Last night we spent a good 2 hours on Heroic Sindragosa 25, and while we didn’t down her, we got closer than ever before with 13% as our best attempt.

The whole night was generally moving in the same direction, upward. I remember when we first started working on this fight three weeks ago we were losing five people to the frost bombs every air phase, with a further number being cut down by asphyxiation. Last night, not so much. We had many air phases where no one got nuked. It got to the point where I didn’t have to obsessively watch grid to look for the little boxes to grey out and inform me of deaths, people were taking care of themselves.

Progress!

Unchained Magic was a lot better too, with fewer instances like three weeks ago when a mage blew us all up with some massive stack of Instability immediately following a Blistering Cold. He did more than 1 million friendly fire damage and set a new record I suspect the casters are secretly aspiring to topple. I’m watching them.

But in any case, in the flight to the steps at the beginning of the air phase, people were really good about standing aside and minimizing damage.

Likewise people were amazing about getting on the proper spots when Frost Beaconed. In the 36 air phases we did last night I can only think of two times when someone was in the wrong spot. And we only got an extra block once.

More progress!

Stuff to work on, though: people panicking in phase 3 and forgetting to not blow up the raid, to pay attention to their debuffs, the works. I always shout “Marathon, not a sprint!” when the third phase starts. Not that that helps much, but it carries the philosophy of the fight–phase three is the main show, and it’s about endurance, not zerging down the boss.

We’re getting there. We are totally getting there and I fully expect a kill on this fight, one of the hardest in the game, in the next two weeks. If not next week. It’s just a matter of time.

Despite the fact that we didn’t get a kill last night, I think morale still remains pretty high. We didn’t spend the attempts raging at people who got Frost Bombed to death, or hit some people with Instability. Frank didn’t ever poke up his bilious head at any point. We’re really not that kind of guild ultimately. And besides, that’s what the knee-cappings are for.

Instead people were joking and having fun and trying to keep people positively motivated. We had some good laughs at points like right after a fourth Bomb hit, Falowin was watching his block’s health diminish (but not his DBM apparently) and started shouting “NOT MY BLOCK, DON’T BREAK MY BLOCK” in a blind panic. Once he was broken out he realized air phase was over. We all got a good laugh and I’m sure that will come back to haunt him.

And speaking of events that will come back to haunt people, poor Morvain. The guy last night was hopped up to the gills on vicodin due to a horrible tooth-ache. Ever a trooper (and with a Gollum-like devotion to his Shadowmourne shards) he still raided, without much of any performance lost. Except for one moment last night when we switched it back to normal at the last 30 minutes of the raid to wrap up the LK and were kind of blowing off steam on the far less deadly Sindy Normal.

We’re deep into phase 3, with myself and a swath of people hiding behind a block dropping our Buffet. Morvain is there and gets targeted by Frost Beacon. “Morvain,” someone mechanically notes, reading off DBM. Nothing happens. “Morvain move.” … “MORVAIN!”

Then a woosh and about 10 of us are encased in ice blocks. “Sorry guys,” Morvain meekly pipes up, snapping out of his haze. “I was looking at my cat.”

Everyone is caught up in the sheer absurdity of it all, and in the haze of laughter and tears the other half of the raid gets iceblocked. We lose it, and–of course–the fight. Wipe.

It was kind of worth it. Like Antigen said, definitely the birth of an in-joke. That damn cat.

If Rhidach was here, he’d do a raid report and tell you all sorts of interesting and useful things about our raid last night. I’m sure a lot of people reading this blog would be really interested to know about things like how we turned Heroic Lady Deathwhisper from a tough progression fight into a relatively easy 2 shot, or why Heroic Saurfang suddenly gave us 5 wipes worth of trouble when we’d been farming him for weeks.

Fortunately, he’s not here. Instead, we’re going to discuss something much, much more important.

My Festergut 25H DPS.

Festergut Is My Favorite Fight

I sat in vent a few hours ago and mourned to my raid that I’d never rank on WOL for prot pally DPS because we’re not killing Festergut 25H at the right time. I wish he died earlier. My average DPS would be through the roof if he died before my buff wears off. Unfortunately, we still need 4 minutes and 11 seconds to kill his ass dead, and in that time my average dies along with my hopes of eventually joining the super exclusive Maintankadin Really Badass Paladin Club. They’re having a party at the top of the WOL rankings, and I am totally not invited.

My e-peen suffers greatly from this injustice.

Last night, before we pulled, I basically told the DPS to whoop it out and put on their awesomesauce pants so my ass could rank. They were Not Amused. Some clever wit pointed out to me that whooping it out and putting on pants were mutually exclusive activities. How the hell would I know? Who raids in pants, anyways?

