Fourth Naxx raid

A strange raid last night, but ultimately very successful. I logged on to find out one of our healers had gone into labour (4th child), and her husband (raidleader and main heal), plus two other family members (both mages and supposed to be in the raid) had rushed to help. So with the thought uppermost that RL was most important, I found some replacements and led the raid through the Spider and Construct wings.

We had one of our guild MTs with us - a prot pally who tanked pretty much everything in TBC and WotLK to date. I think he was even prot in vanilla warcraft. This guy was raid MT, and is great in stuff like this because he really knows what he's doing. He kept us going at a good pace all night, and there was a really good raid atmosphere.

The Spider wing was pretty smooth - I tanked Anub again and the intervene method is really really good - I just don't get hit by the locust swarm at all. It requires the rest of the raid to be on their toes to outrange it, but I stressed this firmly and repeatedly before the kill so everyone was well aware.

All the bosses in the Consturuct wing were new to me, but we one-shotted Patchwerk (me as MT) and Grobbulus. We took three tries to get Gluth, and it was one of those really satisfying fights where you come up with a strategy, it doesn't work, you adapt and succeed. We started with a dps-spec DK trying to kite the zombies with the help of a hunter and a resto shaman, but he eventually got caught and killed. Having wiped twice, I came up with a new, less subtle way of doing things - I figured that the DK could tank the boss for 8 seconds at a time so long as the healers were aware - he could pop bone armour, and only needed to keep the boss' attention for the debuff to expire from the MT. This prevented the debuff stacking more than four times on the MT. Meanwhile, I tanked all the zombies - I didn't bother with kiting - I just tanked them all on the grate. Occasionally I stunned them all with shockwave and ran away, but that was all. With some excellent healing I survived until right before the end, by which time we had the kill sewn up.

Thaddius went down second try - the first wipe was my fault because I got my left and right mixed up and ran to the wrong side. I had to write it down in the end, but the boss was otherwise pretty easy.

Great raid.