Planning your raid’s progression was pretty easy in Classic WoW. You cleared one instance, farmed it a bit, and then started on the next one. It was a little more complicated in The Burning Crusade, but not too much. After clearing T4 raids, most guilds kind of picked at the first few bosses of The Eye and Serpentshrine Cavern at the same time, but usually focused on Vashj first and then worried about Kael. Hyjal and BT worked the same way — it was pretty common wisdom that a guild would kill Archimonde first before moving on to Illidan and the last few bosses of BT.

Granted, there are a few progression generalities in WotLK. I think it’s pretty unlikely that any guild is going to start with Malygos-25, for example. However, you have at least two new avenues of possible “progression”: Sarth plus multiple tiers of drakes, and achievements. And my job as a guild leader is to find a way to meet everyone’s progression expectations in (for our guild) nine hours a week. As usual no two people want the same thing.

Most of our folks love new content, and get bored really quickly when they’re not facing an unkilled boss. Some are more concerned about item drops, and rate progression by the level of their gear. Many are super gung ho about achievements, but it seems an equal number of people just see them as having do to things ‘the hard way’. Is Sarth 2D more or less progression than Maly-25? Does it even count? Getting The Safety Dance on Heroic doesn’t take a ton of skill (although we haven’t gotten it yet..), so is it less progression than Heroic Arachnophobia (which we DO have)? With so many options, it’s hard to know exactly in which direction to lead the team to get the most satisfying bang for our buck.

We still have Heroic Malygos to defeat, which will hopefully happen on Monday. I’d like to do many of the Heroic Naxx achievements, although Naxx Ennui is already setting in pretty hard with the more active members of the team. Sarth 2D seems possible, but 3D makes me nervous. I don’t even want to THINK about a 6 minute Malygos yet, even on Regular. (And on a personal note I am jonesing to finish off my 5 and 10 man Achievements. “Liore the Undying” sounds awesoooooome.)

So we are both quickly running out of fresh content AND flooded with multiple event options at the same time. Ahhhhh!

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Guild Management, Raiding Ruminations Achievements, guildleading, Malygos, Naxx, raiding, Sartharion

My bad luck with Sartharion + drake attempts continued as a very good guild group got their butts handed to them by Tenebron. We wanted to try Tenebron because we figured his increased shadow damage debuff would be easier than Shadron’s fire damage aura, but we underestimated the effect that many whelps can have on a small raid. (Yes, I did yell at people on vent to “HANDLE IT!”) We gave it our all, but I just don’t think we had the right group for the whelp drake. I stomped my feet a bit and made some disappointed faces, but at the end of the day we killed Sarth the old fashioned way. I’ll be back, stupid drakes!

On the bright side, the guild had three Naxx-10 runs last week that resulted in three Sapphiron kills and two Kel’Thuzad kills, a first for us! I was really pleased to see so many people eager to get into Naxx, and that our teams were so evenly balanced. Organizing 10-mans in a 25-man guild is always a bit of a balancing act, and it can be pretty fractious. Two of the groups were organized through a public signup, one was put together privately, and all three kicked ass.

After killing Kel’Thuzad, our group swanned triumphantly over to Malygos (or, as he’s known in the Cats, Malligoose), who promptly ate our lunch. Many times. Finally, a really tough fight! This one will take a while to get…

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Raiding Ruminations Archavon, Malygos, Naxx, raiding, Sartharion