As Karoht said, having an officer along is pretty much just so we have someone that can tell the raid nicely to sit down and shut up, to whom the raid will actually listen. It isn't even really a matter of preventing drama or loot disputes. It's mostly just so that the raid will keep rolling along smoothly. Thankfully with two temporary officers it did, as we finished of the Spine encounter on our first serious night there (we got one or two pulls on the night of our first Blackhorn kill).

Unfortunately we weren't able to repeat that feat on tonight's first foray into the Madness encounter, but we still got pretty far in. About two thirds of the way through the fourth platform. Right now we're going with Ysera -> Alexstraza -> Nozdormu -> Kalecgos for our platform sequence. Our wipes mostly come from the fact that we're still learning the exact correct way to distribute our various CDs across the platforms. I actually brought my LFR T13 shoulders in stead of the non-tier normal mode shoulders from Morchok to get the buff on my Divine Guardian (range buffed to 100 yards, CD lowered to two minutes). Still, with the way we are handling Dragon Soul now there should be no reason why we shouldn't be pulling on Madness for at least one and a half of our three raid nights. Hopefully the gear we get from the first six or seven bosses on Wednesday will be that little extra push in the back we need to get him down by this time next week. After that, it's on to Morchok HC.