With the various scandals, about four or so of our raid team decided to take a break from the game. So we're down to 12-14 raiders at the moment. Never the less, we have persisted and have finished Sanctum of Domination on Normal.
On the positive side, my healing parse issues have suddenly disappeared. This expansion I've been grey-parsing, with very occasionally going into green. But now suddenly I'm back to blue and purple parses. I think that we were running with slightly more healers than we needed. Two of the four who took a break were very good healers. I think I was just getting sniped a lot of the time. We were running 4 healers for 16-18, and now we're running 2 healers for 12-14. We'll probably bump that up to 3 healers for heroics though, maybe depending on the fight.
Painsmith was a pretty tough fight when learning. There's a lot of damage going out, especially to the chains. Once everyone gets the hang of targeting the correct ball quickly, it goes smoothly.
Guardian of the First Ones is the DPS check of the instance. A nice, straightforward fight.
Fatescribe Roh-Kalo is pretty weird. It feels fairly long, but once you get the hang of assigning ring teams, and the team knows whether or not to go counter-clockwise, the fight goes shortly after. We usually wipe a couple times because we forget that we sometimes get three rings and don't assign a third team. Overall, I think it's a good fight. I'm not a fan of the beams that go across the circle, but only one half is marked. The circle is just too big.
Kel'thuzad for us was easier than the previous two bosses. Though if you get an early death it's often a wipe because the person gets raised under enemy control and then it's a hassle.
Sylvanas Windrunner is a good fight, but rather long and technical. It feels annoying when you get to the second or third phase to have to repeat the first couple of phases. But on the plus side people get a lot better at those phases. We'll see what it's like in Heroic. The Sylvanas fight is not as good as Jaina, though. I think it's because there's a lot of other stuff going on in the fight, so she doesn't get to shine.
It was an interesting experiment in trying to progress the story in the middle of a boss fight. I'm not sure it was entirely successful. It may have been better to just have two separate boss fights and progress the story between the two.
Then there's the cutscene after the boss fight. I think I'll save that for a future post on the story of this patch.
