Racing to Ragnaros before the Nerf!

Master Roshi (Dragonball Z)

We had 2 10 mans going this week, and last night everyone had killed Staghelm, which was great!  It was a close call with the other group, they had 1 man left standing with 60k left to go on Staghelm and they managed to get it down!  Aza called it a great Lacrox moment.  Can you guess who it was?  Nooo... it wasn't a bubbled pally, it was Roshii!  All hail Master Roshii!  If only somebody had FRAPSed that, would have been great on a guild video.  Lushnek had lousy dps in our raid again (for Ragnaros) and he AGAIN had his skinning knife equipped... he's picking up my bad habits!  I have no idea how we managed to get all the adds down with him in gimp gear and 2 dps dead (one attempt) but I guess that will go well for a proper attempt.

Grats Roshii and Belinia on Tier shoulders!  It was nice to see something other than Warrior/Shaman/Hunter Tier for a change.

So this means we have 2 10 mans with 2 full days on Ragnaros.  I hope we can get it down before the nerf because I don't want it to be easy just because it was nerfed (see later in this post)

So what do we do for the next 2 nights?  Do we stack a group full of people who know the fights?  Or do we continue as is?  I would recommend a stacked group, though really everyone has kinda had a look already, I think.  Looking at my group, which had Belinia/Hwired tanking, me/Shnaptim/Targetme healing, and Lushnek/Sevros/Moopie/Caedis/Malaetus dpsing.  The other group had Fueghan/Barkhoof tanking, Beauti/Voe/Ea healing, and Azadelta/Longbowflexo/Faithless/Lindrel/Roshii dpsing.

So if I wanted to change my group, I would probably have Voe healing (though Target did ok), Ampharos swapped for Caedis, and Roshii swapped with Malaetus.  We will see how it pans out on Sunday.

What nerf am I talking about?  I hear you ask.  Well, it was revealed on September 12 on WoWblog:

With the final showdown against Deathwing approaching, we’ve been keeping a close eye on players’ progress through the current Firelands raid content. Before patch 4.3 is released, we want groups who are working on Heroic-difficulty content to be able to get as close to Ragnaros as possible, and we want players who are tackling normal progression to be able to experience as many of the encounters as they can. To achieve these goals, we’ll be toning down the difficulty of both normal and Heroic raids through hotfixes in the coming weeks. In general, we plan to reduce health and damage of all raid bosses in both normal and Heroic Firelands by around the same percentage we brought difficulty down for the original Cataclysm raids when Rage of the Firelands (patch 4.2) was released.

We’re looking forward to seeing more groups of players face off against the firelord in the weeks ahead. However, before we make these changes, we want to give everyone a final shot at the bosses at their current difficulty level — so this is a heads up that we’re planning to apply the difficulty hotfixes beginning the week of September 19.

So they are nerfing all of Firelands before they release the next patch.  Which is a bit odd, and a bit annoying really.  I wish they would do it in stages like they did with ICC, or do it after the next tier is out, like they did with BWD/BoT.  I actually ENJOY the challenge (obviously with like minded people) - it makes conquering it that much more satisfying.

But on the upside we will be able to do 25s easier (ie carry people) and the locks may be able to get their cinders faster because we will kill more bosses.  Not  sure if that is what everyone wants to do.  But whatever it is, I guess we'll be doing it together :)