Naxx

Tuesday's have become my knitting night over the last year or so. They also happen to be guild run nights. So I never sign up for guild runs that night since I know I'll never make it. My boss stopped into my office yesterday afternoon to ask what I was doing at 4:30. Never a good question. I ended up attending an economic forecast presentation, which was interesting, but didn't allow me to go knitting.

And that worked out for the best. I got home about 7:30 and made some dinner. I was sitting on the couch finishing up my food when Jeff says that there is a spot open for our guild's first attempt at Naxxramas. If I sign up quick I might make it. We're short some dps. So I sign up on the forums and then try to log in. There is a queue of over 300. It takes me at least 25 minutes to log in. Grrr.



So when I finally get on, I'm shocked and excited to still get an invite. I figured I was probably too late. But I'm going to Naxx!!! We have two tanks, two healers, and 6 dps. Most of us have run together. You enter the instance through any of the four portals and then choose which wing you are going to work on. We chose the Arachnid Wing (our poor arachnophobic paladin) and started clearing trash mobs. I was surprised how easy the trash mobs were. We handled them without difficulty and were quickly at Anub'Rekhan.

Anub is a giant beetle like creature that summons swarms of locusts, large adds, and a few (and that's putting it mildly) scarabs. We were all going into the encounter blind but we knew that we needed to avoid the locust swarm. Our first attempt ended quickly. Tanks went down and so did the rest of us. It was the combination of the locust swarms and the scarabs that killed us. Two more attempts and we finally figure out that the best way to go is to lead him around the circle to avoid most of the damage. But the tank still goes down and we still wipe. On our fifth attempt our main tank, who is a druid, decides to switch into cat form for the run around the circle. He avoids damage and we finally manage to bring him down. Woot!


I'm not sure if it was right then or after that our Death Knight got disconnected. Gone. Thank goodness none of the drops would be useful for her. We stand around and wait for her to return. And wait...and wait. After 10 minutes we decide to start clearing trash to the next boss. Even with only nine this goes quickly. We assume she must be trying to log on and has a queue. So we wait more. Right as we start thinking about finding a replacement she comes back on, grabs her Emblem of Heroism, and on we go.


Grand Widow Faerlina is the next boss and for those who've done Kara, think Romeo and Juliet. She is mostly a tank and spank but with some added features. She casts rain of fire doing tons of damage but we quickly learned to avoid those. It does look an awful lot like a Death Knights circle so at first many of us stayed put. But we quickly learned. The tough part about the Grand Widow is that she enrages, and does some serious damage when enraged. In order to stop this, you need to kill one of her alcolytes right as she starts. But you can't just kill them, you have to kill them within a certain distance of her. That dissapates the enraging. The first time we tried we didn't kill the alcolyte fast enough. The second and third time we killed them too quick. We didn't wait until the enrage started. By this time it's 11 pm and most of us are tired. But we figure one more try. We had been close. And this time it works. We had a paladin who brought the alcolyte down to 50% health and then the moment she enraged we would kill it. Perfect.


So our first attempt last night and we managed to bring down two bosses. The Arachnid Wing was cleared. I'm already signed up to go back on Thursday. Tonight I'm planning to respec Destro. We'll see how it goes. I want my name a little higher on the dps charts.