My Take on the 10/25 Thing

It’s fitting that Naithin guest posted about 10s vs 25s on Thursday. After all, I’m a die hard 25 man raider. A die hard 25 man raider who just joined a 10 man guild.

Bit of background, differences of opinion with (some of) the leadership (understatement) and inconvenient raid times brought me to leave my 25 man guild. Instead of craving a rebound guild, my gquit actually triggered cravings to spend time around people I can get touchy-feeling with. But I didn’t want to lose my skills, or fall too far behind on gear, or to become too out of the loop for paladin blogging (contrarily to popular belief, you don’t have to play at Paragon’s level to read and translate EJ into plain English, but it does helps to step into a raid once in awhile).

That’s when my old healing lead, Vik, put me in touch with Thespius. Remember what Naithin said about backup players being hard to find for 10 man guilds? Well, it was a perfect match. Team Sport gained a backup healer and I got 6 hours a week of scheduled WoW time, which occasionally included raiding.

A Short Post About My Darling 10 Man Team

Some of you with good memories (or who actually click on links on my sidebar) may remember a post about the adventures of my 10 man team.

Ah, we have our strengths and our weaknesses. There are things we can do and things we have more trouble with. For example,

Thing my 10 man team can do:

Kill Lich King.

Thing my 10 man team needs to work on:

Standing together for screenshots.

Joking aside, all of our hard work finally paid off earlier this week when Arthas finally went down. It was a strange feeling, though. While I did excitedly type in healer chat “I think I’m going to cry now” (I’m one of those very confused people who cry when they’re too giddy), my actually feeling was more along the lines of “well duuuuuuuh”. I knew all along we had it in us, it was just a question of getting it out of us, as a manner of speaking.

It helped a lot to have a few people in our group who’d downed the Lich King before, but mostly, you could tell it was all about practice. In the few attempts before the kill, we were moving almost automatically through the Valk/Defile phase, as if our fingers had the fight memorized.

So for those of you who haven’t killed Arthas yet, hang in there. With the buff active, it’s about learning the fight, getting used to the Valk and Defile timers.