Tuesday we were commanded by Zilga to set a new land speed record as we burst through the fights we have on farm. We dutifully complied, not making much of a record in terms of time, but we still managed to clear all the farm off our plates for the week. I also managed to snag the shoulder token, finally scoring my 4pc bonus. Excitement ensued, I assure you.

In any case, Wednesday marked our first night on Nef, and a full night at that. We spent all 3.5 hours on him, doing around 25 pulls. We had some annoying afks which slowed us down, but thankfully the progression was steady. I have a really good feeling about this fight.

Of course, I couldn’t be that boastful off the bat. The urge to evacuate my bowels was intense the first few pulls. All going down between Onyxia, the adds, bolts of electricity arcing across the room, Nef landing — it was initially overwhelming. As we did a few more pulls, the rhythm of that first minute became more and more obvious and it started to click. People got in position faster, tanks got their targets in place faster, I managed to not need that paper bag for breathing anymore. Clicking.

After a short while we got the hang of it all and began focusing on our second big hurdle: managing the P1->P2 transition. We were knocking Onyxia off immediately after the second crackle, which seemed to work well for us. The pacing was pretty instinctual too, Onyxia’s electric power never topped off (well, except for once) and we had super clean transitions every time.

With phase 1 in the bag, it was time to shift our attention to working on phase 2. Between people needing to perfect their method of getting onto the pillar, along with a chaotic approach to interrupts, we had some trouble getting the hang of phase 2.

After a slew of attempts we got better and better at it. I think a huge help was locking down interrupt rotations and, moreover, locking down unnecessary communication in mumble which seemed to be tripping some people up. Instead of random folks calling out they got their interrupts off, I took the approach of a motivational drummer on a Viking rowship. Some people were 1s, others 2s, and I just kept reporting “1 is coming up, here you go. Ok, that was 1, here comes 2″ and so on. The last few attempts of the night when I started doing that we starting seeing major progress with that process.

Coincidence? I think not! (I know, the ego on this one.)

Second to last attempt of the night, two of the three pillars managed to off their Chromatics.

The third pillar with their Chromatic still breathing lost some of their dps in the transition, which really hurt them. I briefly considered bubbling and attempting to swim over and help out, but decided that was actually as crazy as it sounded.

Nonetheless! We managed to enter Phase 3, which wasn’t half-bad.

Pretty good for our first night, methinks. We’ll get better as we get more attempts and more practice into it. I don’t think will nearly take us as much time to down as Al’Akir did. It’s a little bit like the end of ICC when we did heroic Sindragosa before heroic Putricide, spent a month on Sindy, and then stomped Put in about two weeks. I have a good feeling about this!

Housekeeping

I’m going to Paris next week (well, flying out tomorrow) for another one of my work trips. As such, blogging won’t be very existent here (not that it has been, lately). I’ll be bored and living in twitter, so feel free to drop me a tweet if you want to alleviate my crushing boredom. I’ll also still be doing my WoW Insider column on Friday, like usual. I’ll be sure to take a hokey photo for you all of me leaning on the Eiffel Tower while it’s in the background and I’m in the foreground. I’ll also pick you all up a beret-shaped coffee mug.

It feels like we’ve been working on Al’Akir forever. Apparently it’s only been for the entirety of the month of March. The 2nd was first night we started working on him, and did only two half-assed pulls. Four weeks of real progression later, and here we are, according to the same old formula, with a kill. Everything went according to plan, I guess.

I knew we were headed in the right direction when on the second pull of the night we hit 20% and entered phase 3. That showed we were building on the knowledge of the previous weeks, and were ready to close the deal on this cursed fight.

We proceeded through a series of pulls — some fantastic, some that had immediate calls for wipes because a few people died right off the bat — though the trajectory was clearly heading lower and lower. As the night slowly ticked towards its final hour, we were officially on the precipice. The second to last pull, at around 40 minutes left in the raid, we got Al’Akir to 5%. As I wrote in the reason box for the EP bonus I handed out, “FIVE [bleep]ING PERCENT”. It was a huge psychological barrier that we just lept over.

Of course, most of the raid died around the 10% mark, and then five of us spent a minute dodging storm clouds and got him down to 5% before Dara went OOM and we finally exploded. Nonetheless, I think it reinforced for most of the raid how easy the phase was, and gave them a better comfort level with dodging clouds and maintaining a better planar discipline.

