Yogg-Saron

This week, after some excellent progress in our first night in Ulduar (eight bosses down), we were in a good position to finally see the last two bosses of the instance. We only had Freya left to quickly down on Sunday night, then we were on to General Vezax.

Who went down in three tries. First attempt got him to 34%. Second attempt wasn't quite as good - a cast wasn't interrupted which took out the healer on me, and I died shortly after. At this point, our Paladin healer had realised he could solo heal me without any mana issues, so we downed General Vezax on the third try with one tank, two healers and seven DPS (four of which were melee).

We went on to Yogg-Saron, which was a disaster. We wiped twice in about ten minutes because people couldn't handle not standing in the clouds (what the fuck? It's not difficult to avoid them), then people said we should call it because people were getting unfocused. I have a different word for it, but whatever. We still had two days before the reset, which meant Yogg-Saron was (in my mind) going down this week.

Last night we went back to Ulduar, and had some more attempts on Yogg-Saron. Phase one generally went smoothly, with only the very occasional additional add spawn (which we could handle). The first few attempts on the second phase were ugly, with the group ending up spread out, DPS not knowing what they should be targetting, and people running in the opposite direction when they got brain linked.

We finally made some progress, getting Yogg-Saron to 49% before wiping. I was confident that, with a few more attempts, we could reach phase three. The next attempt was awful, with the melee DPS only getting 300k damage done on the brain in 12 minutes of the 15 minute enrage timer. Healer had to leave, we called it less than two hours after the first pull of the evening.

This is where I got annoyed. People having to go and calling a raid due to a lack of replacements I can understand. However, people seem generally unwilling to dedicate any more time to working on Yogg-Saron this week, which I don't understand and find frustrating. Apparently spending two nights wiping on a boss is enough. What the hell? We've spent less than one full night's worth of raiding wiping on the boss, it was just spread out across two evenings.

The raid content is only going to get harder - if they're unwilling to dedicate more than a few hours a week to learning difficult content, we're going to make incredibly slow progress and there's no point in me being here.

I can sort of understand wanting to do ToC for the emblems and loot, but they've already downed the Northrend Beasts this week, and Lord Jaraxxus won't (shouldn't) take an entire raid session to kill. Two attempts at most, otherwise something is wrong. Will we then go back to Ulduar and spend more time on Yogg-Saron, or just do nothing?

General Vezhax

See what I did there? Yeah, I'm cool.

There are about a million words I would use to describe this fight and none of them are what you might call positive. It may have something to do with the fact that Protection Paladins are basically given the finger in this entire encounter.

And, if I'm perfectly honest, I was expecting this to happen sooner. I've heard that pretty much every other tank class would be better suited than Paladins for almost every boss encounter, and was expecting to come across such a situation before the second to last boss of the raid. Yet I have succeeded on all of the bosses thus far, and will likely succeed again.

Being the only tank class that uses mana we're the only ones that are affected by the lack of mana regeneration. I don't gain enough back from Spiritual Attunement (my spec only has a single point in the talent) to cover continual full rotations, so I'm left with gaps where I have wasted GCDs. Add to that the lack of Paladin cooldowns making the encounter exponentially harder due to the absolute necessity for kiting (which, if you fuck it up, means a wipe).

I'm considering switching my Retribution offspec to a second Protection spec just to pick up 5 points in Divinity for the additional healing and the extra point in Spiritual Attunement for additional mana regeneration. Just for one boss. Fuck you Blizzard.

But I'm a pro. I work around my classes inherent disadvantages for the encounter as best I can. The major problem right now is the lack of mana efficient healing - we simply haven't been able to find a way to keep our healers from going out of mana well before the end of the fight. Not that that's anybody's fault, but it's something we're going to have to think about and work on if/when we reach the General this week.