This past week we had a pretty good set of raids. I decided to pug even though we only had 5 people online. We actually had heals and tanks so we just needed to get some dps. It worked out, we had different pugs every day of our three raid nights, but they were all pretty good. Oddly, the pugs we picked up on Sunday night were better quality, both gear and skill, then the ones that we had on Tuesday. I can't tell if that was because people weren't busy on Sunday night, or if better people respond when I say we're starting on Malkorok.
Either way, after a rough start on Tuesday we killed Nazgrim on Thursday. On Sunday night we got some pretty well geared people who were done with their guild raids for the week. It took us a bunch of wipes to get the coordination to cover all the purple puddles, but once everyone knew the plan we were good.
We also had a really easy time killing Spoils of Pandaria. It took us one wipe and then we annihilated it. I think a big part of that was that I and the other tank had practiced it when we ran it on Flex three the week before. Both of us had the crate opening rhythm down. Despite that I was still afraid that it would be a wipe when I had trouble opening the first couple of crates on the Mogu side. Fortunately we were able to recover and get everything opened up and then dead in time.
We headed to Thok after knocking over Spoils, and had a couple of good pulls on him. I am confident that we'd have gotten him the next pull, but we ran out of raid time and people had to go to sleep. Sadly our last wipe was my over-aggro fault. Turns out that I'm really looking forward to the removal of Vengeance in the Warlords expansion. Right now it's a bit of a clunky mechanic that can make tank swaps, especially the initial tank swap, really hairy.
It was a pretty good raid. I know that several Darkfall people hadn't been there when we first killed Malkorok, so they got a new kill for that. I was lucky enough to get the nice tanking boots that Malk drops: the Malkorok's Giant Stompers, but warforged for extra awesomeness. And I remain pleased with our speedy kill of Spoils.