We also were getting to a point where we could get through phase 2 without the feedback debuff ever falling off Al’Akir, which was definitely key for us getting through that phase as soon as possible.

All in all, things were coming together in new and exciting ways. On the last attempt we made it through phase 1 with everyone up, phase 2 I believe only one person died, and we hit phase 3 fresh and ready to seal the deal. We met up at the bottom and slowly worked out way up after each cloud spawn, all the while screaming obscenities at our monitor and attempting to murder Al’Akir through sheer will. Damage slowly melted away his health bar as we all ceased breathing.

At around the 2% mark we all started getting that “holy cow, this is happening feeling” (despite a good chunk of the raid having bit it) and a few people shouted out encouragement on Mumble. “You got this guys!” “We’re at the points where dots can finish him off!” “Hold it together!”

2%, then 1%, then that excruciating decimal phase where time slows down to the point where you can hear the individual flaps of a hummingbird. Finally, the airy bastard keeled over and coughed up his purples… after encasing them in a crystal.

People were elated, this had been a month in the making. A huge wave of relief washed over the raid as we contemplated our victory. It’s been a hard month for ES. We’ve lost some old friends due to real life concerns or burn out (ES is recruiting dps, bee tee dubs!) and for a bit it was looking like this would be a bridge too far for us. I’m so happy we pulled it out and breathed some new life into the raid.

Next week we begin the slow march to killing Nefarian.

This also marks the first end boss kill in the new reign of Zilga and Falowin. Major kudos to Zilga who managed to hammer our unruly bunch into a spreading out machine and was Napoleonic in her leading us towards this kill.

Last night before I logged, she asked me in Mumble for a catchy title to use on the guild blog post talking about the kill. I immediately offered up “Putting the genie back in the bottle”, which she proclaimed as genius. (I probably could have done better, but looking at the title of this post, I guess not.)

In any case, it’s another milestone in my post-leadership tenure ES. Proof that “life” goes on. As such, I join in everyone’s elation.

I like to pride myself on my stupid luck sometimes, and last night was another sterling example of lady lucky shining her gilded, drooling countenance upon me. We were on Chimaeron and had a bit of a rough start. At least five people dead going in phase 2, terrible timing putting a massacre right near the start of phase 2, and down a healer for most of the fight to boot. I was pretty confident we were going to wipe but we continued on nonetheless. Phase 2 begins and I immediately tell the other tank, Ronada, I’m bubbling and high-tail my cowardly behind out of there.

Positioned on the other side of the room, Chimmy soon makes quick work out of poor Ronada and heads right for me. My first instinct is to start popping cooldowns like it’s going out of style. The next minute turns into something of a blur as I somehow continued to live. After nearly a minute I finally keel over, Chimaeron at somewhere around 5% health. We finish him off as people are questioning how the hell I just did what I did.

Honestly, I had no clue outside of suspecting a healthy dose of fortune. Hitting up the logs this morning I checked out the 51 seconds I spent tanking Chimaeron in phase 2 and saw the following:

So basically, I parried an attack. Ate the second, dropping me down to 1 hp. Parried the next attack. Full absorbed the two attacks (a double strike) after that. Next attack missed. Followed by another absorb, then two more dodges. In that time span I got healed enough to put me over 10k hp and thus able to eat another hit. And so I did, knocking me back to 1 hp. Then I parried the next attack, but couldn’t avoid the one after that. At only 119 hp I bit the dust.

I think this qualifies for now as my most impressive avoidance streak.

Last night was absolutely surreal. Like I mentioned in my last post, I stepped down as guild leader of Enveloping Shadows and my job was split up between Falowin (the new GM) and Zilga (the new raid leader). So, yesterday being Tuesday, it was the first raid since the transition and I couldn’t contain my excitement at just be another cog in the machine for once. For the last year and change, I’ve been the head honcho, the one marking the pulls, calling stuff out, doing invites, stressing about replacements, worrying if people were doing their job. Last night, all I had to do was… tank. What a novelty!

The plan was to burn through Bastion of Twilight, and knock over Cho’gall again to score some more shoulder tokens (and thus 4pc bonuses) and free up lots of time for Al’akir progression on Wednesday. We’d take a small detour to get a “taste” of heroic Halfus–two attempts–to see what it was like. It was painful, although, to be fair no one was prepared. It was like a child sticking a knife into an electric outlet just to see what would happen.

