(Yes, pun titles. How I love you.)
So Sunday night we killed Majordomo Staghelm for the first time, but in 10man mode. Which was strikingly easier than our 25man attempts and somewhat demoralizing. I understand a lot better now why 90% of the raiding guilds on Lightninghoof are 10man only now.
But that’s neither her nor there. We obviously (as a 25man guild) didn’t have a “legit” kill for our chosen raid size, so we weren’t going to even bask in the victory. We prevented a shoulder token from being left on the table, no more, no less. The real work was still left to be done with the new raid week.
Tuesday was sort of a rough raid night, but only in comparison to the previous raid weeks when we one-shot everything and rolled over all opposition. This week — horror of horrors — it took us four attempts to kill Baleroc and three for Alysrazor. Such backsliding! And as a result, unfortunately, we didn’t get any shots in on Domo on Tuesday. We just disembarked for BH as a palate cleanser and then called it a night ten minutes early.
Wednesday, the thinking goes, we’d roll in fresh and finish off Majordomo once and for all after our amazing 8% attempt the previous Wednesday.
Initially hope was strong, but then as real-life RNG intervened it began to wane. Several disconnects occurred during attempts. We had to replace one healer and bring in one that was back from extended hiatus and hadn’t even seen the fight yet. Later, another dps had to go for a family matter, so we had to replace him with the disconnecting healer because none of our other standbys were available. All signs pointed to us being quite doomed.
And yet, immediately following that replacement, our attempts started going a lot better. DPS was tightening up because we came to a big revelation: we weren’t stretching out the Scorpion phases enough. Those were our “big money” dps phases. So we went from taking the first Scorpion to 10 and fleeing to holding him up to 12. Personally, I wanted to go farther and eating two additional Scythes with Ardent Defender and Guardian Spirit, but I was vetoed.
It’s probably for the best — I’m not sure how much faster the Scythes would be getting at that point and if I’d get immediately one-shot by a third follow up before everyone could flee.
Like Zilga says, “I don’t get you people — you post this amazing attempt and you try to change what already works!”
So the first Cat phase then, we ate seven leaps, without much incident. Then it was back to Scorpion phase. And so on and so forth.
We kept taking the Scorpion phases up to 6 or so and then splitting. Raid cooldowns were used extensively for the Searing Seeds/Scorpion phase.
After the Burning Orbs/Cat phase, we somehow still have the entire raid alive — which is crazy, that phase is usually the bane of our existence, but it appears it clicked for everyone. Then hastily going into another Scorpion phase we took quick stock of our raid cooldown inventory and proceeded to mitigate our way through every Scythe. His health ticked down slowly but surely, until finally, on the fifth Scythe he was in low single digits. Zilga called for us to scatter like rats, and we quickly did. There was no way we could eat another Scythe.
We quickly switched Domo to Cat form and went to town on him. The decision was made to ignore the adds, as he was around 4%. Around 1% or so, Staghelm took a flying leap away, but that only delayed the inevitable. As soon as he closed into melee, we finished him off with a starving fury. A roar of joy went up as he switched to human form, and then dropped to the ground, coughing up his purples.
Antigen won the only Conq token, but it’s ok. We’ve agreed on a visitation scheme so I can get 12 minutes of wistful sighs in once a week. (It’s going to be a while before I can win a pair of my own.)
And then we went to go give Ragnaros a few pokes.
I’m surprised you didn’t use “Domo Arigato, Majordomo” or something similar as a title… though I suppose it’s probably been done to death.
I gave it to Zilga to use in the guild blog post. First thing that came to mind, so don’t give me too much credit!
GRatz on the Domo Kill!! 10 mans are stupidly easy compared to 25′s prolly has to do with the “herding cats” mentality of more peeps in the same space.Good practice none the less!!
Thanks! I think the damage ration between 10s and 25s is off as well. The 10man mode didn’t feel nearly as dangerous.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention my DC halfway through the fight and then got back in just in time to shout for a cleave – a shout that had it not went off would have killed the majority of the raid.
You want me to congratulate you for missing half the fight and then nearly missing providing a major raid cooldown? :P
It was epic, I’ll give you that.
I spent our last Beth’tilac kill DCed for the entirety of phase one. Our healers cursed me in vent with gusto as they healed through the venom rain the whole time.
At the risk of opening up a can of worms: How did you select the players to take to that 10man, did you randomly select them or take the best of what was available?
