Raid progression, it hurts.

Our guild has recently cleared Karazhan and is having a mooch around the troll city of Zul'Aman to see how we fair there. The bear boss, Nalorakk, is being defeated with relative ease and so with the raid finding itself with plenty of time left it's time to have a crack at the gauntlet on the way up to Akil'zon.

For those that haven't tried this encounter, it's tricky, there are 4 pulls of elite pairs (one of which does chain heal), pairs of elites spawn behind the raid which needs to be running forward at all times and then to top it all off groups of birds fly down which need to be AoE'd. These last two things keep spawning at regular intervals until you reach the top and start fighting the final 'Tempest" so as a raid you have to move, and move fast.

At the moment this is very much a learning experience and tactics are being developed based on which players we have in the raid and how well we can keep them alive and how much damage we can do to the bad guys. The guild doesn't have what would be considered a core raid group, instead it tends to be a balanced group from those that sign up and are able to make the cut in terms of gear and experience. This means that we may not have what would be considered the ideal group based on the strategies you can find online and have to adapt as required.

What doesn't mean however that you can't learn, nor even succeed so long as people are prepared to try and refine what they are doing, and more importantly listen to those who are leading the raid. As a general rule our main tank is raid leader, so deals with looting, invites and where and what we do. I make an attempt at doing tactics and strategies which most of the time come off, but often will require refinement as we discover something interesting about the mobs and how they react to the spells and abilities we chuck at them.

One of the keys things that is useful at this stage is for everyone to evaluate how they are doing, what's working well and more importantly what could be altered at a personal level to try and get that bit further. In my case it'll generally come down to keeping the heals interrupted and only pulling aggro if the final mob is close to death as we're moving forward.

However making random suggestions up to and including changing the make up of the raid for an alt isn't necessarily helpful as it won't help this raid progress, and if you come to rely on a certain class or player then when they're not available you're stuffed before you begin as there's no concept of alternative tactics.

The downside to this 'single-minded' approach is that there will be wipes, there will be repair bills and you're going to need to bring consumables. However if you can come out of it with a new perspective and a better understanding of what needs to be done then the next time should be more productive.

Obviously we won't be killing every boss on the first or second try but if we can learn something from every raid then it should be considered a success for the group, even if there isn't the purple shinies to impress the masses.

Here's to moving forward in the raids and taking a positive attitude into the wipes as they'll always be there when something is new.