Remember when Ulduar came out and everyone (read: me and the like three people that will talk to me) hurt themselves trying to figure out a BiS list? I sat down to do this again for Trial of the Crusader; a bit late, but with only one boss a week available I didn’t feel it was particularly pressing. Well, go figure, the Patch That Blizzard Phoned In made it a complete no-brainer: pick the correct armor/role piece for each of your slots in the Heroic 25 man, done. An entire set with a tier of iLevel on the competition it just too much to overcome with gimmick stats, especially when half of the nearest tier is a direct downgrade. Trinkets might have some hope with their tendency for gimmicky itemization, but even those would have to come off of oh, say, Algalon. Oh, and wands. Since the 25 has none.
In other news, TRI got the new Trial boss down (big surprise, I know). I’m a bit mixed on this fight. On the one hand, it’s the first non-laughable fight in Trial. It pushes each and every raid member, and sometimes in ways I think are good. We’ve got a very, very PvE oriented raid, and the disassociation from personal awareness hurts us a fair bit. It’s not going to solve all of the problems we have with lackluster mental performance, but it seemed a good kick in the pants for things like “No really DPS, don’t be dumb, the healers can’t save you”, “No really healers, you have to do more than spam 2 and whackamole”, and “No really tanks, you uh….uh…you know what, fuck it, go Ret.” I’m cautiously optimistic it will improve our overall performance as a raid.
Ooooon the other hand, it’s an obnoxious “PvP” fight in PvE. Not that I don’t love my PvP, but there’s a time and a place for that, and more importantly, a type of people I do that with. TRI is, for the most part, not those people. Trying to coax a group of people containing members that have never ever set foot in so much as a battleground to accomplish even a semblance of PvP is an exercise in frustration. I can see this turning in to a fuckfest week after week as we bash our heads against an encounter that demands a skill set a large portion of our raid not only does not possess, but has no desire to possess. Of course, we could just bring more DKs and resto Druids and cheese the encounter. Fair and balanced.
In an attempt to end on a less negative note: I guess we’ll see. The actual kill we had on the encounter was fairly clean, so it may just have been something that needed to be learned and won’t be a problem again.
Blunt Trauma 
I really enjoyed that fight, but then, as you know, I do love me some PvP. I typically PvP as a healer tho, not a ret pally so the switch to DPSin a PvP fight was … odd. I probably spent way too much time cleansing/healing,Freeing, Protecting, etc, but then, I like using as many of my class skills as I can.
Having said that, once we got the order for the kill down, it seemed pretty easy and was then a matter of execution. I dont think it will be anywhere near as random as the Priestess in HMT was – mostly because of the diversity a 25 man raid brings which isn’t available in a 5 man.
Of course, there’s more configurations of horde heroes than what we saw, so it’ll be interesting to see what next week throws at us.
Our guild was in the same boat. We have a priest who hasn’t set foot in WG/SoA/IoC? yet – a DK who doesn’t know how to kite with Chains of Ice…with two Grand Marshall contenders.
I liked it, but only because it’s ‘different’ than a standard tank and spank.