Gruul Says "No Mas"

The original plan last night had been to make some progression attempts on Leo. He and Lady Vashj being the only two bosses still alive in SSC.
I was a bit surprised when I was summoned, not to SSC, but to Gruul's Lair.
It seemed the plan was to do Gruul's/Mag and then go to SSC. I will tell you, faithful reader, that I was not in agreement with the plan, however; I decided out of loyalty to my Guild Leader to "not make a fuss".
I faithfully towed the line. I tanked Olm, or more correctly, let me say I ran all over Maulgar's room being Deathcoiled.
We lost Raistilan, our Mage tank. Krosh proceeded to make a couple of our team rather crispy, and it looked like a wipe was imminent. Aerlion, one of our other Core mages, managed to get Krosh's Spell Shield off of him, but he wasn't geared for Mage Tanking.
Thinking quickly, I ran over towards Krosh, far enough away to be well out of his Blastwave, slapped on Fire Resist Aura and taunted. He nailed me with a Fireball, but I lived through it and even got some heals. I tossed my Avenger's Shield at him. He changed targets to one of our Priests before my cooldown was up, and next thing you know we've got healer Extra Crispy. I taunted him again once the cooldown was up. 15 seconds felt like 15 minutes as I waited for Righteous Defense to come off cooldown. He launched another Fireball my way which singed my beard pretty good.
I had given Range enough time to finish him off. I put a quick Judgement of Wisdom up on the Maulgar himself and the fight was soon over.
I gotta say, I was pretty proud of myself. That kind of in the moment, think on your feet and save the wipe is usually not something I excel at.
We continued on and smacked down Gruul again.
We ported to Shattrah and headed over to play Rubix Cubes with Magtheridon. I ran into all my old buddies from Heroes Inc. They were going for a Progression kill on Mag.
We smacked Mag around pretty good. For some reason, I wasn't getting Blood Pact. I think the wrong Warlock had dropped the Imp. Most of the fight, I wasn't getting Commanding Shout, so I was tanking Mag with less than 20k health. My healers did a tremendous job keeping me up. I used a Heathstone and Moroe's Lucky Pocketwatch to get through the ceiling collapse at 30%. Cube clicking was flawless.
He dropped two Champion tokens. One of our main Rogues put in a bid for the first one, and I didn't bid against him. Then it came down to me and a Shaman for the other one. I wound up outbidding him for 5 MKP.
I'm now 5/5 Tier 4. This is the first time I've ever completed an armor set in the game. That was pretty cool. I still need to gem and enchant the the chest piece up.
WWS has been bugged for since Friday. No one can upload reports and there has been no sign of the author. The WWS reports were the way our GM was doing attendance for MKP, so the MKP chart is a little behind right now. I know that if I wasn't capped, I was close.
I'm actually debating creating my own WWS knock off, though I;m not sure how quickly I could gen something up. I don't want to just copy what WWS did, I want to improve on it as well. First thing I'd need to do is write some code that reads a combat log, after that the presentation of the data shouldn't be too hard. Time, of course, will be the big roadblock I'm sure. I've been wanting to mess around with Silverlight development, maybe this would be a good excuse.
With Mag dead, Dora reformed the raid to head to SSC. The problem was we couldn't fill the raid. Our little jaunt into farm content had cost us our opportunity for a Progression Kill at Leo. I know we are trying to gear up some new raiders, but I can't think of a single drop from either Gruul or Mag that went for more than a handful of MKP. People just don't need drops from there, it seems.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again.
IT'S TIME TO STOP DOING GRUUL'S LAIR.
Now, maybe, we didn't have the people online for a Progression attempt when they formed the raid, so they decided Gruul was what the group could handle. If that's the case, I applaud them for wisdom, but it underlines a real problem.
Where are the Core Raiders? According to the Officer's we have over 30 Core Raiders. These are people who have said they WANT to raid, WANT to progress.
Where were they?
I finished up the evening on my Hunter, doing the Children's Week quests to get him some easy Lower City reputation. I rolled this guy just to be a farmer for my Paladin, but I'm really enjoying him. I'm looking forward to getting him to 70.
The Heroes Inc Raid Leader messaged me a little while after we zoned out of Mag's Lair, and told me that Heroes had gotten their progression kill. I was really happy for those guys. I know some people will dismiss their accomplishment because Mag has been "nerfed". I hope those guys don't let it bother them. For a Casual PVP/PVE guild, they are really doing great. I honestly never thought they'd make it this far, and they are even going for Hydross this week.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Raist says:)

Good read..that was awesome how you p/u krosh..nice job:)

You are right about why we didnt go straight to Leo..People told us they would be on..then rl delayed them..thankfully school is done this week for our school raiders:) at least the 20+ crowd:)

WTB no more gruul as well:)
Anonymous said…
I can see your point on Gruul, but I think going to Mag would still be useful. The items from him are probably still upgrades for a lot of our raiders...they just aren't willing to spend mkp as quickly, or as much mkp, because they are conserving it for SSC/TK drops. Hence, you get lower bids for items.

Still, an upgrade is an upgrade.
Honors Code said…
Mag is also an excellent source of epic gems. We should continue to kill him.
Lazenby said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said…
Not really related to this specific post but more to your raidtargets in general. I see you guys fighting in SSC and trying out BT... Why not attempt more MH instead of BT?

While we still have to get our first BT kills we are 4/5 in MH atm.
Lazenby said…
Deleted my previous post as it cut of half the url i linked

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/
guild-general/
32593-time-management-raiding-guilds.html

hopefully it will keep it this time.

anyway as i said before time is better spent learning new encounters than farming old content. Gear is nice but not allways neccesary.
BigFire said…
You guys need to at least fit first 2 bosses in Hyjal into your schedule. They're easier than some of the progression boss you're doing in SSC/TK.
Anonymous said…
Try not to despair too much! With summer coming, hopefully some of old older raiders like Arb, Phorius, Robert, Trey, etc will be back and playing more often and we can take them over less experienced people.
Anonymous said…
Just out of curiosity, why are you spending DKP on Tier 4 stuff, when the 2.3 Badge chest owns the T4 chest? I've seen you do some gear evaluations here and on Kaziel's blog, and it seems like normally I very much agree with your thinking.

Fedaykin98
Honors Code said…
@Fedaykin98

I'm nearly capped on MKP (which means new MKP would be lost), and I've never had a full set of any armor going all the way back to T0.5.

The badge chest is better, but it doesn't look very Paladinish. I'll mostly wear the chest around Shat.

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