Raiding - Poor, poor Gul'dan

Sunday raid was jam packed like I expected it to be. The raid was full before raid time, and a few people missed out, but I know give a week or two that will die down.

Normal is a lot more forgiving than heroic (obviously!) but with everyone we had, we managed to get 7 bosses down. Lucky me got 2 Tier pieces (by accident!) which is rather cool and now I'm wearing them.

I think most people got some gear - whether they are upgrades or not remains to be seen, but there was gear going out. Many of the casual players got loot too, so that was good for them. The normal raid was so smooth that we thought perhaps we could finish off normals on Monday instead of doing heroic, which seemed like a nice idea.

Of the fights that we did on Sunday, I quite liked the Krosus fight. The Kologarn half-body thing (which I suppose Helya also does) at the end of the bridge has always been one of my fave concepts, AND because he smashed the end of the bridge our fighting space got shorter and shorter making it a DPS race. After 5 or so melee got killed because the bridge was destroyed at the front on the first smash, the rest of the raid cottoned on pretty quickly that you must not stand there! Standing in the swirlies reminded me of Kormrok mythic in HFC. And I did like the running left and right to dodge things. Hopefully I don't screw that up too often in heroic.

So Monday night rolled around and we had Botanist, Elisande and Gul'dan to go. Dil warned me that these bosses were a lot harder and I took that on board, but by the end of the night, I was pleased to see that they weren't as difficult as I thought they were going to be.

I finally enabled voice activation for the raiding channel and Neuro was allowed to speak. Xyn had made a mistake in his setup for Botanist which was corrected and that was quite a fun fight, but by the time we got to Gul'dan, I started to see what Aza said. He was complaining that this 3 phase fight- kill adds-dodge the one hit mechanic-kill boss thing was getting a bit old.

Defeating Gul'dan has a cool cut scene at the end...

(SPOILER ALERT SO STOP READING IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW)

...which showed the return of Illidan (which we knew was coming) and he picked Gul'dan up by the throat and then made him explode and all was left was his skull. But Illidan crushed Gul'dan's skull into smithereens, which I am sure didn't happen before because I have Skull of Gul'dan in my bags from Black Temple! It was a cool video to watch, and we get the Eye of Aman'thul to take back to Dalaran so now we have all the pillars of creation. The achievement popped up last night when we killed Gul'dan but it got lost in all the spam of achievements and loot that I didn't realise we had it.

Poor Koda, she disconnected and missed the Gul'dan kill!

What's really cool is that once you've killed Gul'dan you get a manasaber to ride as a quest reward. SWEEEEEEET!

When I watched and read Elisande's fight I was confused as hell. Fast bubble slow bubble? Once I got the hang of it I was like OHHHHHH I get it, and I feel like I got it. Step in a slow bubble, you go slow. Step in a fast bubble, you go fast! Of course nobody wants to step in the slow bubble, so I think I'll have to remember if I get a bomb, I'll go in the slow bubble so my bomb goes off slower than everyone else's as it's going to be the poison pill of the bomb bunch.

Everyone who came on Sunday for the whole raid said they had fun, which was the main thing. I'm looking forward to more raiding this next raid week, but I have realised one thing - I don't think I like raiding 4 days a week. I am thinking that once we have 4 weeks of killing Gul'dan we will have the 4 items to skip straight to the end and we can do that on Sundays and drop Monday raiding, leaving Wed/Thurs for heroic raiding. That won't be for a while though, and in the meantime we'll just have a heavier raiding roster and ride it out till we can wind back again.