Naxx-25 Starting to Jell; OS-25 Almost There

The Oroborus hit the Plague wing tonight, our second night in a row in Heroic Naxxramas. Last night was a fairly straightforward clear of the Spider wing, although we were pretty sloppy at the start of both of the first bosses, and wiped on Maexxna the first time at just under 30 percent. It didn’t help at all that I was web-wrapped twice in a row just as we hit the 30 percent point. However, the second run at Maexxna was flawless, and we took her down with no deaths.

Tonight, we pretty much owned the plague bosses. We had one trash death early on, then a perfectly executed take-down of Noth the Plaguebringer.

We made our best effort yet on Heigan the Unclean: a one-shot kill with only 7 deaths. Cleansing and decursing showed a huge improvement tonight over last night.¹

I think people generally have the dance down. We ran into a bit of trouble when the MT went down very fast; still unsure what happened there, but I am almost positive he pulled Heigan too close to the healers/casters, and we weren’t able to get our heals to him quickly enough due to Spell Disruption. Now that I fully understand the fight (first time I haven’t died due to disease or lava, not counting the no-longer-possible “hide in the corner” strategy,² I’ll know to warn the MT when he’s pulling Heigan too close. However, other tanks picked up Heigan in short order, and we escaped with only 6 more deaths.

Loatheb was the usual snooze-fest. We’ve never had a problem with this fight, and tonight we managed to avoid even a single death. Ho-hum.

Then we moved on to Heroic Obsidian Sanctum. This was only our second time in there on Heroic, but a few times in 10-man seems to have most people in tune with the lava waves. Trash was easy; a couple people died because they forgot to let the tanks get aggro before trying to melt faces. We’ll hope they keep that in mind next time.

Sartharion himself wasn’t too difficult either. The raid leader disconnected about half to two-thirds of the way through the fight, but that only slowed us a wee bit (he’s our top DPSer). Almost no one died to the lava waves, until the last or next-to-last one: I’d been calling them out over Ventrilo, saying “Left” or “Right” as applicable, but one time I didn’t, and a bunch of people died. When Deadly Boss Mods, or Big Wigs, or Sartharion (I truly don’t know which it is, but I think it’s not the latter) calls out, “Run away, little girl!” you’d best get your head on a swivel and figure out where the wave is, and get out of the way.

At any rate, we burned him down; for the last 30 seconds or so I was spamming Smite, but didn’t quite get the kill shot.   However, I got something much, much better: the Staff of Restraint, arguably the best staff in the game for a Holy Priest (it’s at the top of my LootRank, anyway!)

The DKP bidding went something like 5…10…300. Given some of the prices already paid tonight, I wanted to make it very clear I was taking this staff. Yes, I probably could have gotten it for between 200 and 300 DKP, but that’s alright: Now others will be able to outbid me on other items.

I wanted to put the 63-Spellpower enchant on it, but I only have one Abyss Crystal. I checked the AH: 1 available, opening at 200 with a buyout of 250. Thanks, but no thanks. I happily slapped the 50-Spellpower enchant on my new toy. I’m going to have this staff a good long time; eventually I’ll have the crystals for the better enchant.

We’re not quite to the point where we’re ready to tackle Sartharion with a drake up (or three), but with a dozen people over 2K DPS for the fight, we’re getting there. We need to not have people die on trash, or in the boss fight. But soon…very soon.