Raid Leading 5: Slow and Steady

Well, our raid leader had to take another night off, so it was on me again to down Teron Gorefiend (a boss we only killed once prior) and to begin progression on Gurtogg.  I was pretty excited to get another opportunity to lead a progression raid.  I’d spent a lot of time already researching the Gurtogg fight, so I was pretty familiar with every aspect of it.  Did some researching on the trash mobs leading to him as well.  All set to go.

Then about 30 minutes before the raid, I realized something… I never really paid close attention to the trash mobs before TERON.  After giving myself a quick refresher on how to handle them all, it was time to get rolling.

On more than a few occassions I ended up alt-tabbing to check to make sure I was getting the right mobs CC’d.  It was a little slower than usual (okay maybe a lot slower) but they were impeccably clean pulls.  Hardly anyone died on trash the entire night.  Teron went down pretty smoothly on the third attempt after a few people got their first wipes…err…tries at the ghost game.

Now for the fun stuff.  Progression!  Having never done the trash leading to Gurtogg before, it was awesome to get through it with only like 1-2 people dying.  Time to explain the strategy of a pretty complicated boss.  *Deep Breath*

About halfway through the explanation, two of our main healers lost power.  Which would seem like a bad thing right?  In actuality, this gave me a lot of extra time to explain things more in depth.  We even decided to do practice runs of our Bloodboil rotations.  We looked good in practice, but how would it translate in the actual encounter when all hell is breaking loose?

The bloodboil rotations were flawless.  Absolutely flawless.  To do them perfectly on the very first attempt is unbelievably encouraging.  Maybe this guy won’t be quite the road block we perceived him to be.  Okay, so maybe every single person to get fel enrage died.  Details.  >.>

Gurtogg to nearly 50% on the second attempt ever.  Now thats progression

So what’d I learn from the night?  Well, I pretty much rehashed an old saying: “Practice does NOT make perfect.  Perfect practice makes perfect.”  I knew what my role was.  I wasn’t there to kill Gurtogg.  I was there to get the raid prepared for him.  I explained every trash mob on the way to him.  And every single aspect of Gurtogg’s fight as well.  We learned everything the right way, even though it may have slowed us down a bit.  Now when we come back in here next week, we won’t have to be worrying about dealing with scary trash mobs, but instead worrying about finding a good place to stand for the screenshot