Late update on our next kill since my internet connection was dead at home on Wednesday. I had to steal internet access from a guildmate to be present for the kill of our second boss in Naxxramas, Instructor Razuvious. Razuvious is a gimmick fight, but a really cool one. Even though the content has largely been spoiled already on sites like wowwiki, I won't say too much about it. Props go out to our priests though for a job very well done on this one.
Overall this fight was probably a bit easier, and a good deal more fun than Anub'Rekhan for most roles. The gimmick has a high random factor which makes the fight much more challenging than it could be, but still very much controllable with the proper precautions.
We came back in on Thursday and cleared the admittedly rather challenging two-gargoyle pulls. They're a surprising DPS test for trash mobs. Finishing the third gargoyle pack brought us face to face with our third boss, the first of the plague wing, Noth the Plaguebringer. Noth was an interesting fight from a raid lead perspective, figuring out exactly how to allocate our damage dealers throughout. The ultimate issue being a balancing act between control and all out maximum DPS. Noth ends up being the first real gear test of Naxxramas; it's very demanding on your damage classes being competent and organized. I'd expect that most guilds that are much further behind us gear-wise will struggle with this encounter.
Like Anub'Rekhan the Noth fight ends up being unleashable and most people aren't able to be resurrected on death, a rather stark change of pace from Razuvious the night before. Hopefully once we get further into the wings the boss fights trend towards being leashable and wipe-recoverable as the last thing we want now is a C'Thun-like 6 minute corpse run.
We still remain very pleased with the challenge presented by Naxxramas and the fun design of the encounters.
The Razuvious kill yielded our first [item]Splinter of Atiesh[/item]. Yamato was rewarded with this as a thanks to the effort he put into getting us prepared for Naxxramas, as well as his outstanding long-term dedication to the guild. 'Grats, and thank you. :)