Welcome to the Firelands!

A week ago today 4.2 launched and the Firelands raid was thrust upon us. I was happy that we managed to kill Cho'Gall pre-nerf but a little sad that we failed to get Nefarian and Al'Akir down and having seen the Tier 11 content post nerf I'm a little bit more miffed than I was this time last week. Anyhow, I am sure you, my loyal readers don't want to know that, you want the low-down on the Firelands!

Day one saw almost the entire server head there and start farming rep like men (and women) possessed, I fell into this trap in Icecrown Citadel and regretted it because all it did was make me bored of the trash upto Marrowgar even quicker than the rest of the place and despite being a complete rep whore I'm not prepared to suffer that again. The reports in /2 of exotic epics and masses of rep kept flooding in but I resisted the temptation. I did have a quick 30 minutes on my lock as some guildies were missing a DPS but I kept resisting the temptation on Evlyxx.
Saturday Knight Fever, have yet to clear all the T11 content and we have a lot of new raiders so the decision has been made to continue to farm the T11 content on our Thursday raids and then move to the T11 end bosses and Firelands on Monday and Tuesday on our progression nights. This will hopefully only last a few weeks as the aforementioned nerf's mean that we can blitz though the farm content and shouldn't take long on learning the nerfed Nefarian and Al'Akir. Our trip this Monday to kill Cho'Gall took a bit longer than expected and with a few people having lag issues and DCs we decided not to move to Nefarian and went to Firelands trash instead.

Beth'tilac

Entering the Firelands you get presented with a great view that looks like an open world area rather than a typical instanced dungeon, vendors selling rep items and a repair guy. Moving down a stairway into the zone itself you finally see the trash, seemingly scattered randomly, again as in an open world setting. There is a lot of trash and while its great for fast reputation gains it is a major annoyance that I believe is designed to actually slow progress down.

Unfortunately, the trash isn't difficult and although some mobs have some interesting mechanics that need to be dealt with they fall into the  "fun now but annoying in 4 weeks time" category. Especially the spinning turtles that knock you around at best and at worst into yet another trash pack or off teh edge if you're a bit careless with your positioning.

Hopefully there are mobs that are not necessary to clear and others that despawn on certain boss kills else coming here on multiple nights is going to make the trash tiresome quickly. So we finished Monday by clearing the trash to Beth'tilac which is our first target and treated is as a scouting mission for Tuesday.

Our first night of wiping came last Tuesday and the Beth'tilac fight looks fun. Once we worked out how to get our tank and healer up to the spider while the other 8 deal with the trash below things looked both fun and very doable. The only thing I will say is that being up there:
a) feels a very cramped;
b) Is very unforgiving on mistakes - either tank or healer being slow to move or falling through the hole;

Hoping for a kill this week though, which should have been yesterday as you read this or this evening as I am writing it.