I think Fal summoned up our feelings adequately in that screenshot.

Once that adventurism was out of our system, we got back to business and knocked over Halfus on normal so we could start plodding towards Cho’gall. Twin Dragons fell over pretty quickly, though a little messily, and I nabbed the Daybreaker Helm from their corpses. Then it was on to Ascendant Council, which has been the bane of my existence ever since our first kill a few weeks ago.

Our usual pattern is about four wipes as people slowly remember that the lightning debuffs in phase 2 hurt, and then suddenly the epiphany hits and we roll them over. But still 20 minutes later, so it’s a huge slowdown. I politely recommended Zilga remind everybody to lock it down off the bat and she mocked me (and justifiably so) when she complied. Still, I guess people got the message because we one-shot them, though not cleanly. A huge problem was my massive tank fail at the start of P3. I lost control of the Monstrosity right off the bat and had a hard time getting it back and making it stick to me. I should have communicated the initial slipperiness better. I’ll do better next time.

Once the Council was down we mopped up the trash and prepared for what would hopefully be a second Cho’gall kill. The first attempt was good–wiped at 16%–but a little sloppy. It was a great “shaking the rust off” attempt, though, and showed we still could kill him outside of a fluke once we tightened some things up. The second attempt was much, much better and produced a cleaner kill than I think we had the first time around. And with an hour left to go in the raid, so we were officially on fire!

As a sidenote, I should also mention that last night was the first 25man raid that we were joined by Kamalia and Ronada, a healer/tank pair that we recently recruited. Both did fantastically and I can’t tell you how happy the healers are to have another mana tide totem available, and how weird (the good kind!) it is to be tanking with a bear for the first time since Naxx. Kamalia has her own blog as well, bringing ES up to a four-blog guild.

So, we gathered in Blackwing Descent to see how many bosses we could knock down before having to call it for the night. We mowed down Magmaw, Omnitron, and then finished for the evening after wiping the floor with Maloriak. Ronada, the new bear tank, took the boss and his phase 2 tanking and flame jet handling was a work of art. He definitely taught us something new and proved his chops.

I’ve started giving Zilga a hard time with a string of imagined grievances for comedic effect. After Maloriak toppled over, I cried out “I can see the writing on the wall Zilga! First you overthrow me as GM, then you put me on X [she put me on X!], and now this!”

Nonetheless, I’m going to have to learn how to minimize my backseat driving so it doesn’t look like I don’t trust Zilga. Because, believe me, I do. She did a fantastic job last night and she’s a natural at the job. She definitely doesn’t need me second guessing her or stepping on her toes!

One more random thought: on Cho’gall I was getting a little frustrated by people casually blabbing while were trying to deliver a second kill on a boss fight and asked people in Mumble to focus on the fight. I realize now that were this a week ago when I was Captain Rhidach that’d be the advice of the guy telling you how to do that fight and trying to manage a group of people towards a boss kill. However, last night, delivered by Citizen Rhidach, the complaint came off as just that–a complaint. It was pretty humbling.

But, a good kind of humbling. So no complaints about that!

Last week was a bit momentous for me and my various dealings in this world of Warcraft. So, I apologize for being absolutely terrible at providing my usual fare of edu-tainment, but my mind was firmly ensconced elsewhere!

One of the biggest events last week was my guild killed Cho’gall on 25man mode for the first time on Wednesday. We’d been working on the fight for about three Wednesdays in a row by that point, and while the previous week was generally a giant pile of frustration, by the end of the night we were hitting phase 2. The first 75% of the fight was starting to become habit. So then last week imagine my glee when–on the very first pull!–we got him into phase 2. That meant our “base” for the fight was right where we needed it to be.

Cho’gall, as a fight, reminds me a bit of Professor Putricide: it’s seven minutes of repetition with an increasing level of danger, followed by a nervewracking burn phase. And learning the fight is a pain because you have to spend all this time learning that first 75% of the fight–mastering it–and then you can wipe before even seeing the most crucial quarter. So you keep doing that first 75% over and over again until it becomes second nature, and the fatigue is ridiculous.

