Yup, I'm saying it. I think I'm sick of Kara. While I do think that place is great, the bosses can be fun, the design is amazing... I'm sick of it. I've been healing that place every week for months now. Zzzzzz.
We did a full clear for the first time last night, took us about 5 hours with a few breaks. By "full clear" I mean Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, Opera, Curator, Shade, Illhoof, Chess, Prince. Nightbane still whupped us but I think we were all just tired by then. It was a good run and a sort of catharsis for me. I've been getting very frustrated at some of the aspects of running raids in my guild and it was something I needed.
I'm bored now, though. I'm going to continue running Kara for a little while longer on my warrior to get her ready to tank in the 25-mans, but I think my healer is about done. However, I've been looking at some boss fights and I think we're ready to move on. Mags isn't really that hard, and Void Reaver looks like we'll be able to do it.
I was going over the strats with Mega last night and getting all enthusiastic about it. It's a good sign.
I think it's something we need as a guild, too. We have the problem where people come in, run Kara with us for a little while until they get gear and get trained up and then they move on to a guild that's already in the 25-man places to do the same thing. It means that there's ten or so loyal people who just end up spinning their wheels in Kara because we don't have enough to move on. We're at a stage where we have 25 people with good enough gear and skills right now (last week we had three seperate groups down Prince, and we've seen him go down a couple of times this week) so I want to strike while the iron is hot.
Exact same thing happened to Bottle or Tree, except when we tried to make the jump to 25-man, the Officers basically couldn't be bothered organising that many people, or dealing with loot whores or whiners, and stopped logging on 'cause it wasn't fun anymore.
Raid Leading at the early 25-man - Gruul, Mag - level is probably the toughest. You really have to separate the wheat from the chaff, the pros from the slackers at that level to succeed or you just end up with week after week of 5% wipes and aggravation. After you've got a good enough core of people to do that stuff, later raiding is a relatively simple matter of gearing people up and learning the strats, which if they can learn Gruul and Mag then they should be good enough to handle everything.
I pray to god that the Shadows never require 'pro' to be a descriptor for anything we do. This is a game, and as no one else is paying me to play, I don't see why Pro should have any place in it. *shrug* Just me I guess.
Pro is the difference between understanding your class well, turning up to raids having read about the instance and read up on the strats for the boss, having Boss Mods and threat meters installed and getting your gear gemmed and enchanted rather than turning up to raids with no clue, no mods and crap gear. Pro doesn't mean being ultra-hardcore and grinding for pots more than you actually spend time raiding - my guild's in BT/MH and I spend about... an hour a week farming stuff, and that's mostly to pay plate repair bills since Fury Warriors die on trash too much. Ironically since moving from SSC/TK to MH I actually die a lot less since trash is less bent, leading to even less farm time.