Excuses, excuses

The next chapter of the Kara guide was all ready to go up yesterday, but then I decided at the last minute that I would try to integrate some of my Horde screenshots into the mix, so you could get a break from looking at Alliance characters. It should be up today or tomorrow.

In the meantime, my guild cleared Karazhan for the first time this week. We have a 3-raids-a-week schedule, and when I joined a mere month ago, the guild was taking 2 days just to get to Aran, and unable to get any further. Last week, we cleared everything but Nightbane and got in a few good attempts at him over our 3 days. This week, we cleared the entire place in 2 days. Our first-ever Kara clear, and we did it in under 7 hours.

Flush with victory and self-confidence, we decided to keep our third raid on the schedule, and go to ZA for the first time as a guild.

We grouped up at the gong just inside the instance on Sunday evening, giddy with anticipation and optimism. The question was not "will we succeed", but "how much will we succeed beyond even our expectations?"

Turns out the question should have been "did I bring enough money for these repair bills?"

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After 1 shotting almost every boss in Karazhan, we ran headlong into a brick wall in Zul'Aman. The early trash posed no issues: bears, their riders, and troll shaman all fell to our onslaught. That is, until we reached the final pull before the bear boss: Two bear riders flanked by two shaman. We tried everything we could think of - stunlocking a shaman, mind controlling it, bringing in an extra mage so we could sheep both shaman, having our shadow priest switch to healing - but nothing was enough. The incoming damage was just too heavy for our tanks and healers to handle, our tanks were getting burst down before the healers could react. We were doing everything right, such as separating the bears, assigning healers, and using consumables. We just couldn't get past that pull. So after a few hours, we retreated, bloody and broken, to go get our gear repaired and duel naked out in front of the instance.

So next week, I hope more gear drops for our tanks and healers in Kara. We were using an undergeared offtank (mostly great blues, but few tier 4-level upgrades), so that may have been one of the sources of the problem. I was very surprised by the difficulty jump from Kara to ZA. I had only been there once before, with a group of Alliance alts, and had main tanked the first 3 bosses successfully on my warrior. I guess we were well-geared enough that we didn't notice how much harder the instance was. We did not expect the initial trash to be such a gear-check.

So hopefully next week we'll come back with better gear, and give those bears the what-for.