Hindsight is 10/25

I just have to link this again (How to Wipe on the LK) because it is so spot on and now, for me, it is so much easier to laugh about it.

I cannot remember a time where I was personally involved in a raid encounter where mistake after mistake were learned from and progress was made. This is exactly what makes a raid memorable and after you beat it you feel you've accomplished something.

The thing is this was only on 10 and only on normal...and with a huge buff. Easy stuff yes? Yet for our band of amateur raiders it was if we had performed like Paragon. From the very beginning where we tried to use someone who had never tanked before to a priest insisting they could do better if they were specced holy instead of disc we were faced with challenges "professional" guilds simply do not have to put up with.

We made adjustments in strategy all along the way and things got easier. We inched toward the end. Much to my chagrin, we ended up succeeding with the "necessary" classes. We had a warlock to cheat death, a paladin tank healer, a new priest (who stayed disc) and a shaman for heroism. Would we have done it without one of these? I'm not so sure. Actually, on the kill we pretty much had to take what we could get but it turned out to work in our favor.

In a way, like women forget the pain of labor once their baby is born, the encounter seems easy enough looking back on it. You move here for this and there for that. You do your best to do all the things you're there to do and you hope everyone else does the same. And you hope something screwy doesn't happen along the way.

However while I was in the thick of the learning curve several times I felt it was impossible. The biggest reason was because we simply could not get the same group to show up each time. So each time we had someone new and each time we went through the errors the rest of us had become all well too familiar with. A few times the "experienced" of us focused so much on new guys not messing up we took our own dives. It worked better when we trusted each other to do their jobs.

We lucked up on some players who either learned from their mistakes quickly or weren't put in the circumstances that would allow them a chance to fail. Better performers than us sell Kingslayer by telling the person to fall of the edge immediately and running it without them there to cause issues. We rolled the dice with some pugs at a chance of getting a dropper full more of dps or heals and instead I think they performed better than we did overall.

I doubt we'll giterdone on 25 normal. I'm okay with that. I'm willing to at least put some time in trying. But I have no delusions of doing this on heroic in any form. I'm a 3K Fun Run & Walk type of player not a world-class marathoner.

I'll end this by saying it was a time to remember, definitely up there in my top five. Thanks WoW.