We chose a team built around raid cooldowns and who could most likely make a Sunday raid.
He’s a pushover on 10s, but I don’t think that people ‘decide’ to be a 10 raiding team because of the fact that Staghelm is super easy, if indeed people ‘decide’ at all. Some of us never had the option to be a 25, and a lot of raid teams/guilds lost a lot of people at cata. And with recruiting so hard, I suspect most teams just sorta ended up that way, apart from a few 25s that have a megaguild behind them or some really dedicated people that somehow magic recruits out of thin air :P
We just got our first 10N Staghelm kill, and we were pretty disappointed with him.
Good point, sorry if my little tangent there came across as slinging mud at 10mans. On my own server, the end of Wrath saw a lot of 25man guilds implode, and they just reformed and regrouped into smaller 10man teams. I think a lot of the impetus for that on the server was that it was a pain in the butt to recruit enough people for 25s, and the loot was the same, so why bother?
I think that 10 mans are more fun, as in our guild all 10 of us know each other and there is always a good attitude, something I never really could say about 25 mans. Grats btw! I think the damage scaling is due to the fact that with 25man you can say that you will have at least X cooldowns, yet with 10 man its more likely for the raid team to not be fielding a CD heavy side, bring the player not the class and all that, this means that if you do come with a better raid comp then it is a lot easier, although I do think the scaling is off, with only 2 proper raid cd’s in our 10 man we got to 10-11 swipes, compared to my GF’s 25 man with lots of cd’s getting to 7. I wouldnt care if 10 man was harder than 25, we raid 10 because thats how we roll :P
Awesome night that night…and it was the healers who vetoed Rhidach because at the end of the fight on the wipes at near 10% or whatever it was we were scraping for any sort of mana to keep anyone alive…even me, which has generally not been the case.
As for the comments on 25s and 10s…as recruiting officer for Enveloping Shadows I know it is so much harder to recruit for 25s than 10s. I am sure if we were somehting liek a top US or world guild, that wouldn’t be an issue, but on the semi-causual 25s (we do take it seriously just not 4-5 days a week) it is rough to get the 25s recruited. BUt we also try our best to keep our 25s lighthearted and fun so we as much of a close-knit 25 man as most guilds have close-knit 10s.
P.S. I hate my work computer becuase I can’t go back and edit my horrible grammer.
You misspelled grammar. :P
Well said on the 25s thing, sir.
Pulling a stacked group from a pool of 25 raiders does make the ten man version much easier. But for the most part, normal modes aren’t where people worry about balance. In Heroic Mode, this tier seems to be relatively balanced, especially in comparison to the nightmare that was T11 heroic progress for ten man groups. Last tier, there were several heroic modes on 10 man difficulty that were completely impossible because they required the application of cheesey strats from 25 man when you simply didn’t have the numbers to do so. It took blizzard the better part of three months to correct those encounters.
Also, Guardian Spirit won’t allow you to eat a Flame Scythe by yourself. They nerfed it after people were cheesing Heroic Double Dragons with it. Ardent Defender will, but it will cause his energy to reset to 75, rather than zero, so the next flame scythe will probably kill you before you can run back into the group.
Lastly, I’m a little suprised at your wistful lust for the tier shoulders. I, personally, am eschewing the tier token entirely, until I get to Baleroc Heroic. The shoulders off rag are too nice, and the helm of Baleroc is impressive.
From memory, the tier shoulders have substantially more mastery than the Rag shoulders do. While that’s not so important in a block-capped world, it does make capping easier and thus your other slot choices a little more flexible. The shoulders are clearly better than the helm too, if you’re thinking of going 4-piece ever. They’re both quite viable choices.
Frankly though, I’m really looking forward to transmog and being able to choose items purely for their stats. Paladin tanks are always such a hodge-podge of warrior/DK/paladin gear and part of the fun of the game is gearing to look good, rather than colour vision deficient.
The tier shoulders have more mastery, but the Rag shoulders have more total damage reduction. The Rag shoulders are superior in strength, stamaina, avoidance, and armor. The tier shoulders and helm have wasted itemization on threat stats that you can only reforge 40% of, so the off set peices become much more attractive, especially considering the three VP peices are all pure tanking pieces. Taking the three VP pieces, The Rag Shoulders, and the helm form Baleroc will give you a much stronger tanking set, even with the 4 peice taken into consideration, which only has decent applications on a single fight, and only a single role within that fight.