It’s kind of a weird situation I’m in, I keep realizing. My guild is working on heroic modes, right? They were 7/12 when I joined and then we got Dreamwalker that week. (All they were missing was a kick-ass holy paladin, obviously!) Then we did some work on Lady Deathwhisper the second week. Didn’t get her down, but worked on refining the strategy.
The third week, last week, we went out and downed Lady Deathwhisper. And Halion (on regular), too. Then we worked on some heroic Sindragosa. I swear to God, it’s my least-favourite fight in the instance, but I know it pretty damn well at this point. ;)
So this week, we got LDW down again and one-shotted heroic Saurfang for the first time. (The first four marks were all on healers, if you can imagine.) We also got Princes down that night and then went on to Halion.
Last night, though, we were short a healer. We’re seriously in need of a priest and another pally would be great. But one of our priests had his wisdom teeth out or something, so he wasn’t going to be on.
We did BQL, Festergut and Rotface all on heroic with five healers.
And then decided to play with heroic Putricide, which the guild’s never seen before.
I actually really love the heroic Putricide encounter. Malleable Goo sucks ass, don’t get me wrong, but I LOVE the heroic Putricide encounter because I happen to be GOOD at dealing with the stupid Unbound Plague.
In the first night of attempts, and not even a full night, mind you, but we’re talking less than two hours, my new guild almost pushed phase 3.
Of course, it’s going to be HILARIOUS to see their reaction to the insane, incomprehensible amounts of raid damage once we hit ~2 stacks on each tank in P3, ahahahaha. I’m really looking forward to the reactions on Vent or in raid chat, because it’s going to be freaking hilarious. The one warning I gave the healers was something along the lines of “if we make it to P3, don’t worry about me. I’m going to Beacon myself and heal the active tank. Just worry about yourselves and the raid.”
We didn’t make it to P3, but I feel as though in less than two hours of work on him, we did as well adjusting to the mechanics as my previous guild did in about six or seven hours.
I really feel good about the raid group. We did a lot of plague swapping without calling it out and had a few (of our 9? 10?) attempts where the plague swapping was, honestly, PERFECT. We were killing Putricide in my last guild (with AVRE still in use!) and not getting plague swaps that clean.
Speaking of, HudMap on this encounter is freaking phenomenal. I kept messing with my settings and accidentally turned the entire thing OFF at one point, but it does a great job of showing you who has the plague and how long they’ve had it for, which is the difficult part of the encounter. According to the Curse page, it’ll show you who you can’t give it to, too (or rather, shouldn’t, due to Plague Sickness), but I didn’t even see that. I didn’t really need it, given my experience with the encounter, but it might be handy in general.
Anyways. I feel like heroic Putricide is within our grasp. We called the raid a little early last night and left him up for Monday, along with Dreamwalker, Sindragosa and LK. If I were running the raid, I’d spend 2.5 hours on Putricide, then roll through heroic Dreamwalker, regular Sindragosa and LK. Even if we don’t get Putricide on heroic this week, I have a good feeling about next reset.
I think the coolest thing about this is that even though I’m not the one getting achievements like Heroic: Storming the Citadel or Heroic: The Plagueworks… it still feels like progression to me. Even though it’s not new to me, even though I’ve wiped for countless hours on all of these encounters before and then stood in screenshots over their bodies. This is awesome forward momentum. This is progression for the guild. I WANT to get these people their heroic kills, I WANT to get these people their drakes. I want to wipe on heroic LK with these people. I want to wipe on heroic Halion with these people.
I think the end of Wrath of the Lich King will be a great time for me and it is SO NICE to feel that way and look forward to raids instead of dreading them.
I’ve said it before, more than once in the past week or so, but I’ll say it again: I am SO HAPPY that you’ve found a guild that makes you happy. :) Seriously, it’s really awesome to see you so excited about this. ^_^ Gives me warm blogger fuzzies.
God I wish I hadn’t read this. It makes me so envious. I’ve stuck with my guild and we’re well and truly hung up on H Prof Putricide. We pushed so hard to get to 8/12 H ICC… and it didn’t really come to hard. But from that moment we’ve struggled to down farm bosses, great players keep leaving and I never ever feel like we have a good team to raid with because we usually keep having to fill spots with trials.
We’re taking so long to learn H PP. So long. We wiped at least full 3 nights on him before seeing phase 3. We’ve spent nights since and not reached phase 3. I think it’s been about 2 months since we reached 8/12.
I could cope with all that. We’re having a bad run etc. But what really hurts is that just before we killed Lich King two raiders (excellent DPS I’ll give them that) who had been unhappy for a long time left the guild. We were glad. They set up their own 25 man raiding guild. Raids identical times to us, identical days.
That guild is now 11/12 H ICC. And that is a really bitter pill to swallow. They have raiders in their guild that applied to ours and, for whatever reason I can’t even remember, we didn’t accept them.
They overtook us on H PP. And our DPS is terrible. I don’t even know why but I feel like the guild that I’ve loved for so long – over a year – has somehow become something more casual, less demanding, less critical, less… performance-based than what I signed up for. It’s like all the good people stay, but those nice, good people just… aren’t great DPS/healers. They’re mediocre or they just don’t seem to play with the same amount of care that I want them to.
Maybe I’ll realm transfer with Cataclysm :(
Isn’t it terrible that I have to take up your comments section because I’m pretty sure that nobody in my guild will read this, but they sure will read it if I blog about it on my own site.
Apple – I’m really happy with them, too. We’ll see how happy most of them are with me once they read my raid discussion threads the GM asked me to put together. ;D But yeah, I like the group, I like the ideals and I like the raids. :)
Cassandri – oh, that is just *harsh*! I’m so sorry. :( If it makes you feel any better, I hear heroic LK is extremely painful. I had one night of attempts on him before I left my guild and I was just LAUGHING at some of the fail I witnessed.
I’m sure a lot of the issues you’re experiencing are partly due to the turnover — you just don’t have a ton of experience with some of the people in the raid group. That’ll get better with time, assuming everyone sticks around.
If you don’t know off-hand what the DPS issues are, try to figure it out and see if you can talk to them about the issues. And just be constantly recruiting? I’m not really sure if any of that will help, but maybe it will.
I’m happy my comments section can serve some kind of purpose, and if you’d ever like to rant, my email’s open to you. kurn [at] apotheosis-now [dot] com. <3