bah humbug

I'm all for the holiday season. It's great! Gift giving, spending time with family and loved ones, ridiculous amounts of red and green decorations, pretending that donating $0.37 to the red cross donation buckets will make a difference, but December is really just a black hole of a month where Raiding goes to die.

At the start of December all the school age guild members are busy preparing for finals and studying, or going to parties after finals are done, by Mid december, a lot of people leave behind their WoW computers to go somewhere else for the holidays. I know this is the situation for me, soon I'll have to say goodbye to my WoW computer as I spend 2 weeks at my parents house, and I know a lot of our guild members have already just done this.

We were missing 10 people for attempting Lurker Below, and all of the healers that were saved to the first Karazhan group. I ended up doing 2 heroic dungeon runs instead. Which was kind of nice, because I've felt ever since I got thrust into raiding ("No, we dont care that youre in greens and blues, we need more warm bodies") I have had hardly any time to run 5-mans, much less heroics. But at the same time, raiding turns down the volume on 5-mans. The boss fights -- which at one time seemed at least somewhat dangerous -- are now trivial and easily overcome. But thats probably just because I have twice as much shadow spell damage as I did back then.

But at the same time, it really sucks when you lose raiding momentum. It took us a while to down Gruul, but now that he is on farm we realize the critical mistake we were making in allowing the raid to show up without consumables. Magtheridon took a month for us to kill, but in reality, only one week, as the other weeks we were struggling with just getting people to actually show up to the raids. It'd be a nice Christmas gift to get Lurker and Reaver down before I have to run off, but its probably not happening.

Personally, I'd like to get through all of SSC, TK, MH, BT, and the unreleased Sunwell content before the next expansion pack drops, but guesstimating that we have some 12 months before WotLK drops, we'll be lucky to get through Kael'Thas before we all go running off to Northrend.