Don't break my heart

Yeah - it's a shite song, but at least we pushed XT over last night after only two wipes. I'm sad to say this is our first hard mode kill, and it came a month after killing Yogg. We can't even muster the coordination to do FL +1 tower. I swear it's like our raiders hear "hard mode" and they instantly become drooling idiots. I don't know if it's the pressure to do more DPS or what, but that's what it feels like.

It's not just the DPS either.

Recently we cut back to five healers - which isn't much of a cut when you consider that we only have seven raiding healers in the guild to begin with. Our first night of trying this I grab my three trees and our priest, and we start rocking the joint. This is when I learned my first mistake.

Don't trust someone else's judgment.

Don't get me wrong, we have great trees. The problem is that without direction they tend to get scatterbrained and try to heal everyone at once. This tactic worked in Naxx, but that dog won't hunt on hard modes in Ulduar. Of course, I'm not entirely free of blame either. I'll admit that when the tank is topped off I have a burning urge to try and sneak heals out on the raid. This usually results in the tank getting folded.

That problem got sorted fairly quickly though, and we're making progress now. I really have to hand it to our members who have volunteered to sit on some bosses so we can rotate people in. I think they're also learning that my tolerance for missing a sub call is pretty minimal. One call on vent and/guild is all I give. We don't have time to sit around and wait for you. Logging off an alt is one thing - waiting for you to get back from the kitchen is another.

Oh yeah - XT was a stingy POS and failed to drop a fragment, even though we did kill him in hard mode.

I hate the RNG.