Rorshac’s Game of the Week

We finally cleared Naxx last night.  This was about a 5 week affair.  We started, as told in a previous post of the alternate measures we took to get into Naxx from the start.  We have streamlined our groups, and have really maximized our progression crew.  We are currently using secondary groups, composed of 5-7 vets and the 3-5 newer folks.  We use this crew to farm  earlier bosses for gear and to speed up the rest of the run for the harder final bosses.

Bosses we farm:
Instructor Razuvious

Gothik the Harvester (my personal favorite fight)

Noth the Plaguebringer

Patchwerk

and if group makeup is right entire Arachnid Quarter and maybe Heigan the Unclean.

The Saph fight, pictured about, took us about 12 tries.  It is amazing to watch the progression of this fight, it goes from pure chaos to a beautiful dance.  We went from strategies of everyone on one side to lines of people.  We finally settled on 2 sides, one on the left, one on the right, collapse to the middle during flight phase, then get back out.  One big thing to note is in 3.0.8 they reduced his aggro range dramatically, in fact I have to run up to him and spit in his face before he notices me.  The nice part about this is it helps with the cleave problems.  It took us 8.45 minutes.  We were so excited and happy, this was 3 weeks of trying, meddling and tweaking.  I know this is hard to understand, we sometimes have problems moving, hell out first 3 wins against Heigan left the same three standing for the fight (which took 20 minutes one time and 30 in another).  Due to this fact we do require almost everyone to have 2 pieces of frost resist gear.  Needless to say we went on to Kel’Thuzad.

After three attempts he was down, we celebrated, distributed loot and moved on to kick the dragons butts in OS.  Our victory against Kel was a bit unique.  We lost a few people during the fight, at the beginning, we lost our enhanced shaman, who’s rez was on cool down.  Our Boomkin got him back up once rebirth was off cooldown from the first attempt.  When we hit the final stretch we lost out tank healer to a ice block.  I am the main pally tank, I tried getting a FoL off, but after one push back then another, I knew he was dead.  He was out of reach of our priest and our OT healer (ret pally) missed him by a second.  We then continued to beat on him as best we could….then….BAM! iceblock on our priest…he then took a dirt nap.  Well our OT healer came in, our boomkin shifted to heal and  needless to say we did it.  So with our two main healers laying on the ground, we celebrated a great victory then went and did OS, then hit up the Vault, it was a great night.

Next up is the Eye, wish us luck, I am sure something unorthodox will happen and we will try to skate by on skin of our teeth, however this is the way of this rag tag group of bad news bears on Shandris.

We finally cleared the 4 main wings of Naxx last week.  We had a good time and made made a lot of unexpected progress last Sunday.  We learned a lot in Naxx, we are a reasonably small guild with some limited resources.  Due to this fact we came up with some very interesting and creative ways to handle many of the bosses.  For instance we started in the Spider wing with only one tank, we had a pet off-tank the entire wing.  This posed us some unique challenges.  Against Anub’Rhekan we had a Rhino off tank the add.  While I would tank the boss and pull him around the room.  This only took us two tries to get a handle on.  We felt this was a great accomplishment.  We had some issues with hand the pet off-tank the adds, this did pose a big issue when it came to the enrage with Grand Widow Farlina.  We lost the adds before the enrange.  We were able to avoid wiping through the use of a front end burn, coupled with a staggering of the adds deaths.  I did have to divine protection at about 30% health left, the healers were able to top me of and keep me alive to about 10%, at which point I died, and DPS just burned her.  This also only took 2 tries.  Then comes the big spider, after plenty of wipes, we got lucky and beat her.

We then started some more clearing of the Spiders we now have the big old spider down a little bit better, we still wipe, but we use two tanks to make it a little easier.  We taunt after the enrage web wrap to help make life easier.  As our DPS gets stronger, that last 30% burn will go much quicker.

Our key to Patchwerk was two Pally healers, we had the bacon on the MT and the hateful strike eater, which was me.  That kept us topped off almost the entire fight, our first attempt we had about 25 seconds to spare before the enrage, now we can handle it with minutes to spare.

The ultimate point to this post is you can do somethings while short handed or different then the standard write ups on most Naxx advice guides.  You can find alternate ways to progress when short handed or have an odd class make up.  In fact, I am very proud of this, it added a new level to the game that was not there before.   One or two people in the raid were privately messaging other folks in the raid that this was going to be a disaster.  I was told about this after the fact and I smiled.  Needless to say those individuals are no longer in the guild and have moved on.  Guides on the internet are mere guides, they take some thought and insight to adjust them to your group makeup.  You will surprise yourself in some of the many ways you can accomplish your goal.

If you have any questions on Naxx or would like to know what other things we had to adjust for Naxx, please drop me a line and I will help you out as best I can.