Out of my league

I’m sort of bad at melee DPS.

As a result, I often begin leveling melee toons (think I’m on my 6th warrior) and about the time things get complicated (fighting in a party, so level 15 or so) I tend to lose interest and wander away.

This is how my DKs end up as gathering toons. I’m relatively safe in plate zipping about, picking flowers, and hitting rocks.

But we’re at a situation in the guild where it would be awfully handy for me to have a third character to raid on when a warm body is needed and they’ve managed to get both my mage and priest saved to the same Firelands raid.

A normal BoT was being run.

They needed a warm body.

My DK is level 85.

He’s also ilevel 301.

Heroic Ready is a Heroic Effort

I’m not talking 5-man heroics here. We’re talking heroic raids.

In the pre-Cata days, we differentiated between a normal and a heroic raid by the number of participants.

10-mans were normal.

25s had an additional twist to the encounter that made it more challenging, on top of corralling an additional 15 kittens in the box.

With Cataclysm, we have seen Blizzard move towards the mentality that the number of people in your social circle should not dictate which difficulty level you have access to.

And with the exception of the shared lockouts between 10 and 25s, I agree with this thought process. There’s a whole ‘nother discussion about that, maybe some day we’ll come back to it.

So the fights are basically the same between 10 and 25, just with a little less wiggle room on 10s for any one individual to fail.

10 is more than 25

I mentioned the other day that my guild made the switch from 10-man to 25-man content.

A line that I wrote happened to catch my eye when I was proofing the post.

(Yes, I really do proof them from time to time. Not always well, but I try.)

This tells me that our ratio of people that should be there to people that should not be there is more tuned on 10 mans. It means that we’re filling raid spots in 25s with people that may want to be there, but don’t have the skill, or they have the skill but don’t want to be there.

And I started thinking about the numbers involved.

It seems like we have approximately 10-13 people that have the skill, the desire, and actually show up on time.

25463-D

Is down!

That is to say, Atra-fucking-medes has been slain.

In simpler terms, we finally were able to beat the shit out of a blind dragon.

Yeah, we got rolled repeatedly by a handicapped reptile.

The new raiding season started out very well.

Sometime in December the guild wandered over to own the new VoA-style encounter in Tol Barad. I’ve gotten to do the fight once, and it was cake to heal, even as disc. (What do I mean, even as disc? ZOMG. More on this later. Not today later, another day later.)