Great night of WoW raiding (1/3/12)

Last night was probably some of the most fun I've had raiding in a long time.  I like pushing progression, but it still doesn't beat just mopping the floor with a whole host of current content bosses in my book. 

Last night we had 2x 10-man raids running at the same time - thanks to a lot of folks being pretty flexible with off-specs.  I think one group downed 6 bosses and the other cleared 5.  I know in our group we still had a few folks that were seeing stuff on normal for the first time or at least catching up with the current N.O. strategy for all the bosses.  We had a few wipes on some bosses, but not more than 2 I think.  We got a lot of folks a lot of gear too.  I can really see us getting to the point where we can clear all 8 bosses in a 3 hour raid.  We'll definately be pushing some heroic's before this expansion is all done I bet. 

One thing we did learn (or at least verify - maybe some of you already knew it), was that on the bouncy ball boss, it works well to cut it off at 5 stacks.  Initially we were afraid that we wouldn't have enough dps (the more stacks on the boss, the more damage he takes) if we didn't stack it to 7 - that resulted in "Sudden Tank Death syndrome" or STDs.  It's never a good thing when the raid has to worry about STDs.  As it was, we dropped down to 5 stacks and still killed the boss with more than a minute to spare.  It helped that our dps was all in the 25-30k range, but that shows that we'd be just fine if we have some folks at 20k or under too.

I was there last week when we finally downed the new loot ship.  There's lots of moving parts there - seeing it on LFR helps, but LFR just ignores too many of the mechanics to really learn how to do it.  This is definately a fight that people need to learn - sometimes learning the hard way is the only way to really figure it out.  We had 4 ranged and only 1 melee dps in my group last night - going ranged heavy definatley helped.  We got the dragons down on the sides much quicker, including at least 1 time where we killed them both on the same pull.  Last week we lusted with the boss at 30% and I know we still had about 10 seconds of BL when the boss went down.  This week we lusted at 40% - I think that would have been exactly right, but we were down 2 dps at that point, and I ran oom with the boss at < 5% health.  As it was both tanks died right as the boss went down.  Always fun to down the boss with 1/2 the raid dead - that's the Natural Order way!   ;)

Finally, it worked great that after both groups were done with their raid, we gathered up everyone interested and ran LFR.  We had about 12-15 guildies for the 1st 1/2 and probably 6-8 of us for the 2nd part.  With everyone in N.O. needing on all eligable gear and then distributing it amoungst ourselves, we were able to gear up a few more folks than would have been otherwise possible.  I don't we got more than 2/3 of all the gear - it's not like we were taking away gear from the pugs, but it was nice to work and trade gear around internally to get everyone something.  If you get the chance, definately run LFR with a bunch of guildies - although I would recommend against giving Gnome RL responsibilities.  If you've never seen a pug trolled to death - it's not a pretty sight.