Our once-a-week raid team is on the penultimate boss of Sanctum of Domination (Kel’Thuzad yet again!) having cleared Fatescribe Roh-Kalo on our 32nd attempt. We were on target to get through Sanctum before 9.2 launched but Fatescribe proved much harder than everything before. When we finally finished him off the celebration was one of relief more than exultation, though we were all very pleased with our strategic modifications that eventually got us over the line.

Posing around the remains

Sanctum has been interesting with some good fights and some less so. Flying around in the Eye was great and had some funny moments, as did Remnant of Ner’zhul with the platform knockbacks. We were stuck on Painsmith for a while (as I imagine everyone is until it starts to make sense), and most recently Guardian of the First Ones was a hard DPS wall until everyone found a few upgrades and took every possible consumable.

We run Normal mode, and one slightly disappointing thing we’ve all found is that the raid drops are generally worse than the maxxed out Korthia rep gear. It feels like any raid gear, even normal level, should be better than the best rep grind equipment. Some of the joy of downing a boss is reduced when we see the gear being a marginal improvement at best, and often worse. It’s a shame when gear drops are as disappointing as being rewarded 100 anima. At least there’s no chance of drama over who gets the drop!

Similarly to the gear, not being awarded a title (or mount, though I can see an argument for reserving that reward for heroic) for finishing a normal-level raid is disappointing. After finishing Nathria all we got was 2000 anima (sounds like a t-shirt)! Which is a terrible reward for months of effort. 32 runs at Fatescribe was about five hours of concerted work and that’s just one boss. I expect Normal raiders are the bulk or players (after LFR) and a title celebrating achieving a major content milestone would be appropriate.

Despite these minor gripes, working slowly but surely through a raid continues to be the best fun. Progressing from 87% ‘this is impossible’ to 0.1% ‘we got this’ (yep, 0.1%, not 1%!) wipes is immensely satisfying - albeit there was a lot of spicy language after missing that last 0.1%!

0.1% left on the boss

Nooooooooo