A Hunter's Story

So I generally don’t raid 25 mans a whole lot. From having done it many times before, I’ve discovered a few things. First, I don’t want to organize one – not really worth being the one who has to deal with the idiots, the impatients, etc. Yes, the loot is better, but spread across more people, so taking probability of receiving gear into account, generally not really worth it. And lastly, and most important, they’re a LOT easier than 10 mans. However, from time to time I do run them because they can be fun.

Dispute me if you want, but as someone who does 10 mans regularly with skilled players, and who does 25 mans periodically… 25 mans are easy in comparison. Especially when you can PuG a successful 25 man without much trouble and yet coordinated 10 mans are tough to get through. Even when the average gear level is about the same. How to explain my position and how I come at this viewpoint… Hmm… One of the bars near us, we had a bartender who played WoW and did 25 man raids while bartending. Why? Because he could get up during the raid (during a boss fight or trash fights) and give us beer, and the group would still succeed no problem. Aka, his groups could pull the weight without trouble when a member or two were NOT EVEN THERE. So there’s a reason – in 25 mans you can have a player or two not there (run as 22 to 24 without trouble) while in 10 mans if you lose 1 player (9 man) you’re pretty seriously gimped. It’s a scale thing, but if you lose 10% of the players in 25’s, it’s not as detrimental as in 10’s, from my exp.

Another reason is that a few good people can carry the rest. In a 10, if you have a good tank and good healers… You still need good dps to get through the fights, or else they take forever and even good healers run out of mana on boss fights, even if the tanks are doing perfect jobs of keeping all the mobs on them. But in a 25 man? If you have a good tank, good healer or two, and decent dps or two? They can carry the group real well. Even for the bosses that require situational awareness – let the idiots die, then carry on. The fight’ll take a little longer, but it’ll still go down, lol.

I say this from experience, but you are free to disagree. Especially if you’re uber geared and a 1337 player who takes no crap from someone who doesn’t do 25 mans every day… But if you sit and think about it for a minute? You might agree. Not that this is anything new, considering I felt the same thing back in BC too.

But anyway, I digress. Last night was actually my first GDKP run, so I was curious how it worked. So I’ll share, in case anyone else is wondering. In our group, the Loot Master had an addon that made it easier. It was, quite simply, an auction. LM would post the item in chat with a minimum bid and with a 5 sec countdown. People would /raid a number (3600, for example) and LM would call it the high bid and then countdown. Whoever posted the highest when the countdown hit 0 won. LM would then do the next item. If you won, you went to LM and traded them the amount. When all items were done, the addon did the math to add it up & divide by # of players, then ask everyone to trade LM for their cut.

So the cool thing is that I actually won a drop. Deathbringer Saurfang dropped 3 pieces worth rolling on (worth rolling on for anyone in the raid I mean, not just Hunters). One went for 10,000g. Another for 6k. And the Protector’s Mark of Sanctification? 2,750. Add in that the split shares were 750g a piece, and I only dropped 2k on my mark. Pretty darn awesome! Half the raid was amazed/commenting/complaining that that’s the cheapest they’ve seen a mark go for, lol. Guess I was just lucky we had no warriors or shaman, and just like 4 hunters who haven’t yet figured out how to play the AH. Well, that and that none of them went over 3k which I think was going to be my limit, lol.

So now comes my only problem… I need more frost badges so I can upgrade a piece of gear. I mean, I could upgrade a piece now since I have enough badges, but the bad part is it wouldn’t be a piece I want to upgrade. My shoulders are 251 off an ICC-10 drop (Gunship), for example. So I really want to upgrade a 232 like my pants, except there’s another upgrade or two out there for them I could get instead. But I think what I’ll actually go for, is my chest. I already broke my 4 piece set bonus because I deemed the gear better than the bonus (or at least roughly equivalent, knowing I’d upgrade at some point). So this would get me on the road towards a second 2 piece bonus. Plus the new chest will be teh awesome! LOL. I just need more badges since it’ll take 95 to get the one to upgrade…

But anyway, it really did just reinforce my belief, again, that 25 man’s are easier. Especially when a 25 man pug can down Saurfang in 1 shot easily when our coordinated 10 man struggled to take him down. I know, I /rant. I just occasionally (well, Lady X would probably say “often” instead of “occasionally” hehe) get tired of people who are loud mouthed about “I run 25’s so I’m better than you” and then they start quoting their DPS or some other number. And they always forget about how you do more dps in a 25 man because of the buffs and all. Giving your Heroic DPS numbers would be a better baseline, but people don’t want to give the lower number, lol. Of cource, Heroic Dungeon fights are different from Raid fights, so I guess it’s a no-win situation. Ok, I know I know… /rantdone, lol.

So thx to Z for asking if I wanted to join in on the 25 man ICC run! It was fun, easy, quick, and I got a drop!