My first raiding weekend in Wrath...

Went, for the most part, better than expected.

Before I get into my weekend and how my raiding went, I will say that I realized that I’m not as comfortable as I thought I was. After being back for a little while and doing heroics on a regular basis, I felt that I was very comfortable with everything. But as most people know, raiding and heroics are two very different skinned cats.

I have a very hard time NOT worrying about what everyone else is doing. Its one thing protecting 4 other people against 4-5 mobs. Its another thing keeping an eye and protecting 8-9 people against 6-10 mobs. In hindsight, running Naxx the way it was run probably did not do me any favors. But you learn in many ways.

For those who don’t know, I was the raid leader for our guild at one point. This was less because I was familiar with the raids(both in BC and then in Wrath) and more because I was organizational and willing; I wanted to raid, I wanted the guild to raid, and I felt I could do a good enough job getting them there.

I am not raid leader anymore; however, I have been pushing harder than most to get the guild raiding again. Unlike my stint as raid leader, though, it seems the guild has much more willing raiders this time around.

Thursday I got to do Naxx for the first time. I can’t lie and say it was my first time in Naxx, as I had several weeks ago jumped in for about 30 minutes and did one boss in Plague(Grob? Can’t remember) to fill in for a missing tank before I logged for the night. This time we started from scratch. I was the only raider who hadn’t seen the raid. Scrawny, who is the guild’s most experienced tank(I’ve played longer; he’s played/seen more), lead the raid. He did a great job letting me know what was expected from me in each fight. However, we had 3 pugged members and two of those, along with a guildie or two, could not be bothered to wait on instructions and/or stay organized as we made our way through that dread undead floating ziggurat.

Another problem is that people, whether it was due to lack of gear, skill, or effort, had terrible dps. The entire first 70% of the raid was carried by a single DK wearing T9 and equivilant gear. The only wipes we had were after he left; our dps was just terrible. When your two tanks are in the top 5 dps for the raid, there is a problem. If not for having 3 healers and 2 competant tanks, we would have embarrassed ourselves in the entry level raid. Overall, I’m still rather shocked that we only wiped 3 times the entire raid; Horsemen, Instructor, and Kel. Kel was a wipe simply because it was 2:15am and the raid had been going on for 6 hours. We were down to about 5 of the original 10 raiders and fatigue had set in. Also, again, one or two of the people who stayed were severely hindering the raid. I’ll take a cue from my GL and not say names, but dying on every boss and being last in dps(including tanks) from a class that’s normally near the top means you shouldn’t have been there.

Ironically enough, I got every piece of loot from every boss in the entire raid, minus 2 pieces. This was due to the fact that every single boss dropped its piece of healing plate. And I was the only paladin in the raid and not a single person there was a DE. So now I have, more or less, an entire holy set. I had no intention of dual-speccing with my paladin. I have a 77 shaman that will be resto so I can have a healer. I have an 80 blood DK for a melee dps class. And I am leveling a hunter to have a ranged dps class to be able to contribute in any way. I don’t feel like trying to keep up with 2 or 3 sets of gear for each character when I can just use a different character. I understand the “switching on the fly” bonus, especially during raiding. I just don’t like it. However, it’s a shame to waste all that gear(and some of it is very nice gear) and the guild is terribly short of healers (Its also terribly short of tanks, but what can ya do?). So I guess at some point in the near future, I will gem and chant up that gear and purchase my dualspec and figure out how to heal with the guy. Not that I’m gonna make it any sort of a priority, because I have healed on a paladin before, and I hated it. True, that was……pre-BC. I’m sure things have changed. We’ll see.

My Ulduar experience to come next…