Naxxramas

It's been a few days since I last updated and since then Aht has been pretty busy. Our merry little raid (which has changed up a few of it's memebers since last) took on Naxx head strong Sunday and Monday. It total we have cleared two full wings and downed 7 bosses now. Needless to say, I'm stoked. My main excitement stems from the fact that our raid has progressed the most out of the other raids in our guild. We're no where near clearing the place, but we are progressing at a rate that's much faster than when we tackled Kara.

So far, the bosses we've down are Anub'Rekhan, Grand Widow Faerlina, and Maexxna in the Arachnid Quarter. Anub'Rekhan is cake now that my healers have figured out exactly how close/how far away they need to be from me to avoid the silence. Grand Window Faerlina is still cake. We've one shotted her every time we've encountered her. Maexxna was the challenge for us. The last time we took her on, she was a one shot. Sunday night, not so much. The biggest problem is my shaman wasn't getting the de-poison off on time. I tanked her twice and went down hard because my healer was having to waste so much mana healing me through the debuff. After that I requested Kroff switch me and Delynth out so I could de-poison and help keep him up. We tried it once and I got excited when she enraged and got myself killed. This in turn, triggered the raid's wipe. Our second go around with this set-up I stayed calm and resisted going in to try and help. He stayed up the whole time and with the help of my de-poison my healers still had mana to last them. We got her down, rejoiced, and moved to the Plague Quarter. First on the list is Noth. He was easy, we distributed loot and moved on. Next was Heigan. Oh how I hate Heigan. The fight itself is not hard. You dps him across a board that has slime that shoots up through cracks. The slime moves in a pattern leaving one slot open for the group to stand on while slime shoots up through the other three pieces of the board. The idea is to move across the board one way and come back across it in time with the slime. Casters stand on the platform that Heigan starts out on and shoot, bolt, and heal their little butts to their hearts content. Every one and a half passes across the board, Heigan teleports back to the platform and we start the DDR. Casters hop off the platform to position one (where the raid initially begins) and we move back and forth across the board and slime shoots up. One hit of this slime and you're dead. Even my 30k +life pool can't handle one hit from this stuff if that tells you how hard it hits.

In any case, we did several attempts on this guy Sunday night to no avail. I was still learning the movement part of the fight, as, it seemed, was everyone else. So we tried him a few times and moved on. Kroff wanted to keep excitement up and Heigan was definitely sucking the life from our raid. I was in an awful mood Sunday so I begged Kroff to not make us try Razuvious again. I didn't have the patience for him that night and I was really wanting to try Patchwerk. So he listened to my pleas and we moved from Heigan to Patchwerk in the Construct Quarter and took his sorry butt on.

Not let me explain a little how this fight goes. Patchwerk is the gear check for Naxx. The progression is supposed to go Arachnid Quarter then Plague Quarter and then Construct Quarter. When you hit the Construct Quarter you encounter Patchwerk who is your gear check to see if your qualified to take on the second half of Naxx. Well really the third since you have the bosses on the outer perimeter of the dungeon. Half of my raid has tried Patchwerk before and failed miserably. Myself and my healer were ready, but our other cohorts were not. Kroff was very iffy in trying him the first couple of times we ran Naxx, but now that we've almost fine tunned our raid to be a steady group, he relented and we tried him.

Attempt Number 1: Kroff explains how the fight is going to go. I'm going to main tank and Delynth is going to off tank. Juliettah is going to heal me and Hypochondriac is going to heal Delynth. Everyone else is going to dps til their fingers are sore from hitting the keys. No one should take damage but the tanks. If one tank goes down, the second on aggro is going to get pwned. The end. Ahtabat charges in. Ooops. I forgot to mention that Delynth needs to be velcroed to my side as we charge in so we split the damage. That might be a nice little tidbit to have mentioned before I took two freaking huge hits in a row. Needless to say, that attempt was a wipe. My healer freaked out because I took so much damage at the beginning and ran out of mana rather quickly because of that.

Attempt Number 2: I fess up to my mistake in mentioning that Delynth needs to run in BESIDE me and stand beside me in front of the buggar the whole fight. I whisper my healer and calm her nerves down a bit. I tell her I screwed up that last time, I'm not going to be taking THAT big of hit this time and conserve her mana as best she can. Off we go. The fight is going extremely well. Everyone is focused...and quiet. About half way down I pipe up on vent and throw out some cheerleader comments and focus back in on watching the raid. A couple of my dps are running low on mana, but other than that, we're doing well. He's got about 1/4 of his life left. My healers and dropping on mana, but I've saved some "oh crap" moves and start working them into my rotation. We're getting really close now. He's got about 100k life left. I'm dropping...crap, I have nothing left. My healers out of mana. I'm down.

Break.

At this point, I want you to picture exactly what's going on in my house. I'm on the back couch with my leg's propped up, my dog crashed beside me. My husband, Kroff, is sitting with his back to me at his desk pounding away at his keyboard. When I go down, all bets are off. I'm now sitting on the edge of the couch staring at my screen. I might have even broke into a sweat a little bit. Kroff goes down not long after I do. Now we're both on the edge of our chairs and I'm pretty sure we've stopped breathing.

