Battle for Dazar'alor - First thoughts

We had far fewer people for heroic than we did before (thanks to lack of interest in this expansion) and there are a few things that I noticed.

Firstly, this is the first raid since Pandaria that is correctly tuned for difficulty.

I have had heaps of opposition in the past because we start on heroic (and we only do heroic raids normally) and people want to start on normal. However, in the past, normal has been so easy it's almost a joke so it doeesn't feel like it's the right amount of challenge.

This raid, however, IS the right amount of challenge.

Because most of us sit around the 375-380 ilvl range, and haven't played in ages, stepping into heroic felt a little bit too hard. Previously all the first bosses were all ridiculous cake walks, but we didn't really find that this time.

So, after an hour of bashing at it, we switched to normal and went through a lot easier, and a lot of the loot we had were still upgrades for some people. Splatz said that he didn't understand why we did things backwards, and I said that it was a remnant from Pandaria where we wanted to do things that were appropriate for our level.

It felt a bit weird that we had to step back but I think that Blizz has got it right this time. Progressing from heroic to normal (and THEN heroic) is the sensible thing to do if it was tuned right, and this time it is.

If Xyn was here, we would probably be chatting about how the tuning is finally just right. We'd probably also be lamenting about having to do normal first instead of heroic.  But think about it, Xyn passed away 2 years ago now. There have been a lot of changes to the guild since then. New people, new attitudes, new ideas. 

So we had 16 people turn up to raid: Splatz, HK tanked; Crooked, Ram and myself healed, with Gen roped in later; Sev, Krygore, Pancake, Galestion (who swapped his shifts so he could raid), Eurie, Fin, Mag, Morkra, Madcow, Deci were DPSing. Yes, a bit short on ranged!

We had to become alliance for our raid and Gen was so happy to be a nightelf. The rest of us were rather horrified by our outfits as alliance! Male draenei... urgh! Heroism?? HK was the only one who was still the same since he was a panda...

We knocked out just the first 3 bosses on normal and gonna do whatever we can on Thursday night. We have finally moved to what the natural progression should be. And it's not such a bad thing... only took 5 years to get it right!