Zero to Farm in 24 Hours

So, as I previously mentioned, Anub'arak died on Monday for the first time for us. He'd been a roadblock for about three weeks, using various strategies, until we finally worked out an effective strategy and the proper balance of healers vs dps, and kicked his carapaced ass.

Then, we went back last night after the reset, and one shotted every boss in there with almost no difficulty in spite of the lag monster, in and out in maybe 90 minutes. Which was awesome, but a bit puzzling for me. It wasn't the same group, and we even had a couple people in there who'd never even seen Anub before, but it was like Anub had turned into a farm boss overnight. I'm going to pause here for a moment to knock on wood, so that he does't turn back into a roadblock next week.

So this got me introspective, thinking back on previous kills, and I realized this has happened before. Prior to Anub, our biggest roadblock in TotC was the faction champions, who roundly stomped on our faces for a few weeks before we got some rogues to actually show up so we could lock down more casters and actually survive long enough to kill some of them. But even the next week, when those rogues had vanished back into limbo, we knocked them out after one or two "holy crap they just one shotted our best healers" wipes, which I do not count against us because lady luck is a fickle mistress. And since then, we've been knocking them out regularly, allowing for one or two wipes to figure out who needs to be kicking which healer in the face.

Even back in Ulduar, it happened. We spent a few weeks working on Thorim, and then suddenly came in and walked through it like nothing. Mimiron was the same. And after two nights of wiping on General Vezax with almost no progress, the next day we one shotted it like it was nothing. And General is not a forgiving fight, you miss two interrupts and it's an almost guaranteed wipe. Of course, we haven't killed general since then, because we switched our efforts to getting Anub down, but that's beside the point.

And, of course, some fights are the exact opposite. We one or two shotted the Twin Valkyrie the same night we took out the faction champions, and then this past week on our first night in TotC we could not for the life of us kill them. People kept running into balls during the transitions, and we'd have something like 6 or 7 people die all at once. Though we implemented a new strategy this week, after it occurred to the raid leader that we almost never got the shields if we had to transition, and we ended up losing something like a million damage trying to switch, and then got the heal on top of that. So we tried having everyone go light and stay light, and switch only for Dark Vortex, and immediately switch back after that. Ignore light sihelds and just burn burn burn. It worked great, no craziness in the transitions.

I suppose some fights are just a matter of learning the execution. Once you know where to stand, when to move, and what to kill, it's just a matter of doing it again. An unforgiving fight might even make it easier to jump the hurdle to farm mode, because you learned the hard way that missing that interrupt on Vezax, or standing on the wrong side of Thorim's hall, or running head first into one of Mimiron's mines is going to wipe the raid, so you'd better not do it again. I hope we can get anywhere on hard modes, otherwise it's going to be farming Anub and working on Yogg until Icecrown.