How many more times, treat me the way you wanna do
When I give you all my love, please, please be true
I’ll give you all I’ve got to give, rings, pearls, and all

When you’re progressing in a raid, you eventually hit a wall on a certain stage of the raid. It could be a particular set of trash mobs, but it’s typically going to be a boss fight. The question is: how many times do you attempt to take the boss down before giving up? When you do decide to call it quits, do you move on to a different boss, or call the raid early and hope that getting everyone back fresh and well-rested on a new day will give you a better approach?

My current 25-man raid group is struggling with both Ignis the Furnace Master and Kologarn in Ulduar. Last week, we tried to take down Ignis seven times, and Kologarn four times. This week on our first night, we had three decent attempts on Ignis, and only one on Kologarn.

Any Progress is Progress

On the whole (insert Preparation H joke here), our raid made serious strides in only one week. We two-shot Razorscale, and XT-002 Deconstructor went down with three fewer attempts than the previous week. It seemed to me that giving our all on Ignis until our raid time was up was the best strategy, but we were told to switch over to Kologarn with thirty minutes left in the raid.

I immediately thought that, at most, we’d get one attempt on Kologarn and I was right. It was as good as our first attempt last week, getting the right arm down only once before our tanks lost all their hit points. Beating up the trash to get to Kologarn seemed like a complete waste of time compared to two to three more attempts on Ignis. I would have appreciated more attempts on one boss, or calling the raid early if the raid leaders felt like we didn’t have the gear yet.

Our second night of 25-man Ulduar didn’t start out quite how I expected. I was asked to tank because one of the main tanks no-showed, but I declined. I’ve been a Retribution Paladin with this group for about a month now, filling in as a tank on certain fights when needed. We had three Protection Warriors in the raid so we were covered anyway.

I used to be one of the main tanks back when we started our 10 and 25-man Naxxramas raids, but was eventually squeezed out after the raid leaders recruited additional tanks. I don’t know if I was doing a poor job for them as a tank, wasn’t vocal enough on Vent, or just smelled funny. I probably will never know, but don’t really care at this point anyway since I’m enjoying playing with this spec.

Ignis the Furnace Master

We started out with Ignis since we had cleared the other three Siege of Ulduar bosses on the previous night. The path down to Ignis is huge! It definitely felt epic, and the homage to Molten Core with the two Molten Colossus giants was a nice touch. Dancing around the whirlwinds cast by the fire revenants was pretty fun. After our raid leader performed the thankless job of explaining the fight to everyone, and from their perspective (how he knows all this I’ll never understand), we engaged Ignis and began the fight.

The attempts — all seven of them — were chaotic with the tank dying early and often. We had some difficulties with aggro management, mainly because there is no aggro reset (sorry, old joke). I was tasked with slapping Ignis in the leg with my mace and staying alive when I was put “on the pot.”

I Out-heal Priests

What was most surprising was the amount of passive healing I was doing with Judgement of Light. I was showing up third on Recount under “Healing Done.” Come to find out, this is getting nerfed in 3.2:

Judgement of Light: Now heals for 2% of the attacker’s maximum health instead of a variable amount based on the spell power and attack power of the judging paladin.

Although I got a kick out of the Priests whispering me and wondering if I had changed specs again, this really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I’ll enjoy being able to simultaneously DPS and heal until this gets changed in the upcoming patch. Who needs a combat medic hero class anyway?

Raid Reassurance Time

We were reminded again that we wouldn’t be one-shotting bosses, even though all of us already knew that. Although I don’t think anyone is concerned that we’re not doing well and learning on each attempt, plenty of reassurances of how many attempts and wipes it will take us to defeat a boss were given out.

After the sixth attempt, the raid leader put out a vote to stay for another attempt, or move on to Kologarn. The majority voted to stay on Ignis, so we tried again. The main tank and off-tank switched, and the attempt was our best yet. We had Ignis down to 70% before any deaths occurred. We ended up wiping, and the raid leader put up another vote. This time, the majority voted to move on to Kologarn. This was strange to me because the last attempt on Ignis was clearly one where we had made some serious strides towards learning the fight.

Kologarn

We hit the trash hard on our way to Kologarn. When I say hard, I mean hard like you ran as fast as you could right into a brick wall. We attempted to sheep two of the mobs, but those were quickly broken by AoE. An exasperated voice on Vent pleaded for players to not break crowd controlled mobs, but this is probably some of our raiders first experience with a 25-man dungeon with crowd control. In Naxxramas, AoE was used on everything, so I don’t blame them for using AoE in their rotations.

We eventually made our way to Kologarn and had some decent attempts, four in total. We basically re-spawned the right arm once on each attempt, but called it there due to time constraints. I didn’t feel like everyone (including me) knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing on this fight, but hopefully we’ll be able to build on our experiences for next week. All in all another night full of learning experiences and several servings of humble pie.