Festive Occasion
Today is going to be a really strange day, for so many reasons. The group I am with at work is the first group in years that I have actually cared about holiday parties. So when my boss had a party a few years ago, it was quite literally the first “work Christmas party” I have ever actually attended. This year due to some odd circumstances we are not actually having a real party, but instead doing a Christmas lunch of sorts. The plan is to have a long lunch at a local restaurant, and then in place of our normal Wednesday staff meeting we are having these product demos. This year we had these team projects that we had been working on as we had time. Each of them did something that we felt was needed in our environment.
In the meeting this afternoon we have to demo our progress, but I am taking this probably way more seriously than I actually should. I have a product pitch like presentation, with a power point and everything. My hope is that I can burn through the presentation pretty quickly, because once all of the products have been demo’d we are off for the rest of the afternoon. I have a feeling that if any one person runs too long there will be much groaning, so I am trying to make sure things are polished enough to go quickly without stumbling on anything. In any case today is going to be a strange day, and hopefully it will be a fun one.
Kargath’s Hat
This morning I am struggling a bit to focus as I write my blog post. In part I am groggy from having stayed up a little bit too late, but I am also struggling to figure out how to explain just how awesome last night was. This so far has been hands down the best start to an instance raid wise I have experienced in World of Warcraft. Generally speaking our guild and the raids connected to it, have taken a significant amount of time getting our act together before actually hitting the content. With this raid we attempted to hit the ground running on the week the content was actually released. Of course Argent Dawn our server did not cooperate… and the game was essentially unplayable for us on that Tuesday, however the following Thursday they managed to down the first two bosses. Since then we have been progressing steadily each week. Last week we managed to down our very first Heroic boss as well, but due to some bugs not a single person in the raid got any loot. The bosses share separate lockouts, but it seems like last week you were only able to receive loot from one of those lockouts.
As such we altered the order in which we did the content so that we could take down Heroic Kargath first before doing any of the normal mode content. That way if we were only going to get loot from one version… we would at least get the heroic version. I can’t say we have this boss down on “Farm” yet because it took us a few tries to get him down, but it does feel like it was more solid than last week. Last week was definitely a “by the seat of our pants” kill, feeling like we barely got him. This week we had a few rough attempts but then on the time we killed him everything went pretty solidly. I struggled a bit with staying alive this week in general, which is part really bad luck and part sluggish reaction speed. When he died I got quite possibly the worst helmet I could use statwise…. which directly replaced the previous version I had… but at least it has the festive green text saying “Heroic” on it.
Twin Ogron: Doubly Dead
This week on normal everything is starting to feel like it is easily farmable. We downed Kargath and Butcher with ease, before moving forward to Brackenspore. After struggling a bit last week, this week everything felt smooth. I can say that pretty much every job on that fight happened flawlessly, but we also got some luck on the mushroom spawn placement. In any case we one-shot Brackenspore before moving on. Tectus on the other hand gave us a bit of a problem. While we one-shot him last week… it was definitely a lucky attempt. The way we were “handling” things was far more “by the seat of our pants” than it really needed to be. In fact the attempt mostly involved me running around like crazy dragging the bosses with me, trying to avoid crap as best as I could and keep the melee out of it. If we were going to take on that fight on heroic, we needed to start developing a strategy and last night we did just that. The first few attempts were nonstarters, but there was a moment when everyone started to grasp what needed to happen and just executed it. While we had like 20 seconds to the enrage timer on our first attempt, this time we managed to down him with a minute and a half left, feeling like the fight is definitely in the sustainable territory.
The fight we struggled with last week of course were the Twin Ogron: Pol and Phemos. More than anything we really did not have solid strategies for dealing with things like the fire and whirlwind. We made a half hearted attempt on Tuesday, and then managed to get some serious tries Thursday… which was enough to propel some research on the matter. Our attack was two prong… firstly we changed up where we were fighting the Ogron, and secondly we now understood how the axes work and where the fire comes from. Things went perfectly, and the new placement combined with understanding the patterns gave us our first Twin Ogron kill… and it was a one-shot. In one night we managed to clear six bosses, one of which being a brand new kill… I feel like that is pretty much a banner night for our raid. Now we need to do research for the next encounter, which I actually saw on LFR after last nights raid… and which is why I was up way too late. It looks like it is going to be madness, but hopefully we can struggle on and make good attempts this Thursday. Unfortunately I spent a token on every boss but normal Kargath, and the only piece of loot I walked away with was the heroic hat. It’s amazing how being handed fistfuls of gold can make you so sad.
