Monday night raid report

I run a guild-hosted raid every other Monday night, 10-man, with the help of a couple of my good friends.  We've experimented with a couple of different raid formats and I think we've finally settled on a 10-man version of our guild's 25-man Wednesday night raids.  Which is to say, for the moment, Onyxia and Trial of the Crusader, with the loot pinata that is Vault of Archavon if the situation arises properly.

Two weeks ago, we skipped Onyxia because I didn't put that as part of the calendar invite and a few of our folks were saved.  Monday night we did it right, although we struggled a bit.  Due to the size and nature of my guild, we bring along pretty much whoever we can get, no matter whether they're "properly geared" or not.  Last night we had quite a few alts or relatively new 80's along with us, and one wonderful pug healer.  One of our healers for most of the night was a druid alt of one of our rogues, as we are perpetually overabundant with DPS and tanks and perpetually short on healing.

As an aside, while as a competitive jerk I would rather we have 10 fully geared mains, I much prefer our guild structure, where folks who are a little behind or haven't had the time to dedicate to getting fully geared with Emblem gear get a chance to go, even if it means we wipe a time or three, and people CAN play their alts if they so desire.  It gives folks that only perform one role on the big guild runs or any other runs they do the chance to do something different.

Back to the raid.  We had only 2 ranged DPS, a mage that had never been to Onyxia before, and a warlock alt of one of our solid tanks/healers.  This makes phase 2 and its craziness all that much harder.  The OT for Ony was a DK.  We wiped once due to hardware (mouse driver) issues, and once or twice while some of our newer folks (new to level 80 or new role-wise) figured out the intricacies of the fight.  One more wipe due to a little bad luck, and then we finally beat her down.

We moved on to ToC and traded out a DPS for a tank, with the OT switching up to take the DPS spot.  We brought in a second bear for dual furry tanking.  I will admit I was a little nervous as the new bear had a lot less HP than I had expected, but we went with it.  After a wipe with Gormok, we got to the jormungar and wiped on them a couple of times.  Our alt healer then convinced one of our awesome priests to step in, and on the last attempt of the night we downed the Northrend beasts.

I'm a little out of it this morning, so just a short post and sadly nothing all that interesting to talk about.  My one reader will be disappointed, but hey I've got to break down those expectations some day.  Thanks for reading!