I was worried last week we were going to spend an hour or so getting back to being able to hit phase 2. But, like I said, fortune smiled and we were on our game. So the following attempt we had similar success, pushing it to phase 2, but wiping soon after. At this point I assessed the situation and listed for the raid the things I wanted us to immediately fix before we could successfully kill the boss. Chief among them was Corrupted Blood totals. That last attempt, we had a few people at 50 before we even got to phase 2, which was unacceptable. The law was laid down: no one past 25 until phase 2.

The third attempt we did we really locked it down and got Cho’gall all the way to 7%. Immediately everyone was excited by the sudden inevitability of the kill. Fourth attempt was to 9%, a tiny backslide, but we were doing much better at the burn phase, just corruption was too high going in.

The fifth attempt wasn’t stellar, to put it lightly. We had tank deaths, people at greater than 50% corruption, and various other non-stellar things. I released Frank a bit on that attempt, unfortunately, and as much as I hated doing so I think between that and the shame of the backslide, a lot of us buckled down with a determination to achieve redemption on the next go. And so we began our next attempt, coasting through the add phases with no trouble what so ever. Tanks weren’t in any serious danger, slimes were blown up immediately, and (most importantly) blood remained very uncorrupted all the way to phase 2.

By the time we hit the burn phase, every was still under 25% corruption, which was incredible. I pulled Cho’gall onto his throne so that all his eye stalk adds would spawn immediately around him and go be easily AOE’d/splashed down. People held everything together, and after what felt like an eternity, we finally knocked Cho’gall over.

It was our first end boss kill on the 25s, and definitely very exciting. Three people got their four piece bonuses that night (Antigen among them, grats to him!) and the raid got a much needed shot in the leg after the last two Wednesdays that ended ignominiously on Cho’gall.

Changing of the guard

The other major happening from last week was a major shift in my guild. After a solid year of leading Enveloping Shadows, I’ve stepped down as guild master for a quieter existence as just an officer. In my stead, Zilga and Falowin have stepped up to divide up my duties, with Zilga taking over leading raids (Frank is dead, long live Francine) and Falowin taking over the remaining GM duties of the morale and complaints departments.

The game has started to become way too frustrating thanks to the excitement of the past few months and I wasn’t able to give the guild my all anymore without exploding into a supernova of stress and ulcerated tissue. Thankfully, my officers are a stand up group of folks and I know they’ll be able to continue in the job with a fresh determination that I definitely was unable to provide as of late. The guild is, beyond a doubt, in fantastic hands.

I’m currently suffering because I can’t wait to raid Tuesday night, finally being able to just sit back and just tank. It’s going to be a surreal experience.

As I tweeted last night, I had an inordinate amount of fun interrupting Conversions on Cho’gall last night. And it’s so, so easy as a Prot Pally. And to top it all off, a quick response to the casts can also save your life if you’re tanking Cho’gall away from the raid and your tank healer gets MC’d. So this definitely a skill you want to nurture for your bouts with Cho’gall.

I used the first macro on this Maintankadin thread, and it absolutely did the trick.

#showtooltip Avenger's Shield
/targetenemyplayer
/cast Avenger's Shield
/targetlasttarget

I watch the timers for Conversion, and then right before they hit I line up my GCD so that I have one free as the mind controls go out. I then strafe for a step so that the mind controlled people are all in front of me, hit the macro, and with luck the shield will bounce between everyone and dispel all the MCs. The downside is you’re doing damage to the Converted, but you’re bringing them back into the fight immediately, unlike a fear.

That last part is key when you’re covering your tank healer. You need them up and healing again ASAP, and being able to cover their Conversions yourself is a great insurance policy.

And, let’s not forget the epeen! Last night I posted 45% of the interrupts across our Cho’gall attempts. And that’s including Depravity interrupts, so my percent of Conversion interrupts was likely much, much higher.

Slash flex, and all that.

Despite the hubbub, I haven’t noticed any threat issues since the HP generation nerf. Nor holes in the rotation. The trick is, if your Crusader Strike misses, not to sit there and mash CS until you successfully get one through. Use the cooldown to hit one of your “9″ fillers and then go back to CS. Never deviate from the rotation, just we need to live with the fact we won’t be ShoR/WoGing as much as we used to. I’m fairly certain that between the nerf and buffs, it evened out.

Of course, I’m still mad about how it went down. That much has not yet changed.

