I wanted to clarify a few points and address some potential concerns regarding our plans for the March to the Moose:
1) Gear: Bosses below Xhul do not offer us anything other than perhaps a token to get a 2/4 piece bonus. Currently, everyone is well equipped to handle early heroic mode bosses and the later normal mode bosses and those are what we should be working on. With Xhul, Mannaroth, and early heroic bosses on the agenda, we hope to get the couple of people that do not have their 2/4 piece tier bonus squared away first. To be honest though, no one "needs" any gear from normal to down Mannaroth or Archimonde. We just need practice.
I realize that everyone has a piece or three that they want out of normal, but we've looked at every member of the raid group, and there are no upgrades from normal that are better than Normal Xhul/Mannaroth/Archimonde or the early Heroic bosses that we currently complete. Further, there are crafted JC pieces that can be bought for neck slots and there is Doom Lord that drops upgrades too. Outside of tier pieces (where we'll have a chance to get three tokens based on past success), continuing on normal just slows down our progress.
2) Raid members that do not have their 2 piece tier bonus will be given priority on any token drop for their class. This goes for Normal and Heroic modes. Officers are looking at gear and will distribute accordingly. With the goal to down Archi on normal and transition to full time Heroic raiding, we need to get everyone their 2/4 piece tier bonus so we can make these transitions smoother. After looking at gear, most everyone has at least a 2 piece set, and several have 4 pieces. This should make the distribution happen faster.
3) Heroic mode: I think there has been some confusion on how we are going to approach heroic on Sundays and I want to clear this up. We are going to start with a fresh lockout on Nov 22nd, and extend it until we hit a roadblock. Other than struggling with mechanics on Fel Reaver, we have no issues with the next couple of bosses after her and have yet to hit a boss that we could not down. We want to push until we hit that boss where we simply lack the gear, and once we know which boss that is, we plan to reset the lockout. We don't really know where that roadblock is because we haven't had many opportunities to get into heroic fights. As we only raid for six hours a week, cutting off normal-mode bosses where there is a single piece of loot that one person can use just seems like the smart move. We know the mechanics, we need to get more valuable gear.
4) Strategy: At this point in time, we plan to down Archimonde for several raid sessions both for practice and to get people their class trinkets. We likely will not do this enough times to get everyone their class trinkets, but we would like to get as many as we can to take advantage of the power of them. Also, doing this fight enough will prepare us (somewhat) for the heroic version. We're going to get there eventually, so it will be best to be ready for most of the mechanics instead of going in fresh on heroic.
We understand everyone ideally wants to have their BiS gear, but we overpower normal mode now and faceroll everything we know the mechanics for and the only bosses we have any issue with are the last two which we have logged very few attempts on. We need to start getting in there and doing these fights though so we can get that experience and give ourselves a better shot at completing this tier and getting the mount.
Expect there to be several resets over the next several months so we can get more gear for more people. There is no reason to assume that we're going to spend hours on one boss all weekend until we get it down. All we are doing is continuing on from where we're at.
If you still have questions, please feel free to contact an officer directly. If you need suggestions on upgrades (valor or bosses to use your bonus rolls on) please contact Balerstos.
