Rotations and the roster conundrum.
My guild killed Alysrazor for the first time this week, making us 5/7. I was not in that raid, however. For the first time, we have more than 10 active raiders. On the Alys kill night, we had to sit 2 people, and wow, one of them was going to be a healer! I chose to sit rather than make our shaman or our disco priest sit. The shammy is new to the guild, and we want to give him a good shot at raiding during his 2 week trial. And the disco priest (Verd) can’t play much this summer because of how his real life is working out. I didn’t want him to have to sit during one of the rare times he can play. So without me along, the raid wiped a lot on Rhyolith then killed him, then figured out the tanking on Alys & killed her.
Alysrazor of course dropped the leather caster boots, which had to be sharded. I weep softly into my mana potions.
And then that same night we recruited a new warlock. That concludes our recruiting for the moment, assuming the new people all work out. That also means I need to write a rotation policy that is fair but allows our raid leader to choose the roster he needs for progression fights. Farm fights (which we define as any boss we’ve killed more than 3 times) should see everybody cycling in & out regularly, though. The downside of being the GM is that I probably need to take the hit more often than other people: I’m the cruise director in charge of making sure everybody has fun. This does not necessarily make for fun for me.
Such a bind. If we have 10 people exactly, we can’t raid when somebody goes on vacation. If we have more than 10, somebody always has to miss out. I’m thinking the ideal roster size is 12, maybe 13 at the most.
We threw our new warlock into our Majordomo attempts last night (following a much nicer Baleroc kill than we had last week) and he was stoic in the face of wiping. We refined our tactics effectively, and we saw some sub-20% wipes. A little more work on handling the flame orbs cleanly and we’ll have a kill. I was in on those attempts, which were big fun. I like that fight so far. I get to bust out Tranq & tree on cooldown.
I made movies of a couple of the wipes. No soundtrack & titles nonsense. These will be evaluation tools. What are we doing right? What could we be doing better?
I would be uploading them to YouTube now, except that I have a Verd in my office/guest bedroom right at this very moment. It was pretty fun to raid last night with somebody in the same room with me. I could smack him when he needed smacking! For some reason the guild seemed to feel he needed smacking often.
Is it just me or did Blizz make Rhyolith harder rather than easier with their hotfixes? Our first kill was straightforward, though steering was tricky. Now the fight seems considerably more unforgiving. Maybe they felt it was too easy the first week? Or maybe we’re not adjusting enough to new required tactics.
Project PUG Tank has been on hold. I haven’t had the time even to do dailies on poor Aegidius. I have been doing them on Leafie and Leafie only, and even she is 5 days behind the main curve because of my vacation last week. Fortunately it doesn’t actually matter in any grand sense. I feel my gear is falling behind a little, though.
