Thursday, August 27, 2009

Mmm, Tastes Like Crow!

A real man can admit when he's been wrong.

...
...
*cough*

So, anyway, last week's ToC10 group hit a rather nasty snag with the Horde Faction Champions encounter, and it was beginning to look like this week would be a repeat failure. The fairly random nature of the enemies' target-selection and immunity to crowd control caused us to repeatedly succumb to the general chaos before we could bring even one healer down. Gradually, though, through several tactical iterations, we hit upon a successful combination of DPS allocation and kill order to finally take them down - at least with this particular team matchup. Still, I think our throw-everything-at-their-best-healer-first method should be pretty generally applicable.

Next, new encounter! I have to admit, even though the Twin Valkyr aren't exactly hard (assuming one isn't dyslexic), they are fun, which the Faction Champions are decidedly not. In fact, we were having such a good time, that it came as something of a punch to the gut when our entire raid was unceremoniously disconnected when we were seconds away from one-shotting the encounter. Garrosh is behind this, I know it.

Anyway, it was a good night overall. Even if I'm somewhat happier with the level of difficulty presented by ToC's later bosses, I'm still ambivalent about the design of the raid in general. While foregoing trash can make for a fairly quick run, the gladiatorial arena schtick still comes across as a lazy way to implement raid content.

That's all until next week, when the floor unexpectedly collaps- aaaaiiiiieeee....

Thursday, August 13, 2009

The Bleeding Edge

Or, I Cut Myself Raiding.

As is obvious, I haven't been writing much lately. This isn't really for lack of raiding progress, so much as lack of anything very interesting to talk about. Although we have yet to beat Yogg (here's hoping for this weekend), we've easily taken down the two Trial of the Crusader bosses introduced thus far.

Too easily. Really, after Ulduar, ToC just feels like a design cop-out and ramping down in difficulty. Hell, it barely feels like a raid. I'm holding out hope that the remaining encounters will be somewhat more interesting, but at this point I'm much more interested in pursuing Ulduar hard-modes and ultimately Algalon.