Victory for the horde!

In my new guild, there are two raid groups. The "A" group has been stuck on the lich king for a while and the "B" group (that I used to be in) has failed to get past putricide repeatedly. There was a little bit of a gearscore discrepancy but overall the "B" group gear wasn't too bad. We had a great MT and a so-so OT, awesome healers and pretty nice DPS. Yet week after week we'd get stuck at putricide.

I think that's where the difficulty level hits a brick wall. The first four bosses are practically a joke for any 5k+ GS group these days. The strategy is simple, everyone's done it a million times, pretty straightforward stuff. Festergut is a little more stressful for healers and Rotface involves more movement, but after a few attempts people usually get the hang of it.

Putricide and onward is where the shit really hits the fan. The slimes that spawn on Professor is not the friendly, slow-moving slime like in Rotface. No, this sucker flies across the room and hits you for 10k or more. And it's not just the adds, professor himself starts slapping you silly in phase 3.

Blood council is a short fight but requires lots of movement and raid awareness, not to mention a decent 3rd tank. Again, another boss group B attempted but couldn't down. Dreamwalker is doable, but we didn't even attempt Sindragosa - I hear she's harder than LK himself.

Anyways, last night I ran with group A. I didn't notice anything really different up until the plague wing (except that perhaps I wasn't the top DPS in all the fights - definitely a good sign). But then festergut and rotface went down in the first attempts with absolutely no problem. Even when the MT went down in the last 30% of fester, we just kept spanking him and down he went. We had only 1 slime explosion before rotface ate it as well.

Then on Putricide, we wiped once. The second run, we burned him to phase 3 in a really well-controlled manner - people were doing what they were suppose to do and killing off the adds ASAP. When phase 3 started we burned all our CDs and not one raid member ate it before we brought him down. And my new dagger dropped too!!!

Blood council and Blood-queen took 2-3 tries but again, once the new people (myself included) saw how it was done and got the hang of it, they went down smoothly. We were all too sleepy to continue, but tonight is Sindragosa and possibly LK!!!

It got me thinking why group B was stumbling when group A did it all so easily. I suppose they have more experience but after a few attempts generally people get it. Was it the gear? In group B the off-tank usually hovered at 5k - 5.2k or so. Was that the problem? Was it the DPS? Was it that we couldn't burn the bosses down fast enough? Was it the heals? Were they struggling to keep everyone up throughout the difficult phases? Maybe it was a combination of all those. Maybe it was just the lack of experience. All I know is, it feels good to win.