Naxx pug

It was a blast. The raid leader was a bit of a jerk and tended to ramble, making it hard to follow descriptions, but whatever. We got through the fights, most were one-shotted. Some were tough, but all in all it was smooth running.

I won rolls for the legplates of carnage and the T3 chest token. The guild that ran the raid was generous enough to provide the scraps for tokens. Now I have the T3 chest. It's really not that far below the healing chest from Terestian. If I had the set bonuses, it would be impressive.

The fights were clearly changed a lot due to our gear level, so I didn't get the full experience. Still, even with the easier strats, it was impressive. As usual, the trash was excessive, though thankfully very easy with 20 level 70s.

We did Patchwerk first, I was one of the tanks, it was a little dull to be honest. The next few bosses were cool, the dog was confusing to me. I was assigned to kite the adds, but pretty much failed and ended up taking the full hits, getting stacked to the point of several mobs (I wasn't paying enough attention, I was busy running) with damage increased by a few thousand. It was fun times. Thaddius was a bunch of wipes at first because we had no melee DPS and I'm no good at tanking a mob that mana burns. We killed him at the end. At that point I was pretending to be DPS, wearing ret gear, but still prot spec. It worked well enough, I was third on damage for the fight, though the balancing of the charges does play a role in that.

Spider was a bit dull. The gear inflation meant that Grand Widow Faerlina was just plain tanked and I held a couple adds. Anub'Rekhan was easy too, though the first time there was some trouble with an add, leading to a dead tank and a 2% wipe. Maexxna was easy. The trash was almost the most interesting, until I realized that I had no aggro because the other tankadin (who left before the end) had much better gear and spell damage.

I didn't like the plague wing much. We had barely any decurses for Noth, so that wiped out about half the raid very early on. Heigan killed me because I didn't know about dancing. He did give me pants though. Loatheb was pretty badass, and just to contradict myself, he made it into an awesome wing. Prot can do some nice damage when every single swing is a crit (I was at 80%, 2.2k+ AP, and a totem twisting shaman, which I lost by the time of Thaddius).

The death knight wing was fun except for me being completely sick of trash by that point. I tanked the adds on Razuvious, except for one that a warrior took for no apparent reason. It was pretty boring, just hiding from the shout while waiting for him to die. Gothik sucked. The adds were on the line between hitting hard enough to need a tank and hitting hard enough that I have mana to tank them. My tanking was pretty much fail, but he died fast enough.

The four horsemen was amazing. It took us a while, first because I didn't know when to rotate, then because the healers weren't moving. I think it was 4 tries (yea, I know, this took guilds weeks or months, but this is BC now and taunt doesn't use spell hit anymore). I liked the mobility, but without the "if you are a half-second too slow everyone dies." It really was a cool concept for an encounter, but I can see how it was absolutely bullshit ridiculous pre-BC to require 8 prot warriors for a single fight, even with raids being 40 people. Thankfully we only needed 5 tanks and one was a prot paladin (me, duh). We were very low on healing, so any mistake was an eventual wipe. When we finally got it down I ended the fight having had my mob taken away. I was just about ready to jump back in (my marks fell off) when the final horseman died. It was good times.

Overall Naxxramas looks like an amazing place. The size could definitely be prohibitive though. The winged setup helps though, so you don't have to spend forever going through farmed bosses to get tot he ones you need. I'm ignoring the whole issue of Kel'thuzad needing the rest to be dead, I'm not going to let facts get in the way of my point. :P Winged, but linked instances are great. DM is an example. West and North are really the same, but because of the setup they can be done as separate instances, allowing people to play in smaller pieces.

Where was I? Oh yea, Naxx is awesome, please don't take it away from us, Blizzard. Don't pretend that taking it away and charging $50 to get it back isn't taking it away. I realize they are your servers and you can do whatever you feel like since we only charge for access, but what standard does this set? Do you decide that not enough people did Uldaman, so you take it out, enlarge it to give space for 10-mans, and call it Uldum?