Seems like this is a somewhat relevant thread to ask this, so...

My guild has Gruul on farm, and we've just started working on Mag. The nice thing about Mag is the small amount of trash - we currently hit Gruul on Wed which is a 3 hour raid. Clearing Gruul takes ~1 hour, which means we get almost 2 full hours of attempts on Mag. the problem is that the Mag fight is hard and we don't seem to ever have an ideal class balance for the fight - especially when we come straight from Gruul. Two weeks ago we got Mag to ~65%; last week we just didn't have the healers to survive that long.

What do people recommend as the logical next boss to focus on after Gruul? I've heard Void Reaver is fun, but the one time we looked at TK the trash was lengthy and painful. Is an SSC boss a better bet perhaps? And if so, which one?

SSC trash is quite harsh as well, but your best bet will be hitting The Lurker Below. This fight is basically a harder version of Ragnaros.

While Void Reaver may be an animated pile of easy dropping epics, the trash before him is a pain in the but and simply time consuming. I'd agree that it would be worth checking out Lurker. He is behind a fair bit of trash which can cut your attempt time.

While I haven't seen him myself yet, my understanding is that if you can get the resist gear together for Hydross he's another possible target.

We worked on VR and Mag simultaneously, and ended up downing them on consecutive days (took several weeks of attempts: casual guild, not PvE gods).

The TK trash is lengthy but rewarding, and in my opinion not THAT painful. It's overwhelming at first but you quickly get the hang of the necessary CC'ing. Certainly everyone with a tier 2 blacksmithing epic will love you for grinding through the trash.

We're working on resist gear for Hydross but our NR tank is currently taking a break over the summer, so umm...yeah.

I guess our choices are Mag, VR, or Lurker then. Question: Given our current progression, once we do it a couple of times and get the hank of it, how long should it take us to clear to Lurker? To VR? With our current raiding schedule we really only have about 2 hours (in case it wasn't obvious, we're really quite casual), which makes trash a concern.

I suppose trash epics and vortices make the SSC/TK trash less of a pain, although the one time we cleared to VR we got a grand total of zero drops. Bleh.

Repeating a bit from above, but anyways...the trash to Void Reaver isn't exactly hard on an individual pull basis, however it is a lengthy clear. Hall after hall of 9ft tall blood elves, robots, and crazed demons. When you have the pulls down, and can clear them with minimal downtime, you're looking at about a 40min clear, maybe less if you are really moving. Lurker is probably a little lower once you get the hang of the Hydross trash which shouldn't take too long. The Six-Pumping-Station Trash is very very easy. It's just that there's six of the packs.

Generally for us it's about 35-40mins to clear to VR (+/- 5 mins or so). It takes us about 10-15mins to clear the Hydross trash, and maybe 20 for the Lurker trash. These are half-guesses as I've never really timed them, but our raids start at 7:30 and we're usually clearing to Lurker by 8:15 (Hydross kill and buff/prep time in there), and if we start with VR, we usually reach him about 15-20mins after 8.

No trash drops is pretty unlucky, don't expect that to be the norm. We've had murloc packs thatt have dropped two Spyglasses, and this past week we had hunter belt patterns from consecutive Leotheras packs. Good luck in there, some of the packs look overwhelming, but once you pull them once or twice it becomes cake if everyone sticks to their assignments.

It sounds like you're going to do just fine. The transition to 25 man content is always a difficult process, probably the hardest phase in TBC. Everything you're talking about here is something I'm sure every guild has experienced. Mine certainly did.

Just always remember that it's better to take one step back if that's what will get you two steps forward. Going backwards in progression to get two Kara groups off the ground is completely normal. Once you get to Gruul you'll probably end up having to pause progression again to gear up your offtank so he can take Growth 14-15 Hateful Strikes, again a very normal process.

As for your tank issue. I'm afraid that's just a lack of dedication if no one (not even you) is willing to spec into full protection. If you want to progress then you need to bite a few bullets, proper spec is one of those must-have things that will impede your progress until you do it. It's not as disheartening as you think though; if you can maintain a steady gold income then it's not so much trouble to respec on a weekly basis. It seems daunting but it's only 100 gold a week. My guild's main tank respecs multiple times a week and is able to reimburse himself for both his respecs and his ridiculous repair bills by completing his dailies and farming for about an hour a day.

Congratulations on Nightbane. You'll get Prince on farm soon enough, just be smart about moving your tank in coordination with your raid.

Hope this helped.

Congratulations on Nightbane. As for Prince, try to be proactive about your raid an tank movement so you don't get boxed in by infernals if at all possible.

As for your tank issue, I don't think you want three full time prot warriors. While excellent for holding agro, prot warriors aren't really good for much else. Having two in the raid is very helpful, especially if you're low on feral druids, but more is a bit of a gimp. What I would suggest is allowing one of your other warriors to spec fury or MS with the understanding that if one of your prot warriors can't show up one week then a temporary respec to protection is in order.

Actually I think Void reaver before any boss in SSC is probably a fantastic idea. Its a good 1 night pony, and if you time rezzes you can have 3.5 hours of attempts on him in 1 night.

We did VR before stepping foot in SSC and I recommend you do the same. Bring at least 2-3 locks for banishes and soul stones and you should down him in a couple nights.

