Up to the Challenge

Benevolent Thuggery has seen some great success in Ulduar during the past few weeks! Four Heroic bosses are down (three of which are quite challenging!), we have killed seven bosses in Normal Ulduar and this is just the beginning of long term progress in this instance.

Heroic Raids

The first boss which the Thugs focused on in Ulduar was XT. This raid boss took a lot of discussion, fine tuning and learning to complete. This opened most players' eyes to the fact that we have been coasting through easy content without thinking about detailed raid theory, rotations and role assignments. In tackling this boss first, we got back into the right mindset for raiding as a functional team! Razorscale and Ignis kills followed the XT defeat rather quickly.

As one of the Raid Leaders who worked on the Ulduar progression kills, this is a challenge from various points of view. The leaders have to keep morale up, assign appropriate roles (for leaders and players), devise alternate strategies without confusing the members and maximize raid potential. This puzzle is continuously evolving before our eyes as new challenges are presented every time we go into this place.

The next step for the Heroic Raids is to clear those first four bosses on the first raid night so we have time to work on tackling the next section of the instance. I am planning on making the best effort to do this on the only scheduled Ulduar raid by minimizing Leviathan event time, assigning ALL roles before the run, moving us forward at a good pace (easy to do as a tank) and using concise explanations for bosses.

Rollback

With three nights of Ulduar scheduled per week we managed to get as far as I would expect for a casual guild with our population and skill. Many raiders were left disappointed and frustrated with the difficulty and requirements of the new instance. Some players who returned to raiding and new recruits had sub-par gear. Despite the fact that our guild has been farming Naxx for months, the decision was made to put Ulduar as one night a week then slowly bring it back to a 3 night a week event.

I see why this had to be done for gear and morale however I am discouraged by some of the attitudes that provoked the decision to re-introduce old raids on the calendar. Naxx has spoiled raiders and now many have fallen into an expectation of easy loot without effort. As soon as there is a struggle, they give up and leave their friends to fight for themselves in a challenging environment.

At some point, I hope that Heroic Naxx can be reserved for off-nights and become a distant memory. Players will always need gear, and there are other means to get Ulduar ready. I am running a 10 man Naxx on Sunday and Monday which has a good mix of experienced players, new players and alts who need gear. This is what the Karazhan runs used to be. Frankly, 10 man Naxx bores the hell out of me but I can just turn on the music, grab some tea and curb the boredom to make that place bearable. After all, these runs need to be in place as a stepping stone for new players and alts to have a means to make it into Ulduar. If another Raid Leader wants to take this run, I will gladly pass it to them.

Normal Ulduar

There are now two Ulduar 10 runs scheduled on weekends - a 2pm session and the Late Shift run at 9pm. I tend to run with Late Shift because my schedule can be unpredictable during the day on weekends. Late Shift has been very successful as we have killed 7 bosses including Hodir, one of the final four Guardians.

We worked on killing Thorim last week, he was much more challenging than expected. Maybe we can try Freya or just work on Thorim until he's down. The last four guardians are all difficult and present unique challenges to the raiders, it's a lot of fun!