02/04/2021

Four Horsemen and a Paladin

It's been two months since I last wrote about my guild's Naxx progression, which is really kind of surprising considering that I spend two nights a week in there right now. I guess I just don't have that much to say about the day-to-day of it, but after two months an update certainly feels in order.

Monday night was a good night not just for Redbeard, but also for the Forks as we got the Four Horsemen down for the first time. This brings us up to 13 out of 15 Naxx bosses killed, compared to the 8/15 we were at when I last posted at the end of January.

Gluth was really just about figuring out a kiting strategy. We eventually ended up going for a paladin spamming Blessing of Kings as the kiter, with mages and some warriors helping to slow the mobs. It still feels messy every time though, and the kiter is usually dead by the time the fight is over.

Thaddius took a few attempts for everyone to get comfortable with the polarity shift mechanic but wasn't as bad as I had feared.

In regards to Loatheb I mentioned last time how we wiped at five percent or something - well, eventually we got there. Ironically, we then had another two or three weeks of failing on him again due to healing screw-ups that needed sorting out, until we finally got him to something you can fairly call farm status.

Gothik, for me, was a lot of boring waiting around while people endlessly discussed what to CC and what to kill and when, none of which was anything I could help with. Eventually something was figured out that worked, or maybe it just took us that long to actually get it right.

But then, the Horsemen! The fight known to give guilds of all levels pause and put their skills to the test. As I told Red, this was actually one challenge I wasn't worried about, because we've spent so much time failing on easy stuff, failing on a harder fight for a while should be a piece of cake in comparison. And it was... fine.

We started off using an addon that's supposed to show everyone where to move during each part of the fight, but it conflicted with some things so eventually dropped it, though it was a good tool to get a grasp on the basic mechanics of the fight. By Classic standards, it's a relatively unforgiving one with quite a lot of personal responsibility, and losing a single tank or healer usually meant a wipe, which meant that as a dps I barely got to practice one or two rotations before the call to mop up went out on most attempts, but eventually we got there. I made a kill vid too!

Next it's onwards to Sapphiron. We had some attempts on him so far and the main takeaway from them was that we should probably get some more frost resist gear than we brought originally, as well as some more healers. Speaking of healers...

At the end of January I paid to attune my paladin to Naxx. It was with an eye on Sapphiron, where we knew we'd need some dps to go on healers at least during the learning phase, but as it happened we actually found ourselves short on healers quite a few nights before that. Theoretically we have enough of them on the roster, but sadly a number of them have pretty poor/irregular attendance, which threatened to throw many a night into disarray if some people hadn't changed to healer alts.

 
I'm one of about four people who've been doing this regularly and it's been... alright. It's no secret that I enjoy healing, though I have to say that healing in a forty-man raid is comparatively boring, as it rarely feels like you make a difference being one of three to five people spamming the tank. Also, if you think grabbing and retaining world buffs on one character is already a pain in the butt, let me say that doing it on two (when you're not sure which character you'll be needed on for which fight) is worse.

Ultimately though, I'm glad that I put in the work to gear up the pally to help out as I know that on quite a few nights, me and others having these healing alts has probably been what made the difference between being able to kill Patchwerk or Loatheb or not, even if you don't really feel your personal impact as the twelfth healer during the fight itself.

Two bosses to go, and while the beta for TBC Classic has started, we still don't have a release date, so I'm hopeful. We can kill ten bosses on our first night pretty consistently now, which then leaves the second night to clean up the remaining three and work on progression. While I didn't even plan to raid when I started playing Classic, after coming this far, I'd really quite like to see Naxx through to the end.

5 comments:

  1. WOOOOO!!!!!

    Grats!!!

    And that's also for getting a second toon into Naxx! Your Pally looks awesome rocking that tabard!

    And yeah, 4H is a real bitch to get down. I know we chatted about strategy, but yeah, I think your strat was the best for your raid, like the Burn Thane strat was best for us.

    As for Sapp, the farming for Frost Resist gear sucked. The raid leadership gave us a goal of 280 if you're not in a group with a Pally, and 260 if you are. Healers were originally expected to not have any Fr gear at all, but that was changed later to be around 50-100.

    Being a Mage specced into the Amplify Magic boost talent, I got the gig of casting Amp Magic on the entire raid until the Mage lead also specced into it and we divided up the duties. We were skeptical as to whether this would work at all, but the Main Tank provided a 4-5 minute explanation about why it's important, so we did it.

    After that, the biggest job a Mage has is decursing, because Sapph heals with those curses. And then you have to worry about DPSing and staying alive.

    Still, Sapp is a bit of a bitch to do, but not nearly as bad (my opinion only) as 4H were.

    I'm so looking forward to your post of your Sapp kill!!!

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    1. We started with a goal of 150 FR for ranged dps, but I'm not sure that's enough. :S We also had the healers on 0 initially, and that definitely wasn't enough, lol. Healing on my pally I had to spend about half my time just healing myself to prevent myself from dying, which isn't very efficient.

      Amplify magic?! You got any maths on that? Because we had people talking about using dampen magic instead to reduce the frost damage...

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    2. Oh, believe me, there were discussions about that, but the Main Tank was insistent. I believe his reasoning was like this link: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/frost-aura-fully-resistable/725903/11

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  2. Hi, my wife saw you blogpost and she was interested in the guild experience as she doesn't have a guild that is active at the moment. She is currently newish lvl 60 priest night elf on Herod server.
    What server are you playing on with "Order of the Holy Fork" and are they accepting new members? :) thank you!

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    1. Hi! Sorry, but we're not even in the same region. :) As is mentioned on my about page, I play on Hydraxian Waterlords, which is an EU RP-PvE server.

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