Raiding in WOTLK...Follow

... hey guys.

I've spent the last days raiding the new content in WotLK and I wanted to share some insights with you (and of course spread my ego around *giggles*).

There are three (or four if you count the pvp raid dungeon) raid dungeons currently available at level 80. All dungeons are available in a 10 and 25 man version.

Mainly there is Naxxramas with 15 Bosses and it is the new Karazhan. It is devided into 4 wings and after clearing those wings you can enter the frostwyrm lair where the last two bosses await you.
The bosses are mainly tuned down versions of the old Naxx 40 versions. Thus bosses have all the basic abilities but the complicated stuff or those things which would be undoable in a 10 man instance (like having 8 tanks for the four horseman) has been removed.
Gear requirements for Naxx are rather low. If you are in SWP gear or if you have replaced your gear with lvl 80 or heroic dungeon drops the instance is easy, the gear check is a lot lower.
Every boss drops one badge (25man content has different badges; 10man content drops the same badges as you get from killing heroic bosses). KelThuzad has two badges. So the instance has 16badges in total (which really makes it another Karazhan).
We went in on Tuesday for the first time and killed the first 14 bosses before server restart.
On Wednesday we went in again and cleared the place in about six hours with a different team.
We did the 25man version on Sunday and cleared the place on the first evening one-shotting almost everything (yay for server first Naxx25 clear and a shiny new title).
One or two bosses took two tries and thaddius and saphiron took three tries (we did saphiron without frost resistance gear which made it somewhat healing intensive as the whole raid took 1.5k damage every 3 seconds on top of a lot of other damage sources).

Besides Naxx there are two other raid dungeons. There is the obsidian sanctum which contains one boss and his three adds. You can kill the adds before you engage the boss. If you do so the boss becomes a joke but he drops less loot from a reduced loot table. Killing him when his adds are alive (you can choose to let one, two or all three adds alive before you engage him) makes the fight a lot more difficult.
Currently we only went with two 10man teams. The first team killing Sartharion in the first attempt (but killing all adds before engaging him). The second team kill him with one add alive, but they needed some tries to master the fight.

The third pve instance is where you fight malygos. You need to loot a quest item from Saphiron which allows you to summon Malygos. There are different items for the 10 and the 25man version.
We tried Malygos in the 10 man version for two hours and he was a lot harder than the other 10man content. But he still doable. Lets see when we have him down.
With defeating Malygos you have cleared the 10 or 25 man raid content of WotLK.

There is a fourth raid dungeon which is the PvP raid instance in lake wintergrasp. It is available to the faction which controls the zone (you fight for the zone and after you control the zone the winning faction can enter the raid dungeon for two hours after which the fight for the zone starts anew).
The boss is really easy, we killed him two or three times (always on our 1st attempt). This dungeon has a lockout of only three days (opposed to all other raid content which has a 7 day lockout) and the boss drops two badges and two items (can be either pve or pvp set gear on all slots. However the boss does not drop the token, he drops the item, so make sure you have as many different classes in your raid as possible).

I hope this gives a small overview about raiding in WotLK

Small update.
We did kill Malygos (heroic mode or 25man version as you whish) today on our 6th or 7th attempt. Having done about 10 tries in the 10 man version helped a lot since we knew the basics of the different phases and just had to multiply that knowledge to others in the raid group.
The fight is funny, everyone has to know his role and the three phases of the fight are very different from one another (phase 1 is fighting him while getting power buffs and taking good chunks of damage; phase 2 is hopping from shield to shield while DPSing a lot of adds; phase 3 is zerging Malygos down with the help of 25 dragons you control).
The fight is somewhat complicated, but the gear requirements are not very hard. So if everyone knows his role you can defeat Malygos in a mix of dungeons blues, heroic gear and a few pieces of Naxx gear.
Malygos was the first fight where I'd say that difficulty of the encounter is somewhat well balanced. A lot of very casual raids will have a hard time against this boss, but once everyone has mastered the learning curve (which is not that demanding), the fight becomes manageable.

And I really like my new title of "Mulgrin The Magic Seeker" *giggles*, it is a lot better than the last title "Mulgrin Conqueror of Naxxramas" which has a really lame translation in German language.

We raid four days a week during progression and that has been enough to clear the content (although some very motivated people did some 10mans beside the 4 raid days which helped somewhat...).
I expect us to run 4 raid days for another two or three weeks. By then we should have everyone in a full set of epics again at which time we will only do the 25mans which will probably take two rather short raid days (Naxx is still huge and took us 6 hours to clear the first time, so I expect it will still take 4 to 5 hours the nexts weeks).

Yes Naxx is being pugged already. However most PUGs don't come very far as there is often noone who really knows the fight mechanics and there seem to be a lot bad players in those groups (I have heard some horror stories). Although I've heard of some PUGs already clearing one or two wings.

I used to raid on a central server, and this is pretty much the rule also. We tried to go 3 days a week but were struggling to keep numbers. I for one don't have huge amounts of time to say "sorry honey, I can't be with you or the baby because I am playing WoW" so this kinda worked for me. Then we hit a roadblock and couldn't get through a few bosses: SSC end bosses in particular. So we decided that the term casual and raid were not co-existent and went to 4 days a week which I really couldn't do. Now I just pug what I can and get frustrated as all hell. I wish there was a guild that ran 2-3 days (preferably a little later in the night so I can still get some QT time in!).


Hrm... I would say that that remains to be seen! (j/k)