Last night was a great night for raiding ten man with the l8raid team. We managed to get several hard mode notches in our belt, and I watched before my eyes as my Glory of the Ulduar Raider achievement filled in. I was feeling great, on cloud nine as it were, until I logged in this morning to this: Bornakk explaining that the end is nigh for getting your achievements in if you want your Proto-Drake rewards. Yes, they will give us a month's notice, but once they do, the clock is ticking to get all your poop in a proverbial group raiding wise.
I'm not surprised really, I called it after all. As soon as Ulduar released, I did the math, counted down and realized that people in Naxxramas only had four months within which to get all their raiding achievements done, and we could expect nothing more with Ulduar. My issue is two-fold; real life encroaches in on raiding time. It's summer and everyone is going on their vacations, taking off to go fishing, or camping, or anything that's not sitting at a computer the entire evening pounding keys and yelling into Vent. Real life will cut my raiding time short as well, so don't think I'm slamming my raid members. We're all guilty of this. Again, not a surprise, after all summer comes every year.
My second problem is that Ulduar is balanced properly. On the surface this might not seem that big of a deal, but anyone who raided the new Naxx knows that it was a cake walk in raiding form. Ulduar is not. It's full of challenge and difficult fights and great hard modes that really make your team play at their best. The fights aren't easy, and they take time to learn. Our 25-man team keeps rebuilding because of reason number one, but the ten man group has been learning at a speedy pace. Still, will that pace be fast enough to get all the content done raiding two nights a week?
Bornakk states that while it is possible that the proto-drakes may be taken out at a later date, they might yank them from the game with the launch of Patch 3.2. With the first set of Wrath raiding proto-drakes I was four achievements away on 25-man and six on tens. We were by no means far off, and that was with a non-progression focus. I guess what irritates me is that we're the sort of group that can get this done, as long as we have the time to do it in.
Four months might have been sufficient time with the original Naxx/Sartharian/Malygos raids, but I don't really believe it is with Ulduar. Unless, of course, the ultimate design is to reward the professional guilds and leave the rest of the raiders lusting over what they cannot have simply because we don't raid as our job.
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