[Druid] Naxx 25, health and you

Last night was our guild's first 'official' 25-man raid. We did fairly well, downing spider, plague and half of construct wing before having to call it a night.

And as Flyv pointed out recently, it's pretty easy. The only difficult trash mobs were the gargoyles that, at 30% start casting stoneskin which will heal. Everything else was AoE killed without any concern. We didn't have any deaths in the entire raid until the start of the military quarter - 6 bosses in. We wiped exactly twice - once on Razuvious due to some confusion on the mechanics, and once on Gluth. We even did the Safety dance flawlessly.

We've got 3 raid nights ahead of us and I fully expect that we'll be able to clear all of Naxx in that time - and likely get a good couple of looks at Malygos. We've already downed Sartharion in 25 and may do that again, as it's an easy 4 emblems, a 22 slot bag and a couple of nice T7 gloves.

On a personal note, I got basically the best upgrades I could hope for on the run: Valorous Shoulders and Origin of Nightmares. With those two pieces I am over 40k health raid buffed along with 33k armor. Now, keep in mind that I'm a Tauren Leatherworker, so I get a lot of health from those two sources - but also keep in mind that I am still using T6 helm and chest, BC trinkets, BC cloak and only 3 pieces of Naxx gear at all (10 or 25 man). Everything else is dungeon blues or epics. I fully expect quite a few upgrades coming up, especially to armor.

The Patchwerk fight was pretty interesting too. Thanks to the higher avoidance and high health pool, I took 3 times as many hateful strikes (161 vs 49) as the next warrior tank. Each hateful hit for 3k less damage, and they were avoided 4% more often. This is factoring block into the equation as well; block simply does not compare with armor when you're talking a 50k base damage hit. Even with my fairly poor gear (this was before the upgrades) I was still doing better than the T7-10 geared tank. Threat isn't an issue on this fight except that I had to tone down my attack rotation as I was close to surpassing the MT (this is because hatefuls give extra threat, not because our MT sucks at threat generation or I'm OMG awesome at it). At least on Patchwerk there's nothing mechanically bad about being a druid tank. Whether it's fun or interesting or whether we have the right tools for easymode raiding - well, that's another post in the making.

It's also unclear whether something like Patchwerk is a fair benchmark for gauging tank strength and consideration. True, it's one of the only fights where a tank's gear really does matter, but it also heavily favors a druid tank due to the high damage hits and high soaking requirements. It's likely that Gluth is a better fight to compare, as tanks have to go back and forth and he hits for medium damage, allowing you to judge exactly how two tanks are doing in the same situation.

All in all, it feels very much like Sunwell Plateau did post 3.0.2. Gluth requires some actual coordination, so I expect it to take a few attempts to get it down - but it's not all that hard. Razuvious requires our priests to do something they're not used to, so I expect that to take a couple tries. 4 horsemen is probably going to be the next challenge after that, but I don't think it's going to be a killer either. And none of these things is going to require the fairly good coordination and performance that Brutallus (pre-nerf) or Illidan did. It's exciting to be downing new bosses and all, but it's somewhat of a letdown on how easy it is.