Currently my guild have started in Naxx this week in Europe and are at Gothik.

Through a guild vote several days before the patch, it was decided upon going Deathknight wing.
Upon reaching Razuvious and wiping for the first night figuring out the mechanics of the fight/perfecting the pull/timers/etc., our leader compiled tactics and the following evening it took us 4/5 attempts to kill him.
After our first days raiding, another poll was created whether to push hard on the DK wing or kill the first bosses in each wing for 'easy' loot (excluding Patchwork ofc). Many members felt like pushing the unknown DK wing, pushing hard and after 2 days of wiping around the 3/4 minutes mark we just get overrun and is similar to what a C'thun stage 2 wipe would look like but 10 times faster.

As it stands we have 2 choices:

- Get a flask up on everyone, mongoose, arcane elixirs, etc. and push hard to break the 'fabled' 6 minute barrier, which I believe was the time on the test server at which the adds despawn and you could actually damage Gothik, and see what happens and whether or not Phase 2 is possible. This is basically going in blind and exploring at a very high cost.

- The other option is to ignore Gothik completely and go for the spider wing (which has been cleared, thus farmable) and wait until: a) Another guild kills Gothik or b) wait until official word from Blizzard that Gothik has been 'retuned'.


Either option would be a possibility but venturing into the unknown could result in either fat epics and a world first or a severe ass-handing and alot of flasks wasted.

Any opinions?

Ah, the dilemma of risky-yet-uber-rewarding vs safe-but-less-rewarding. I myself am a risky person who would think of the situation in the following light... Flasks for an entire raid: 3000 gold. Repair bills for a night's worth of wiping: 600 gold. A decent chance at unprecedented progress: priceless.

As surprising as it may sound, gear is progression so I would have killed the clearly killable first. Our decision to go for Maexxna, an encounter we knew nothing about, was essentially someone else's kill.

Yea, we know nothing of these bosses yet, except for the ones that have been killed. That confirms them as actually being killable and not bugged in any way, so guilds go for them. We killed Anub, Raz and Noth this week and we'll be doing Spider Wing next reset all the way 'til Maexxna now that kills begin streaming in.

We just got our tank in 2/8 Dreadnaught as well and gear is definately progression. Those 4 and 6 set bonus will basically get us a very solid tank for this place, and with solid tanks you can do everything :)

It's pretty convinient to always follow other peoples track. We just went for Anub'Arakh, Razuvius, Noth, Faerlina and today we will kill Maexxna.

Are we cowards for not "going on our own" ? Sure. Do we care? Not really. It's smart. Our guild isn't pro enough to ever get a world first anyway, and we don't really care about world firsts so it's a win win situation.

From what I´ve heard Gothik is pretty hardcore and he was rehauled only a week or so before the patch went from PTR to live. The fight could easily be too imbalanced. Wiping on him for another week seems kinda stupid.

Our instances reset this night, so now you have lost quite some loot from possible Anub'arakh/razuvious/noth/grand widow kills.

Yeah, we got kinda caught up in this sort of "world first!" whirlwind when we were trying Heigen a couple days ago. The truth is, Heigen's bugged, and on top of that, the encounter's no walk in the park, either. Gothik could be the same way. We tried that guy for a couple hours and got basically nowhere. These guys aren't dead yet for a reason.

The truth is we're not really sure if our dps is good enough or if our gear is good enough for even Patchwerk, so it's better if we just keep trucking on the stuff we know can be done. Spider wing, Razuvious, Noth, and eventually, Patchwerk. We want to keep farming the trash drops, too -- we've gotten 3 Harbingers of Doom -- and if all the rogues end up with those, we could be in a lot better shape dps-wise. Getting loot is better than not getting loot.

Don't let the thought of a "World First" make all the decisions for you, basically. We're really not expecting them, seeing as we're Horde and prolly not up to par yet gear- and stratwise compared to the guilds that have downed Maexxna and Patchwerk. There's not much glory to be gained when you're the only Horde guild to succesfully run Naxx on your server either, with only one big Alliance guild doing the same on the other side and we're both doing decent on the EU lists comparably.

That said, there is a definite drive to at least "keep up" and I think that makes for healthy guild progression. We've had some really good loot from the bosses we did kill; Hatchet from Noth, Iblis from Raz and Touch of Frost from Anub', along with 2 pieces of Dreadnaught for the MT. That makes for some hella decent item progression for my taste, one you'll be missing out on if you just throw yourself at a boss noone's killed yet and might be untuned (Gothik) or just plainly bugged like Heigan. I'd advise you to start with the Spider Wing next reset and see how you fare.

Farming the trash in the DK wing up until Instructor is very doable with a small group.
Our server is hardly hardcore but we can do it with a group of 12.

You can definitely farm a lot of the trash with a midsize group. The problem is that most wings mix trash that would easily be 15-mannable or 20-mannable with trash that is nontrivial for a full raid. The ghoul/slime packs in the plague wing could be done with 20 very easily. The gargoyles patrolling would be literally impossible with 20. You could easily kill a Retcher or Spewer in the Abom wing with a small group, but good luck getting through the 4-Golem pull at the start with that group. And so forth. That said, the DK wing is probably your best bet if you want to try to clear some trash with 20ish people.

As for farming Naxx down the line, I don't think anyone will ever do that zone in one day (in the expansion maybe, but not at 60) unless they specifically set out to marathon-clear it. Once Naxx is truly on farm, there really won't be any reason to do BWL at all anymore, though I expect people will continue doing some AQ for C'Thun drops and getting healers their hybrid sets for leveling in the expansion, so there'll be plenty of time in the week. I think 2-3 day clears of Naxx will eventually be the standard. (Either 2 Wings/2 Wings/Sapp+Kel, or 3 Wings/1 Wing+Sapp+Kel.)

Stupid question, but do you have to full clear it? There are no optional bosses?

My guild got a lot of experience on gothik on test, and we recently tried him again on live servers. In my opinion he's still a bit overtuned, even though he was nerfed considerably from test. We have gotten him to come down a couple times, although the attempt was basically over shortly before that happened. That said, it might be doable if you loaded consumables, although i would still consider him one of the more difficult bosses that have been fought so far.