In other matters, my first week of Rebuke has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. I’ve been enjoying the application of it. And discovering that the animation of when you cast Rebuke you do a roundhouse kick was a nice surprise. However after using Rebuke 11 times over the course of our Council attempts last night, it was blocked once, dodged, once, parried three times, and missed six times. It didn’t actually interrupt once. The wages of 2% hit, I guess.

As for the week, I’m really happy with how it went. Tuesday we steamrolled through our farm bosses, one-shot Chimaeron (our second kill of him), and then moved on to Atramedes for some progression. After about 90 minutes of learning the fight we knocked him over. Wasn’t that hard of a fight in the end, I think a lot of what slowed us down was people overthinking the sound mechanic and not just focusing on not standing in fire as their guiding principle.

Then Wednesday night we hit the Bastion of Twilight, starting with Halfus (who REALLY got knocked down a peg with the 4.0.6 changes) and then onto Twin Dragons. Both fell over without a complaint and we were clear to move into the Council’s room.

We proceeded to have about two hours of progression, making steady steps forward every time. Towards the end we were hitting phase three every time, we just needed to clean up our path to it. Next week we’ll easily have the fight.

A funny moment from last night: I noticed that Falowin was catching guff from some people via the usual jokes, that he’s the oldest raider and thus he built the pyramids. He doesn’t mind it, it seems, but still I tried to put the kibosh on it (as Gandy once said, the only thing older than Falowin are “Falowin is old” jokes). So I demanded everyone say something nice about the poor guy, and some responses included “he always has ribbon candy” and “he served admirably in WW1″. (Sorry man, I tried!) I’ll give Fal this, though: he’s a really good sport.

Like I tweeted this morning, my first major battle today was thinking up two separate puns to use in the titles of two separate blog posts. One on my guild’s website and the other in this space. I realize now, that I’ve made a huge error–I’ve bestowed the far better pun title (“He’s dead, Chim”) to the wrong audience. I apologize, my beloved readers, for failing you so utterly. From now on you’ll have first dibs on the cream of the crop of my awful punnery.

Anyway, as you might surmise from the title, we killed Chimaeron 25 last night for the first time. The clean-up 10s, as always, lead the way, however. They’ve had him dead for two weeks now. In any case, the kill was a great cap to a somewhat lackluster raiding week. We’re in a bit of a transition right now, and a little tight on dps, so having a few folks knocked out by work and weather on short notice made putting raids together this week somewhat of a chore.

But when all was said and done, our current bugbear keeled over, which is great. Frees us up to put progression shots on Atramedes next week.

The success we had in the fight last night was a culmination of about two weeks of pain for the healer corps. We’d been making steady progress for a while but last night it really clicked. First show we got him to 60% or so, and through the first feud with no deaths. I borked the second feud, unfortunately, which cut the great attempt a bit short. The next go we had another great attempt and took it to about 50%. The third attempt was when the magic happened, so to speak.

On the first massacre we lost three people right off the bat, including a healer, which resigned me to the attempt ending poorly. However, we quickly got the healer back up and made it through the next few massacres and feuds without a single death. Inexorably, we marched on through the descent in Chimmy’s hitpoints and slowly but surely reached phase 2. Completely unprepared for this sudden happening, I did my best to kite and cooldown, but flubbed it utterly while flopping about in a puddle of my own panic.

Thankfully Demo, who was offtanking, is a pro at ranging his healers (I kid, man!) and lived a pretty long time. Eventually he bit it and one by one the dps were knocked off and Chimmy’s health bar melted away. With about 3% to go and only three times that many raiders up, my knuckles began to change from white to a menagerie of unhealthy colors, and I did my best Muldoon impression, commanding the raid to SHOOT [IT]. After what seemed like an eternity, Chimaeron fell over and coughed up its purples.

As for tanking, we went with the method of me eating the break and Demo taunting off me when double strike was coming. Once he took the strike, I taunted back. Tanking was smooth as silk from my vantage point, so I think that’s the ideal method to be using.

This kill was just what we needed to get back on track.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been averaging about three bosses a night when it comes to farm night. Magmaw, Omnitron, and Halfus–those are our bread and butter. Last week we spent a good chunk of Wednesday getting the Twin Dragons down and then moving on to Maloriak for some solid progression, which means five bosses (plus Argaloth) over two days. Last night we did all those bosses. In one night.

So we started out the night quickly getting over to Tol Barad to bang out Argaloth before the battle was to begin. Thankfully, he was kind of us, dropping two pve purples, as opposed to none last week. With that wrapped up, we shuffled off to Bastion of Twilight to begin the night properly.

