Naxxramas Retrospective

A few thing you should know.

1. I started playing the day before patch 2.4 (Sunwell Plateau)
2. I never raided before Wrath (except a couple retro raids)
3. My guild did not make significant progress in Ulduar.
4. We're not a raiding guild, we've gotten to reliably down the lower spire and festergut- usually.

Anyways, a retrospective on Naxxrams!

Lets start with the Arachnid Quarter:

1. Anub'Rekhan: a fairly straight forward fight. It taught how to manage a single add, getting out of non-visual fire, and spreading out.
2. Grand Widow Faerlina: My off tank is a Faerlina, so I don't know if this is anything special. Anyways, another straight forward fight that taught how to manage adds, that you want to kill at a specific time, in a specific manner.
3. Maexxna: Teaches how to deal with incapacitations, either breakable single target, or raid wide.

Plague Quarter:

1. Noth the Plaguebringer:  Noth was another simple fight, decursing and add management were the raiding traits exhibited here- simple stuff really.
2. Heigan the Unclean:  Also known as the "The Dance Boss" Heigan is all about positioning, mobility and knowing where to not stand. He also dropped my first epic: Demise.
3. Loatheb: He taught about positioning, buff management, shoe-throwing and ridiculous healing parameters.

Military Quarter:

1. Instructor Rasuvious: He taught us how to deal with unusual circumstances- meaning, the MC'd adds that needed to tank and be healed.
2. Gothik the Harvester: He worked on making the raid leader be able to balance his raid, by splitting in, and having each group be sure to not hurt the other group by going too fast or too slow.
3. The Four Horsemen: This fight was about debuff management and fulfilling roles you aren't used to. We usually had a ret pally, a enhance shammy, or a affliction lock do tanking- a weird experience for those classes.

Constrcut Quarter:

1. Patchwerk: was a simple dps race and taught us about tank threat and dps threat management.
2. Grobbulus: He helped teach tanks how to kite and other members of the raid how to move to avoid hitting other people with aoe effects.
3. Gluth:  He taught the DPS  how to kite and the tanks how to taunt off at appropriate intervals. He also taught healers how to not panic when everyone almost died.
4. Thaddeus: Again, similar to Gothik, there was the balancing, but then, in phase two, there was movement and debuff management.

Frostwyrm Lair:

1. Sapphiron: This lovely dragon showed what a dragon could do: cleave, breath attack and tail swipe. Additionally, she showed us how some line-of-sight mechanics can work, via her ice-blocks.
2. Kel'Thuzad: KT taught us add management, positioning, cast-interrupting and add/boss tanking.

Looking at it, Naxxramas pretty much taught everyone whatever they could need to know, in simple mechanics. None of the fights were hard to learn, and most of them had a single phase. If they had multiple phases, the phase shifts were distinct- eg, boss being there/not being there and similar situations.

The one thing that it didn't really teach was 'don't stand in the fire'. There aren't any persistent fires anywhere in the instance. The only thing that could be considered as such is Heigan's plague sprays, but that kills players too fast for it to be something that you can run out of realistically.