate 100% vote for beating up on the loudmouth. So we gave it a few very good tries, and managed to push him to 6%. As Thanael put it, we experienced the joy of phase 3. At the end of the evening I had another vote, and it seems that everyone wants to keep on trying this encounter until we beat it. So next week’s flex-o-rama is another run through wing 3, and another try at killing the head of the Orc Nazis.
I am afraid, however, in order to kill Garrosh I am going to have to start doing something I hate to do and excluding people. This is a dps-intensive fight and very gear-dependent. We brought a couple of people in who had much lower gear levels, and they did great in the fights leading up to Garrosh but Garrosh is a different encounter. So I’m stating for the record that while I do not mind bringing along a few undergeared people for Blackfuse and Klaaxi next week, I will likely be kicking people out of the raid before we start on the pre-Garrosh trash.
This has been a ‘struggle with farm bosses’ week so far for Team Kaels. We kicked over Immersues easily enough (it’s nice to get that one on true farm status), but we had some real difficulty repeating last week’s kill on Protectors. We buckled down on it and tried new things – I adjusted the timing on my Devotion Aura, we adjusted where various mobs would be tanked and who was responsible for which interrupts, we got Snuffy killed deliberately on a number of wipes, and we finally got a clean kill with everyone standing up at the end and a generous amount of time left on enrage. Then we went on to heroic Norushen, who we had been regarding as a ‘gimme’ boss. But occasionally, something that had been super-easy all of a sudden becomes super-difficult and this was one of those nights. Both of us tanks were getting completely wrecked, no clue why. Of course, Kaels and I started blaming ourselves for being bad tanks, folks started sniping at each other for not killing the adds in time, it got rather super-tense. Finally I realized that the problem was that our dps had gotten too awesome. Previously, the dps took a little while in the shadow realm to kill their adds, so the adds popped up in the normal realm in a evenly spread-out rhythm. But the dps were rushing through the shadow realm in record time, and the moment one dps was out then the next one goes in, creates more shadow adds, which buff the boss and wreck the tanks. And so, as the Pandaren say, the solution was “Slooooow Down”.
This Friday, we intend to start learning the heroic Sha of Pride encounter. We have assigned Pac-man homework to all healers and dps. Wish us luck.
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