Now, have I ever explained how much I hate the trash in BoT? Ugh. Nonetheless, the little bastards coughed up a Soul Blade which I snagged. So that was pretty exciting. I’ve forgive their numerousness for now.

Once we hit Halfus we were faced with Storm, Time, and Nether. So: fireballs, frenzy, and shadow nova. (I really dislike the shadow nova.) This also marked the first week without Slate Drake. As such, I tanked Time and Storm, Ana tanked Halfus, and Ziazmere (an offtank) took Nether. We popped lust and burnt down Storm first, then singled down each drake one by one. About halfway through the second one, Ana blue-screened and I picked up Halfus. When Ziaz’s drake was dead, he took Halfus off me so I wasn’t tanking the boss plus a drake. Ana came back into game around this point, but she was locked out of the fight at the beginning of the dungeon.

In any case, we ended up toppling Halfus a second over enrage after some dps bit it during that last 50%. Technically our best kill yet. I’ll take it.

After loot was doled out, we plodded through the gauntlet and down to Twin Dragons’ room. Last week was our first kill and I was still wary of how it would go. Yet the raid showed me they were ready for prime time and easily dispatched the Twins with a one shot. It was pretty exciting, particularly, for me to see us go from somewhat struggling for a first kill to easily wrapping it on farm.

At this point we were kind of ahead of schedule, only 90 minutes into the raid. So we took a five minute break and moved over to Blackwing to keep the pain train rolling. Magmaw and Omnitron buckled in short order and soon, with about an hour to go we were standing in front of Maloriak, one boss ahead of schedule. I spent my usual ten minutes explaining the fight in stuttering detail, and then we did a quick learning wipe. Regrouping, some mechanics were clarified, and we were off to the races again.

Full dragon alchemist

The way we usually did Maloriak was Ana on the boss, me on adds in the back left, and Ziazmere in the back right. Raid would follow the normal procedure depending on vial while Ziaz and I would communicate how many adds we had, peeling on or two off each other if we needed to keep them even. A mage was assigned to each side for frost novas to give some breathing room. Though, truthfully I found that I could tank up to six at a time on 25mans without much difficulty. Nine was happening, though, obviously. Once Ziaz and I both had 12 adds total, we started interrupted the release casts.

Three seconds before the green vial was tossed, Ziaz and I dragged out adds to the back middle and popped survivability cooldowns. AOEs started up, and most adds went down for the count. We had a few stragglers with slivers of life, but I knocked those out over the next 30 seconds of so myself. Release casts didn’t have to be interrupted from that point forward, the most adds we’d get were 9 total split between the two of us.

So through the motions we went once more, until the green vial was imminent and into the middle we went. Adds were officially melted down and we could switch to the boss. I was delighted to see him at 28% when the green phase ended, right where we wanted him to be. We pushed him over the 25% mark and got ready for the craziness. Ziaz and I headed to the back to pick up our Prime Subject adds, and the raid moved forward to hopefully avoid getting fixated onto (I’m still foggy on how this mechanic works in this fight, so this move was precautionary).

Add began strafing around the boss so that she wouldn’t get caught by a flame jet, while the raid took care to move if the boss was facing their way, or if a frost orb was descending nearby. Unfortunately as we approached zero, havoc started breaking lose. First Ziaz went down, and I somehow picked up his add. Then, Ana went splat and I quickly grabbed Maloriak as well. Chaining cooldowns, I did everything I could to hold him and no get ground into a fine paste. At one point I ate a flame jet thanks to panic-induced tunnel visioning, but managed to survive (the benefit of having the eyes of all the healers on me).

Finally, with a groan, Maloriak collapsed and coughed up his purples. And here we were on the first night having dispatched our major goal for the second.

We rounded out the night throwing about five attempts at Chimaeron and watching as the healers wet themselves.

Tonight we’re starting on Conclave, to the delight of the healers. Even if we don’t kill another boss this week, we’re still ahead of the curve.

There’s a running joke in guild from the time we did Halion and I managed to tunnel vision while being debuffed in Phase 1 and dropped a fire patch in the middle of melee. Following that, the next time I was debuffed on the next attempt, I ran out of melee screaming “REDEMPTION” and promptly dropped it in the middle of the ranged instead. I’ve never lived it down.

