Post Holiday Update

Been off on holiday for a couple of weeks, so no WoW. On my return I joined the guild's first trip into Gruul's Lair, which wasn't our best evening ever. I'm wondering if we're starting to run into the limits of a casual raiding guild, but I hope not. We had two problems - firstly a bit too much casualness, which meant we got less attempts on the High King between trash respawns than you'd ideally like, but the most glaring issue was the lack of a mage with tonnes of stamina.

One of the High King's adds is a mage that needs to be tanked by another mage using Spellsteal to avoid most of the damage, but has to be able to take a nearly 10k hit when the stolen spell expires. We had two mages, but neither had anything near the 10k unbuffed stamina that's recommended, so we didn't progress. We learned a lot about the pull, and got the first add down several of times and did heavy damage to the next two, but that was it. As with all learning wipe nights it was rather frustrating, and it seems rather ridiculous to me that an early fight like this should need one individual to be able have stats so far off the class norm, otherwise the entire 25 man raid fails. We'll get a mage geared up, but with a casual guild you can never quite know which mages will be there next time...

I've spent some more time with my new paladin. I'm not yet sure this is where I want to go - I'm still attached to Grulnak (shamans are my guild's 3rd least played class, and I'm one of the few resto shamans) - and I know that paladins have limitations. But in the next several months I need to decide which character will be my main, and spend very little time with my alts. The paladin has promise, I especially like that they can grind in their tanking spec, unlike my retired level 60 prot warrior. I'll level him some more to see how I like the feel of the class, but I may well find I end up sticking to my "orc priest".