longest boss fight ever

this will be short and sweet. So we took a 10 man group into naxx last night just to continue a weaker effort from earlier in the week. We were plowing through until we came to heigan the unclean. Now for those people who had been in naxx prior to the patch knew that there was a couple ways to sort of cheat the fight mechanic to avoid dancing. Unfortunately, those cheats have been fixed and you have to do the fight as intended with the tanks and melee dancing the entire fight and the ranged dancing during the fast stage. So on the first fast stage, everyone in the raid died but 3 people. Myself, the tank, and MT healer. 25 minutes later Heigan was dead. We actually 3 manned a Naxx boss!!! While doing the fight it didnt seem like it was that long of a fight, but it assuredly was 25 minutes long. It takes a while for one dps with a dead pet and a tank to do 9.3 million hp worth of damage. Geez i just looked that up, and didnt realize it was that high. Hmm, maybe that is from heroic, but whatever it is a heck of a lot for 1.5 dps to do. I feel bad for the people who died within the first minute, but we got him down.
As a guild we also did our first completion of the military quarter. We plowed through the first two bosses and came to the horsemen. After many immediate AOE wipes and some members leaving and new ones coming on or getting on healing alts we slowly started getting better. It then came all together and we downed them. It is a very neat fight mechanic stressing group coordination and movement over dps. I would have gotten the T7 chest if i didnt have it alreadt from probably and archavon drop. All in all it was a long, but good raiding night, too bad we did it the night before the reset lol.

Note- I am still BM since i love my pets damage and even post nerf i am still doing a decentamount of damage. Im not 2700+ like i was, but still 2200+ i think which is decent.

Hunter Specc

Thanks to BRK and his past two podcast with both Lienna and Nassira, I am now much more informed about how to put together all my hunter specs. As some people know, but mostly none of you do, i leveled 1-70 as MM and then switch to raid as BM for Kara and have been BM ever since. Now with the nerf to BM coming, I really do not want to have to respec to either MM or Surv. I can not imagine a hunting spec other then BM being the top DPS. It just doesnt make sense. The BM hunter is the definition of huntering. It is a hunter and a pet working as one to cause as most damage as possible. One is nothing without the other. Heck, my cat does almost 40% of my damage on some fights and if it was possible for my cat to be alive without me it would have no focus for its special abilities. Sure the other specs use pets too, but they are more of a superfluous addition and not incredibly important. I mean they really just use the pet for the stats they gain, not the damage a pet can do. So how a BM would drop in DPS below a Surv or MM is just beyong me. Please dont do it Blizzard. Hunters dont need to do arenas and be great PVP, dont nerf our PVE raiding to fix PVP. A little nerf is OK and needed, but if im getting killed by MM or Surv hunters you are going to force there to be no more BM hunters around in raids. And everyone knows they will miss seeing devilsaurs and spirit beasts tearing up the mobs.

Guild Update- Getting Some Stuff Off My Chest

Ok so lets get the more mundane out of the way first. I have gotten a couple of gear upgrades since I last posted. You can armory me or whatever, but I am up to 3 pieces of T7 gear now which is nice and I also bought a emblem belt. So I did manage to get the "superior" achievement for whatever that is worth. I really just need to get some new boots, the wraith spear from mexxna (lost the roll twice), and eventually get a new helm. I have the best hunter helm short of a full naxx clear so im not worried about that. Still looking for spirit beast, but according to BRK's blog Loque'nahak on the PTR is not despawning after only being up 10 min, but is there till tamed or killed for the achievement.

In other news, this weekend the guild decided to put one of the strongest groups we could together to try and down some naxx bosses we have never tried or seen. We were even fortunate enough to have Kabel, a great resto druid, join us. We were rolling there for a while after clearing the plague and spider wings in 2 hours. After that we went to patchwerk and crushed him even with only about 9 ppl since a melee took a hateful strike early in the fight. So this was about all i had previously seen. I have seen all the fights in detail on tankspot.com. I recommend people go there and learn about fights. So anyways, we spent about the next hour at least on Grobbulus. We were just struggling with the fight and we could get him down to about 500K then wipe. He starts doing his mutating injection twice as fast and it just got real messy. Anyways, we killed him last night after only like 3 attempts. I lost on a sweet ring roll to a DK. Since we struggled with grobbulus, we decided to move to the military wing and do instructor rezuvious. After an initial tank mishap wipe, we downed him pretty easily. Again this wing we had never done before. After that was downed Gothik in a one shot zerging. We owned him badly. Next was 4-horsemen. Now funny enough, hilarious even, is that I sort of became the explainer of these fights, just based on the videos i had seen. Admittedly we did not havea great group composition for the horsemen, so we died a couple times due to potentially some poor communication by myself, but then the crap hit the fan which brings me to the stuff I need to say.

