After a full day of practice on Hagara without a hunter, actually going with a fresh recruited hunter made it look fairly easy :p

GJ!

There's been little writting from me on this news page, most of it has been about heroic bosses we killed, the move to a new realm and such, this post will not be any different. Except, we will be talking about the nerfs that come in effect in Dragon Soul.

The kills

Past

We have had lots of boss kills in the past. And we always managed to keep killing them after first progression kills, even the week after. Even though most bosses become easy to kill after weeks of clearing, we should always seek out new ways to do the previous bosses. We should try to perform better, faster and kill them even more smoothly. Why? If we perform better, we will take this experience with us to our next target. This experience will give us positive feedback, which will result in even better kills. This is an upward spiral, the better we kill them, the better we will become. If we do them faster, it will leave us more time to the extent where we might be able to cut a day away from our raiding because the instance is already cleared or where we can spend a full raidday on a progressionboss. Faster does not always equal better. A boss kill without new insight, is a wasted boss kill. Except for the loot ;-)

Present

At this very moment, we have killed four out of eight heroic bosses in Dragon Soul. Morchok, Zon'ozz, Yor'sahj and Ultraxion heroic have all eaten dust. Currently, we are sniffing on Hagara aswell, and gave her a good fight last night. I don't have any doubt that she will go down this week, which will bring us at five out of eight. This is a goal that is absolutely realistic to reach before the nerfs hit. Anything past five bosses down before the nerfs, will be highly rated and something we can be proud of as a guild in my opinion. We did notice last night on hagara, that a hunter would be good on that fight. But that is all there is to it. It would be good, but not mandatory at all. Will a hunter make the fight easier? Yes, It will make 1 part of the fight easier, BUT that is what makes it challenging and i'm sure that it is possible without a hunter and we will overcome Hagara heroic very soon.

Future

A kill after nerfs shouldn't be demoralized, at all. Specially not a small nerf like the first implementation, it's 5% of the health and 5% of the damage done, that's it. You still need to do the mechanics right, if you don't, the 5% will not help you. Any kill that we will get will be celebrated like before. (Usally a big relief sigh on vent with the words "Finally" and "Good job people." and then handing out the loot). Our kills be handled the same, without the nerfs in mind, mechanics will still need to be beaten, and the dps will still need to done.

The move

Executus

Executus was our home realm from Mount Hyjal/BT to Dragon Soul, it was a good realm, the community was good. Until people saw what was so good on other servers. Namely you didn't have to end up, not doing Baradin Hold/Vault of Archavon one week, because everyone else already done it. Yes, this is still a problem on Executus and many other really low population servers, if you're not online on wednesday when your faction gets Baradin Hold/Vault of Archavon, forget it, you can't run it, because there wont be unsaved people left. 

One of the reason we wanted to move aswell, the implementation of epic gems, only available too raiders, and only one gauranteed chance of getting an epic gem, per week, per character. As you can see, this wasn't viable for us, at all, as we knew from the start. That as soon as we came to the dps check(s) we would use epic gems. Being on a server without them would have just slowed us down.

Sylvanas

I would say that from our relative short time on Sylvanas, it has made an impression on me, I like this server, it feels like the old friend that welcomes you back after years from not hearing from you. I say this due to I've been in a guild on another server (Frostmane), that was actually hostile against transfered characters and guilds. But Sylvanas isn't like that, we found some recruits, and we've made a small name still on the server (going by Wowprogress number of unique checks per day).

Compared to Executus, this server seems to have everything. It has a mix of good guilds, pvp (arena and rated battleground), old raids, pugs and even alittle bit of rp (yes I've seen them in Cathedral Square). Most of these things didn't exist on Executus, which gives me the impression that we missed alot before the move. 

Transfering

So how was the transfer for progress? It was good and bad, good in the regards that we could strengthen our roster with fresh blood. It was bad in the regards that we lost one week of progression as we moved after we cleared it, this had an upside aswell, as we could clear it again as soon as we reached Sylvanas, giving us abit more loot from normals, and advancing Qnyx one week faster on the legendary daggers (yes he got Shadowmourne back in ICC, but it would be stupid to not have a class for the daggers, at all).

So we gained some loot, but that's not really what we needed, what we needed was time on bosses. Time that we lost due to it.

The nerfs

The debuff to bosses will become active with the reset after this one, so effectivly giving us two more weeks (minus one day) to progress on the unnerfed fights. We won't say that we weren't expecting the nerfs to happend, we did. Did we expect them this soon? (6 weeks after release), No we didn't. This and several other things speaks for that Mists of Pandaria is getting closer. 

I have already touched the subject of the nerfs earlier in the post, that we will still be going strong, and if the 5% nerf helps us get to new bosses faster, it's even better. What people seem to forget, is that 5% isn't really that much, general speaking, every week, you (raidgroup) are getting around 2-3% stronger and tougher, by gear alone. All this buff is doing is making the grind shorter, they could have used the same method as in ICC, and buffing the players, but I see that nerfing the bosses with the same mechanic is a really good idea. 

In ICC, we had one of our paladin tanks (Weeps) saying "Even thou we get a 5% damage/healing/health boost, we struggle 5% more." This statement is true, if you can do the same as last week, with 5% less effort, you will do it. But by nerfing the bosses, and you still wanna do the same damage, you will have to keep it up and become better.

The results

We will continue to aim to progress ourself, even with the nerfs, we will aim to become better and better. And we will ofcourse look forward to the new expansion, well most of us atleast.

Disclaimer:
Written by Nyarth Guild Master of Nex Noctís, while he was bored during work. Most of the things written in this post reflects only Nyarths views on things, and not the guild as a whole.

After narrowing down the Hour of Twilight rotation, all we needed to perfect was our dps output. 

After all it went fairly smooth and were happy with the result :)

WoL: Heroic Ultraxion first kill

Zon'ozz proved to be a good challange.

After some wipes we got it narrowed down pretty much and forced a kill :)

WoL: Warlord Zon'ozz first kill

Happy Newyear from Nex Noctis.

That 2012 may be a great raiding year! :)

After getting prio on the oozes done this boss was pretty easy after all. 1 Shot it today :)

Also Zon'ozz were doing pretty well, 4% wipe so a pretty good raid night tonight :)

WoL: Yor'sahj First kill.

After 6 months of discussions it finally happened. Nex Noctis has transferred away from Executus

Our final destination realm has become Sylvanas :)

Heroic Morchok didn't stand a chance, we got it down fairly easy :)

Yor'sahj we tried for a bit but proved to be hell, so were probably gonna progress on Zon'Ozz for a while :)