SSC Week 3

On Sunday, the Ungawa group ventured back into Serpentshrine Cavern and took a few more shots at Hydross the Unstable. We are getting the transitions down and are having more success on the adds that spawn when he transitions. On our second attempt, we did approximately 3 million damage and brought him under 50%, but we got dangerously close to him enraging - though an errant shot by a DPSer on a transition spawned four additional adds and wiped us. On our third try, we managed to do 3.2 million damage and I can tell that progress is being made. We took a vote after that attempt and voted to go on to see Lurker (I really wanted more shots at Hydross at that point since I know progress is happening). After we cleared one platform, we jumped down to Lurker and were assaulted by fish. We then realized you have to clear all the platforms above and the fish will despawn. So we went back the start, cleared all the trash from the start to Hydross, then started clearing the platforms, and after three platforms were cleared, we had to call it due to time.

Though we were unable to drop any bosses, we did see some nice items. The following dropped for us: Serpentshrine Shuriken, Pattern: Boots of Natural Grace (congrats Llyr), and a Nether Vortex.

Looking at the full damage report on the night, I tried to help a couple of the mages out as they were obviously having problems in there. When I looked up their profiles on the Armory, I saw that they had good gear, but just hadn't put that much time into them. There were green gems, items without enchants, and the spell hit rating was quite poor. I advised both of them that all the damage and crit in the world won't help if you can't hit your target in the first place. So hopefully they will heed some of my advice and next time have a better hit rating and put out some more damage.

On a whole, it's quite tough to think that we can progress in Serpentshrine Cavern with the DPS that we have. As I said after our first foray into the Cavern, if we don't have people who genuinely will put the effort forward and buff themselves completely, buy/farm consumables, enchant their gear, socket their gear with rare gems at the very least, and just work to get ready, how are we to progress? I know that we are working with individuals to gear them up and I talked to both the mages in my group about their spell hit rating and also posted about gems and enchants on our forums. But I feel that there are people who really aren't taking this seriously and while we do want to have fun, we should be focused on our damage and/or healing output as well.

Following up our gains in SSC (but still, ultimately nothing died), we continued on to Gruul's on Monday. After a couple quick resets of Maulgar, he went down quite easily and we had three tries on Gruul. Unfortunately, we were once again unable to get him down, coming up about 15% short in two of our three tries (again, the same mage I am trying to help was lowest on DPS - many people discount spell hit rating, but it is the single most important stat for mages on PvE bosses). We're definitely getting closer to getting Gruul down, but again, there were people asking for food, some didn't have their flasks, and the laid back attitude is nice in vent, but when that laid back attitude transfers over to how characters are played, it just causes problems.

With the Gold Team now forming up a 25 man group, I will most likely be departing from Ungawa and I wish them the best of luck. But I really would love to see the 25 mans with my Karazhan/Zul'Aman team. We have fun while raiding and everyone always comes prepared. We have all spent countless hours working on our gear, enchants, sockets, and reading/watching strategies. We function well as a group and I have high hopes.