The lesson is, I was so consumed with making up for my mistake. I made an equally terrible one.

In any case, that really has absolutely nothing to do with this post, but the whole redemptive aspect seemed appropriate in how we made up for the utter clusterfrak which was Tuesday night. And it’s a fun story. So there.

We went from a blackhole of disconnects and pillars of flame, to a one shot of one boss, a three shot of another, and a two shot of a third. And with more time we could have easily mopped up the fourth.

Actually, another running joke that I’m now reminded of is how supposedly Magmaw and I have an illicit affair going on. This stems from a post on the guild forums where someone was commented on the color pencil strategy guide of the fight and said “aw, he looks so cute, maybe if we ask nicely he’ll give us purples.” I responded, “I tried that once, but he put me in his mouth. :(”

It kind of snowballed from there.

Eventually, I had to put down my foot and make it clear that what happens between a blood elf and a giant lava worm is their own business. Mmkay?

We’re not the most mature raid core, if you haven’t discerned it by now.

What the hell was I talking about? Oh, right, Magmaw. After the night before people were just about utterly terrified of the pillar of flame and seemed perfectly ready to get the hell out of it at a moment’s notice. I was using DBM to watch the cooldown and would announce when it was up, so folks could shift attention to the floor and when to run. We noticed that if Magmaw’s head is down, he won’t catch pillar, even if the cooldown is up. However, he will cast it as soon as he stands back up. So we needed to be prepared to move as soon as any spiked phase ended, as the pillar was coming immediately.

For added protection, I had one warlock spec into shadowfury so he could stun the parasites as soon as they spawned. Another lock brought aura of foreboding. In addition to frost nova and other spells, the parasites barely moved from the spawn point. We continued to use a frost DK to grab aggro and “kite” them as well, though there was little kiting needed.

As long as everyone made it out of the pillar, the parasites were no danger at all.

Anyway, after a few rounds of spiking the boss and wailing on his face, he keeled over and coughed up his purples. One shot. It was incredible redemption after the night before.

We then rolled over to Omnotron, and after my twenty minute explanation, we headed into quite the learning attempt. After a few people blew up, we ran out. Slightly shaken, unstirred, and much more knowledgeable of how the fight ran. Another attempt went similarly. The third attempt though: thing of beauty. Everyone executed perfectly. No one made any raid-killing mistakes. Our perfect execution was rewarded with an inevitable kill.

I gotta say, I’m a huge fan of 25man bosses dropping five epics per kill. It’s going to make gearing up much, much quicker.

After we finished up that boss, we then headed over to the Bastion of Twilight to get another lick at Halfus Wyrmbreaker. Once we finally cleared through all the trash and stood before the boss, I surveyed the scene and attached a tank to every drake and the boss. We had Slate, Nether, and Time. And thus, the fight would consist of a tank swap (but with a stun), a point where the boss will get a damage buff occasionally (but suffer a debuff the entire fight), and there would be fireballs (but they’d be crazy easy to dodge).

The first attempt I made a kill order and we rolled from drake to drake to drake, and finally reached the boss with a minute left on the clock. Obviously, we needed to tighten things up a bit. So, we took a page out of the Meloree handbook, and used the “round ‘em up and AOE” method. Sort of.

We stacked all the mobs on each other and still killed one drake at a time, but allowed cleave and splash damage to help us out a bit. Raid turned on Halfus exclusively with 2 minutes and 26 seconds left on the enrage timer, and we went to town as best we could. At around 10%, Halfus enraged. As he was enraged, he became stunned by the Slate Dragon.

A chance! So we kept going, yelling encouragement to one another. The stun wore off and I failed to bubble in time. I was quickly one shot. The other tanks followed. DPS scattered a bit, and Antigen attempted to run away and taunt the boss to kind of fake-kite it. I think he bit it soon after that.

Finally, after a minute and three seconds of post-enrage teeth grinding, the boss fell over. Not the cleanest kill, but it was definitely done in our usual style. I’ll take it.

Once that was done, we went down the stairs and through the gauntlet (imagine my surprise the first time a fire elemental blew me off the stairs and into the lava) and down to the twin dragons. We were running of the time and didn’t get to do more than two attempts, but the fight was pretty obvious. It’ll go down very quickly next time. Especially once we can get two raid nights in a week, like usual.

(Redemption!)