On prince we found if you stack the raid with DPS and run 2-3 good healers we had better success with the randomness of the encounter. As has been stated many times - it's all about positioning. Have someone in the raid in charge of calling out where the raid will move (mark a ranged member) if an elemental drops on them and where the tank will move to if an elemental drops on him. Move before you get boxed in and pay attention to elementals that have recently de-spawned (a good place to head to). Sorry for the prince talk I know there is a thread on it........

No, no worries, Klauso. Its all helpful information. The loot thing might come back to bit us a bit sooner than we thought as we got Maulgar down tonight on the 2nd night of trying him (meh, not sure how to type that any other way than it sounding like showing off, which it definitely is not). Loot was distributed via loot council for now.

Yeah, we've been pretty lucky that due to attendance issues (RL - we're not a very demanding raid and deliberately so), both our MTs have geared up quite equally. Beyond those two, however, yeah, there is a bit of a gap, mainly due to precious little tanking loot dropping (most off-tanks/other warriors have perhaps 1 or 2 kz items at most).

My guild uses a form of a loot council and it has worked extremely well. We maintain a page on our internal guild wiki that lists all of the bosses we've killed and their loot table. Each member is required to list their name on pieces they're interested in - bold for extremely interested, normal font for moderate interest, and italics for sidegrade/fungrade.

When loot drops, we ask for anyone who's interested to send a message to officer chat with what they currently have. Members have the ability to send but not read /o. Officers take into account how interested people are in the drop, see how long it's been since their last piece of loot, and then figure out where it's going to mesh best. We also try to distribute loot evenly between officers, old hands, and new recruits.

The system seems a little convoluted, but the more data the officers/council have to work with, the better the decisions they'll make, and the happier the guild will be with the system.

We took out VR prior to entering SSC. We also only had one lock. Learning his trash was really, really fun.

You used to not be able to banish those adds at all. So 1 warlock isn't that bad. Line of sight the saw blades.

We use /roll in Kara and blind DKP bidding in 25 mans. In WOW 1.0 we had a loot council but only to decide on what classes could bid on which items. So far in TBC we haven't had any loot issues and the majority love blind bidding because everyone puts their own values on each item. It's fun to try to outbid someone by the smallest amount. But of course we run the risk of poor loot distribution because someone put in a dumb bid. I can definitely see the strength of a loot council for a guild that wants to progress fast.

We were under the impression that Saw Blades are still launched while they are banished. Even now we fight that trash using all sorts of line of sight tricks because that's how we learned it.

TK trash is considerably harder than SSC trash, but you have a terrific advantage in TK with the grave yard being right outside. So long as you have a tank and a healer up, your raiders can die all they want and just run back in time to finish off the fight. Wiping on VR's trash is nearly impossible unless your tanks all die.

My guild is planning our 2nd night of HKM attempts soon. We tried it once, about a month ago, and wiped 30 times essentially on the pull (we got the priest down once). Now our MT and mage tank are a lot better geared, and I hope that will make a difference.

The thing that boggles my mind about how Karazhan and Gruul's lair are setup is that a guild starting HKM will need 8-9 healers. Kara takes 2 healers, and Gruul is 2.5x as big a raid as Kara - shouldn't it take 5 healers? We're basically going to be going in with 2-3 healers who have no Kara experience, and more greens than epics.

How is this transition intended to be handled? Are we supposed to have certain people respec resto/holy for Gruul's, then back to their original dps/tank spec for Kara? Or are we supposed to be running 3-4 Kara raids to gear up enough healers, then sit a large fraction of our tanks and DPSers?

My Kara raid and the three others of friends guildies all use 2 tanks, 5 dps, and 3 healers for a Kara run, which I thought was a standard composition. That comes out to 7.5 healers for a 25 man raid, which is what we usually run with.

I guess the answer is that if you have Kara raids skilled enough to run with 2 healers, you might be able to squeak by in Gruul's with 5 healers?

Kara takes 2 healers NOW. It used to be harder when it started. Used to bring 4, but as poeple learnt you optimized to less and less. Same with 25, bring 8-9 on learning, doesn't hurt, get more comfortable, then drop down to 7-8 or the least you can do it with.

That's probably a really bad idea. Figure, at minimum, 3 healers on the Maulgar tank, 1 healer on the hunters/moonkin covering Kiggler, 1 healer on the mage tanking Krosh, then 1 healer apiece for the Olm and Blindeye tanks. (Yes I know Olm is supposed to be tanked by the felhounds, but generally you'll want a DPS warrior/feral standing by in case he breaks.) So 7 healers, but since you're slightly undergeared, perhaps add 1-2 healers, or partial resto/holy druids/retadins/shamans that can dps decently as well.

Why are your healers wearing greens? PMC/Whitemend covers 5 slots, and it's close to T5 in quality. A couple of instance runs should net them some very decent blues. Ask one of the well-geared healers in a Kara group to sit out so you can sub in a poorly geared healer and gear him up quick.

Oh and by the way, make sure the Maulgar tank gets the Inspiration specced priests or the Ancestral Fortitude specced shamans. The extra armor bonus helps.

TBC is actually a lot more flexible than many threads on these boards might make it out to be. Our first Maulgar/Gruul kills were with only 6 healers; if your DPS can push themselves a little harder it literally can make up for the lack of a healer (or two). Also, don't be afraid to juggle your raiders. Maulgar is going to require at least three tanks - which means you should have enough tanks for 3 Karazhan groups. When you get to Gruul it's all right to swap out a tank for more DPS or another healer. Just swap out a different tank next time. Your raiders will understand, progression is important to everyone and if you're fair with how you manage your raiders then you will see little to no contest to your decisions.