I've spent little or no time with my guild in World of Warcraft last week or the week before. Just didn't get around to it, didn't get computer problems fixed in time, had other stuff going on, whatever. This Tuesday I got on and we raided like usual, or maybe even a bit better than usual. When we got to Festergut, though, we got wiped out probably at least five times. Just couldn't kill him; several times it was because we were doing everything right except for doing damage too slowly. I'm told the guild has managed it before, but it must have been while I was away. So before Thursday's raid I played around with my character a bit, hoping to improve his damage a little bit. In Thursday's raid, we tried the boss short one person, I'm not sure why exactly, and got killed. The second time we tried we got our 25th person and killed him. The weird thing is, the second time my dps was quite a bit lower than the first. I can't remember anything I did wrong the second time, and in fact I had to move around a lot less than most people on that fight. Something like 10 percent. Either time I'm pretty sure I did better than Tuesday, but still, it's baffling. I wouldn't expect random variation to have such a big effect, especially not on that fight.