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L8raid went to Sperpentshrine Cavern (SSC) yet again last night. Each week, we do a little better. We're clearing 5/6 now but haven't really taken time to put any serious effort on the final and by far, toughest boss in the instance: Lady Vashj. Our progression in SSC is pretty typical for a casual guild, I think.

We got the Lurker Below first. The big fish is a moderately technical boss and there are a handful of events everybody needs to be ready to react to. Then we tackled Hydross the Unstable, which is famously annoying for requiring specialized resist gear costing many thousands of gold to craft. It's also annoying because the fight isn't really that complicated but happens to have a lot of opportunities for any one person to make a mistake that wipes the raid. Since we have so many new people in any raid, we do better on fights where the experienced people can carry the learners, but Hydross is a tough one for that. Then we took on Morogrim Tidewalker (first fight were the prot pally gets to show off). Then Leotheras the Blind. Leo should have been a hard fight, but we got it quicker than we expected.

We realized then that time was the key. We need to get all these bosses down quickly to make time to work on the next.

The time issue popped up first for the fifth boss, Fathomlord Karathress. When we beat Leo, we realized that between our practice together and the gear Blizzard was releasing into the game via badges was allowing us to push on for more progression. But tt took awhile (weeks) to find time to get to the Fathomlord Karathress, but when we finally had time, we got him down the first real night of learning it.

Last night we made more progress on speed. For the first time, we cleared 4 of the bosses in one night. We got Lurker in one attempt, Hydross in 2 (stray shaman totem, ftl), Morogrim in 2 (wtf? *all* the healers are in Watery Graves?), Leotheras in 2 (1% wipe again, lol). We ran out of time before getting to the 5th boss. I noticed we lost time prepping for each boss and maybe we did more prep than the number of new people really needed since it was mostly old hands.

We also lost a lot of time rotating people in for others who had to go. Or who arrived late, like me. I'm actually late a lot and while I feel bad about it, there isn't much I can do to coax my RL into letting me be ready at 11pm server time reliably. I'm on Central time, so it's 10pm here and the family evening routines frequently push into the 10-11pm hour. 11pm local would actually be a perfect time for me to raid, but that'd be too late for everybody else, so we just improvise.

But that's alright. I was happy to listed in on vent and work on my long-neglected fishing in Stormwind (up to 100 skill, heh). I'm not at all about loot (or thus, DKP) except in that it helps our progression. I like new kills and when old kills click over from challenging to farm. I like the feel of the team coming together. And I can get that vicariously while fishing, too.

Plus it gave me some time to think about planning the raid schedule. We have 2 nights scheduled in SSC this week. Given last night, on Sat we're going to have a nice chunk of time to work on something new. I know some people will start whispering that we should go back to Black Temple and try to beat the first boss there and that's not a bad idea. However, I'm very tempted by getting a few solid hours of work on Lady Vashj. She's intimidatingly hard, but I was reading another warcraft blog at http://www.bigredkitty.net/ and his raid group is almost exactly at our progression level. They've gone 3/4 TK and 6/6 SSC before pressing into MH/BT. So maybe instead of coming back to SSC with gear from the next instances to overpower the encounter, we should just grind it out now for pride.

I guess we'll figure it out on Saturday.

P.S. L8raid Leotheras kill movie by Ownaa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSAgQf8Yhsk

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