First, WoW is a game that when i play i do not want to deal with infighting between members of the group. I understand personal interactions happen, but try to keep your personal feelings for another raider OUT of the raid. It just becomes a distraction to the group and crushes morale which is already fragile enough taking on new bosses and wiping late into the night. I am not trying to be insensative, but everyone is trying to have fun and progress as a GROUP, and when individual issues with another player prevent that it doesnt result in good things. Needless to say, we had a couple members leave the guild after that raid which was sad, but expect in all honesty.

Next issue involves PUGGING people for 25 mans. Our guild does mostly 10 man content since we do not have the numbers to put together a 25 man without filling several spots with friends or pugs. Friends in general are cool and some are basically honorable guild members, but unknown pugs are terrible. We were doing 25 man Arch and OS. Arch went well so we moved onto Sarth. During the clearing of trash, we had a couple members DC, and this is where the issues come up. 1) if you are a pug, consider yourself blessed to have been invited and keep your negative comments to yourself. NO, we will not pull more trash while a couple ppl have DC'd, especially one being the lootmaster/raid leader. And after the 5th time of explaining why we are not pulling, LISTEN to the reason. We heard you when you said you were in a time crunch and had to go soon, but you are the PUG in a guild run and we are not going anywhere without OUR guild members and the raid leader. If you have to go...go. The hard core raiding guild would not even tolerate that kind of complaining and vocalization, and to be honest i probably would not have either. Fortunately for them, we are in between casual and more serious so they were allowed to stay. Next issue with this pug is that we were trying our first attempt ever at keeping a Drake up while fighting Sartharion. We had a great healer from OOB with us who had done it and was explaining the fight. Needless to say, people were not listening so that idea had to get scratched and we eventually killed Sarth no problem.

Onto the next item of annoyance. YOUR DPS IS IRRELEVANT IF YOU ARE NOT GOOD AT FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS. Case study, this pug had you know some crazy dps that was 3500+ but oh...he got hit by flame wall FOUR TIMES. You can hit like a truck and have great gear, but if you cant move to stay alive you are worthless to the raid. I would much rather have an undergeared person that I know can follow instructions instead of someone who is going to go off as a lone wolf and crush the damage meter but end up dead. And do not think about blaming the healer for your own death.

Ok i think that is it for the basic rant, but seriously people, this is a game, but you are not the only one playing it. If you want to be solo then dont raid or even be in a guild.

just some random screen shots

First pick is from a FOR THE ALLIANCE achievement to get the black war bear mount where you have to down all of the horde bosses. I think this was our last boss having to kill the Blood Elf guy. This was more fun though since it was winterveil and we had a 40 man gnome christmas elf raid going on.
This next one was in naxx just showing the damage meter. I know hunters are supposed to be the top of the damage meter, but it is good to see. I have some epics but not all for sure so it is good to break 2k dps. Plus i could always send it to bigredkitty.net and he would be please to see. I think this meter was either for the whole run or just post Grand Widow Faerlina or whatever her name is. Boss #2 in spider wing

Clearly I Can't Dance

So we went back to Naxx last night to see if we could get anymore of it done having downed the arachnid quarter, noth the plaguebringer and patchwerk the night before. So we were basically coming in to wipe a ton of times trying to learn the Heigen dance with the exploding poisons. It took 3 or 4 wipes before at least the tanks and healers were surviving. Soon after people started following the tanks and another couple dps survived most of the fight. I on the other hand was never able to survive. I am not exactly sure, but i would get just clipped by the poison either in front or just behind. If you get hit you will die. So i was never grotesquely in the poison, but i didnt make it despite having watched many movies about it. I guess doing is different then watching, even when i try and stay on top of the tank. Downing heigen was a first for the guild so that was a good thing. After that we tried moving to Loatheb. This guy proved to be a problem since his necrotic aura prevents all healing from occuring at any time except for a THREE SECOND WINDOW. My dps was through the roof, near 2700 for that fight thanks to the spore 50% crit incease buff, but we still always wiped. After 3 or 4 tries people had to go after getting a late start including myself. Guild note- we need druids and shaman badly

On other notes, my LWing is nearly maxed out with only two remaining patterns to buy. I can make it all once i have those patterns. I also did manage to get my epic flying mount. I finally saved up enough money for the training then did icecrown quests till i got the 200g or whatever to get the epic flyer from SMV. Let me tell you, the epic flyer makes a ton of differenec. Still on a spirit beast hunt, but there has not been any sightings or it or even a whisper of its appearance. I have seen a couple hunters on the server one, but they certainly are not running rampant. Also with the coming nerf to cat dps, i will be leveling a devilsaur. I named it Unseen, i dont think she knows and it is probably for the best. :)