In Naxxramas

Ok, well I've been off this thing for a week now because of a particularly nasty strain of flu. I finally started feeling vaguely functional yesterday in just enough time to pack my bags and get ready for the exodus to the Frozen North for the holiday period.

Still despite being near-incapacitated by said Flu, I managed to lead and main tank Smart Casual's first three Naxxramas raids. Priorities, I haz them!

Wednesday saw us crack open the Spider and Plague Wings. These were undoubtedly the two easiest wings, and I used them as a gauge of the guild's ability to handle content that was, to most of us, pretty new. We managed to one-shot all the bosses, even when two of our DPS were locked outside during the Maexxna encounter, when I disconnected during the Noth fight, or when 70% of the raid failed to do the Heigan Dance correctly.

On Friday we returned to do the Construct and Military wings. This is definately where things got harder. We only one-shotted two bosses in there (Thaddeus and Gothik) with the rest taking 2-3 attempts to get down. The final encounter of the night, The Four Horsemen, ended up taking about four or five attempts to get the tank transitions down. It's still fairly straightforward, but still much more interesting than the average Karazhan fight.

Turning our attention to the final wing on Sunday, we had our work cut out. Sapphiron was a pretty frantic fight. A lot of running about and a lot of aoe damage, plus his brutal cleave and tailswipe made positioning a bitch. Three wipes and we killed him though.

Kel'Thuzad took much longer. I can't remember how many attempts in the end, but either people got into bad positions (and chained iceblocks) or we lost folks to void zones. The two Nerubian Guardians he spawns at 40% are exceptionally brutal to boot, since they start stacking a +15% damage buff every 15 secs. Ulu played offtank on the fight and died to them at 13 stacks of the buff, so it feels like you've got about 3mins to get him down from 40%-0.

After I was done. Well I dunno, I didn't feel much of anything. There was no big "woo-hoo", more of an "oh, that was it?"

Ah well, now we've got two dragons to amuse us until Blizz rolls Uldar out.