Resume.

As I said, Kroff goes down after a nice little blow to the face. I've stopped watching the body count after he goes down and now I'm watching Patchwerk's life. 50k...40k...30k...oh come on! 20k....10k....OMG WE GOT HIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! To tell you the truth, I don't even remember how many we had left up, but we got the punk! I proceed to scream in guild chat "PATCHWERK DOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!" Or rather, I think it went something more like "PATCHERWK OWDN111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" because apparently when you get excited you lose the ability to spell correctly or type correctly. We receive a few congrats from our fellow guildies and very elated we leave the dungeon. New gear in hand and a very positive and successful run. Hey, I'm happy.

Sunday night. We all meet back up. We're down a healer, but Kroff has found us a permanent replacement after the guy's guild shafted him. Needless to say, he's very excited to be coming with us after we've successfully cleared 7 bosses, two of the harder ones with him. A dps was running late, so we picked up a replacement for him and charged in for night number two.

First up was Heigan. What? Again? Yes, again. My husband wanted to start us off right by torturing us. This was an interesting night. Seven, or eight, or a billion (I'm not really sure, I lost count after the first twenty attempts) in we finally downed the punk. The funny part? The only three left alive were two death knights and a healer. Yes, that's right. I'm positive that any combination of death knights plus a healer, can down anything. The fight was definitely not a pretty one, but we downed the punk, and moved on to Loatheb.

Again, this is an interesting fight. First off, dude has WAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY too many hit points. I mean...he's a plant...kinda. A mutated one, but a plant nonetheless. Plants don't live long. Especially when I get a hold of them, as Kroff will tell you. But I'm just speechless at how much life we're going to have to pound through. The way the fight works is as follows. You engage him and have a few seconds to tank and spank. After that, the fight operated in twenty second intervals. For seventeen seconds you can't receive any heals. Yes, that's right, no healing. This includes healthstones and healing pots. Okay, so seventeen seconds isn't that long to make it through with no heals, right? Right. Then the debuff wears off...for three seconds. That's three seconds for two healers to heal the entire raid. You read right. Three seconds. My healer is sweating bullets the whole fight I'm pretty sure. She was already dreading the fight after Kroff asked her to watch the video on it.

Alright so after that description, the fight seems pretty impossible. Not so my friend, not so. The other aspect of this fight is the spores. This is how it works. You tank dude in his nice cozy circle in the center of the room where he's waiting to pwn your face in. The room is square and a spore has a chance of spawning in one of the four corners. The raid is split into two groups. Each group is responsible for alternating killing a spore. The spore has like, no life, so they're an easy kill. Once the spore is killed, anyone with in 30 yards I think (don't kill me if I'm wrong, it happens) gets a buff where your crit chance goes up. So basically you crit the crap out of dude, heal during your three seconds, and go back to critting your pants. My job is to stand there, let dude hit me, pray during the three second heal time, and try to avoid the spores. Because while the spores up your crit, they also remove any threat you generate. So technically it shouldn't be a big deal if I get the buff, because I should have enough threat built up to not worry about it. Note: this will come into play later.

So Kroff explains the fight, we charge in. Thankfully after I charge everyone is in the room, because the gates falls securely into place locking us in. A small detail, I wasn't aware of. Position his back to the raid, check. DPS start pounding his face in, check. The debuff starts. The first few rounds of this 17/3 thing, we did pretty good. My healers were doing well on mana and I was staying up there. Round one I did make several mistakes. I popped a lot of my health regen "oh crap" buttons at the beginning and thus doubled up on the heals I got. This made it harder for me toward the end of the fight. Another problem we faced in attempt one. Two people pulled aggro off me. That's right, two. As any tank out there knows, an aggro pull is very hard to recover from. Even with me growling right away to get him focused back on me, the recovery time just wasn't fast enough. We wiped.

Attempt number two: we talk about our mistakes, make a few adjustments, and charge in again. And here's the problem with attempt number two! Again, two people pulled aggro off me. Again, this causes a HUGE problem. We also had two people, one being a healer, standing way too far away from the group. My only guess is they were trying to range the debuff to see if they could heal through the 17 seconds. Not gonna happen. By the time Kroff corrected the problem it was too late. We wiped again.

Attempt number three: again we discuss the problems and make some adjustments. We threaten everyone within an inch of their life to watch their aggro. We charge in again. Okay, this round, much smoother. My healers kept the groups up, I saved my "oh crap" buttons, and NO ONE PULLED AGGRO! YAY! Loatheb down.

We moved on to try Grobbulus before Kroff called it a night. Yes, I said try. Grobbulus is another one of those movement fights in which I'm still learning the ropes. Rather than post incorrect information, I'll wait til I've got this punk on farm and then let you know how it works.


In other exciting news: Aht now has 69 non-combat pets in her collection. She got her Magical Crawdad from Mr. Pincy's second cooldown last night. I'm a happy bear butt. :-)