Naxx Update

I haven't written about my guild's Naxx progression since the post about the raid's release in early December, when I expressed some concern about us having gotten only three bosses down during the first week - a week when the news were all about how more hardcore players had once again cleared the raid within hours of release, and our own initial forays felt slow and clumsy even by our more casual standards.

To the Forks' credit though, we have persevered... and in fact appear to have slid into a unique niche on our server as the one Alliance guild that's consistently progressing at more old-school speeds. Everyone else seems to either be (nearly) done or have given up. This has actually led to us picking up more recruits and our roster is the strongest it's been since I joined, to the point that we even have to bench people occasionally.

I missed out on our Maexxna and Razuvious first kills, but was there for Heigan, Patchwerk and Grobbulus.

Getting back into the groove for the Heigan dance was easier than expected (after having learned it during Wrath of the Lich King) and both times we've killed him so far I was one of the few still alive by the end, with half the raid dead (though I have yet to successfully make it out of the gauntlet he teleports you into, something that wasn't present in this form in the Wrath version of the fight).

Patchwerk required a lot of wipes (though they were no skin off a hunter's back as I could always just run into a corner and feign death) while tanks and healers figured out what to do, but then things just suddenly clicked and we went from a 48% wipe to a kill on the next try.

Grobbulus is the biggest loot pinata in the instance, to the point that even we could one-shot him! Figures that a boss like that was hidden behind Patchwerk...

Gothik the Harvester has eluded us so far for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. I remember this fight being so easy in Wrath, and the Classic version isn't really any more complicated mechanically, but somehow we always end up getting overwhelmed by adds on one side or the other just before it's time for him to come down. I'm sure the raid leaders will figure out what's going wrong eventually.

One fight that's very different from how I remember it in Wrath is Loatheb - in Wrath he has this necrotic aura that prevents healing for most of the fight, so healers had to time big heals to go off at just the right time during the brief windows when the aura dropped off for a few seconds. In Classic, there is no such aura, and healing can be done at any time - but casting any healing spell as any class will put all your healing abilities on cooldown for a full minute, meaning that the healers have to set up a strict rotation to keep the main tank topped off and not a single heal can be spared for the dps, meaning that we have to follow our own strict rotation of using consumables to stay alive for five minutes.

We gave it some "dry runs" without consumables just to practice the positioning of the spores and things seemed to go well enough, but when we tried "for real" our dps felt way off. I suggested that we might have to try him as the first boss of the evening with as many world buffs as we could muster (casualness be damned), and when we did that we wiped at 3%. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get him down this reset.

So things are going... decently! We've come a long way from that first night of constant stumbling, followed by other nights of wiping five times in a row on the exact same spider trash pack, to being in a position where we at least have the first few bosses on farm and can progress a little bit more every week. Which is all I could ask for really! Huge kudos to the leadership team for keeping it all together in what honestly seems like pretty challenging circumstances to me (and no, I'm not writing this just to suck up to them in case one of them reads this).

I don't actually know whether we'll even be able to clear the instance before Classic TBC comes out if the rumours about how soon it's supposed to be released are true, but I'm happy to be along for the ride either way.