So where is that Naxxramas thingy anyways?

It just hit me, today. What have I done?! Was my brain on vacation yesterday? What the hell was I thinking?

I don’t like to raid lead. I am really bad at raid leading. I have sworn never to raid lead again.

So, given these circumstances, the smart thing to do would be to not scrounge up a team of bold adventurers to go exploring Naxxramas on Sunday the 7th, right?

It would probably be even smarter to not say, hey, no gear requirements, everyone is welcome as long as you are level 80!

Possibly the most unrivalled smartness of all would be not to explicitly ask the bold adventurers to refrain from reading up on the fights so we can wing it as we go along?

Well, I have never claimed to be smart, if someone thinks I am it’s at their own risk ;P

I guess I got carried away by the insane amount of fun I’ve been having doing all the Northrend dungeons.

Larue dinged 79 last night in an Oculus run. On the finish of that run she got her Northrend Dungeonmaster achievement, the proof that she has successfully beaten all of the Lich King dungeons on normal difficulty.

On every single first run I’ve been going in not knowing what to expect and I have been very reluctant to let anyone say anything about tactics before we have tried it ourselves first.

Sure, we have suffered a few wipes before we figured out what to do, and on a few occasions we have even left without having finished the run, admitting defeat temporarily.

Most of us have played this game for a long time and we have conditioned reflexes. Black spot forming on the floor (or black wall-to-wall carpeting spot like in the Halls of Stone)? Don’t stand in it! Something sparkly cast on me? Run away from the others, it will probably explode soon. For almost every boss, we have encountered something similar before, and if we didn’t nail it the first time now we did it on the second or third or another time.

But nail it we did, and in all the coming dungeons we will nail it again. Don’t ever doubt that.

And it’s a great feeling to trust in your guildies to react and to be able to play good. Sure, we all make mistakes and screw up sometimes, but hey, so what? It’s a lot of shit going down, red and green numbers flying all over, flashes and bursts and beams of many different colours all over the screen, its easy to miss that you suddenly sizzle a little extra because that pink magnifying glass-beam has started to burn you down like an ant before it is too late, at least if you have never encountered it before. We die, we run in, ress up, and throw ourselves back into battle again. We talk tactics and ideas and suggestion together, not “I read that you are supposed to do this when the boss does that.”

So, high on this instance-running fun, I thought why not check out Naxx as well? The official guild runs weren’t supposed to start until mid-January after the holidays, why not use these weeks until then to do some exploring with like-minded guildies, and since I planned to be 80 by the weekend why not ask around and see if anyone else is available on Sunday evening?

The Northrend dungeons are fast to run through - no more 6-hour runs like BRD or even 3-hour runs like Shadow Labyrinth - and pretty easy on the gear-dependency. (But are they too easy, as the extensive QQ’s of the so-called top guilds seems to indicate? And, really, who cares about that hyped whining? I mean, you buy a game and then you use all short-cuts available to “win it”, and then you complain that there is nothing left for you to do? I wonder if all those “top guild” players always fast forward when they watch a movie, or if they always read the last pages of a book first.)

So, judging by the 5-mans, the 10-mans shouldn’t be that bad either (I hope). I have warned the people going with me that this will be a test run, an exploration run, a fun Indiana Jones-style “We’ll think of something” mission into the unknown and not to expect a full clear and that anything downed, even a trash mob, will be counted as a success!

I have faith in my guildies’ abilities to play good and save the day. I have less faith and more doubts about my own ability to lead them in any way, but as I started this, I’d better do my best to finish it as well.

Wish me luck.