Since we’re on the subject, let’s talk about lust. Obviously the optimal time to pop lust is just after the tank swap, although my silly raid seems to believe that it makes the most sense at the beginning (when I am not buffed) or at the end (when I am also not buffed). Really?

Last night, no one called for it and we forgot to pop lust altogether. What kind of unobservant fool was main tanking that raid?

Well, I managed 9k DPS anyways.

Gear Swapping: A Serious Note

I, unlike my 11/12 and 12/12 ICC 25H bretheren, can’t swap out that much gear on this fight.

We still, sadly, have occasional issues with Fester 25H. Very rarely, but they happen. I recall an all too recent enrage timer wipe ending with a single live paladin and a vent full of dry comments along the lines of, “Farm!” “Totally on farm.” “Good thing Festergut’s on farm.” He is on farm. But anything can happen.

If I joke about forgetting to take off my threat gear, I’m lying through my teeth. I have a specific Festergut 25 set. I make each non-survivability-based gear choice with great care, knowing full well that if I die, it’s my own damn fault and I owe the whole raid repair fees as well as an apology for wasted time. Every itemization point I pull out of armor or stamina to devote to expertise, hit, or strength is a bit of effective health that could save my ass if some recruit mage or hunter decides to be go be BFF with the tank healers during a Vile Gas. Yes, I know this. So despite my joking about Festergut 25H and threat gear, I think hard about being conservative.

The major gear changes I recall making from an armor centric set: Bloodvenom Blade, 264 expertise boots (which I usually wear anyways), 277 hit pants (one of the most convenient places for me personally to find hit), some tank neck with expertise on it, the +200 str libram, and DMC:G in place of one of my armor trinkets. This puts me hitcapped and 32 expertise. Nothing special. I could hardcap my expertise if I threw on the TOGC expertise trinket, but Festergut hits pretty hard. I wore the Putricide 10H armor/stam proc trinket instead.

I consider this a poor man’s threat set – regular tank gear with some strength procs mixed in. I dream of wearing a Big Numbers set on Festergut 25H, but my AD proccing at the end of last night’s battle says “ROFL! Not gonna happen.” Look, a girl can dream…

Back To The Details

So I broke 9k dps. This is nothing special compared to the incredible numbers some of my cohorts can muster, but I was fairly happy with it.

On the plus side, I did beat two dps, which warms the cockles of my black and cheerless tank heart. Every time a tank beats a DPS, I fully believe said tank should take a shot. (Hey, tanks with threat sets…. I expect this rule to be followed.)

Good thing I only had Rotface 25H left to do. Big ooze kiting really requires at least one stiff drink. “Hey, you, in the dress, turn around! WHY ARE YOU RUNNING THAT WAY? COME BACK HERE! What, are we doing the achievement and no one told me? OH GOD VILE GAS–” *chug*

I uploaded the logs later last night. When I was done cursing my logs addon at great length for failing yet again to record Halion, I noticed to my great delight that my name was sitting on the right side of the Dashboard. I ranked! I really did! #194, baby!

I honestly thought I’d never do that on 25H. Alright, so it was 194th, but I’m pleased beyond measure that there are only 193 protection paladins among the guilds uploading to World of Logs between myself and Meloree’s extensively theorycrafted and simmed 16k dps in the #1 spot.

What’s that, you say? There are probably no more than 200 different guilds uploading to WOL who are running Fester 25H with paladins as first tanks? Goddamnit. I was just starting to feel like a special snowflake.

edit: I just checked the logs again and between last night & right now, I’ve been knocked out of the top 200. Hold on, be right back, crying in a corner. I’m serious, I almost cried, here at work. I have to do better next week!

Another guest post from Anafielle while Rhidach is gone! You get to deal with me all week…. so, like I always tell my 10 man, get excited!!

Several of us popped in to see Heroic Halion 10 last night.

Although the other tank was a DPS on a pally alt, he was the more experienced shadow side tank. He tanked Shadow Side earlier this week & they decided to leave him with it. This left me up in the physical realm.

Physical side tanking sucks when you are a massive control freak, like I am. I firmly believe every tank has a bit of control freak in them somewhere…

You get to sit there while the raid wipes on the hardest part of the fight… doing absolutely nothing except staring at raid frames. NOTHING. Last night, I couldn’t even really tab out to complain to twitter or walk away to get a beer (umm… definitely things I have not done while tanking normal 25) because the void zones persist in both phases. God knows the moment I looked away, someone would spawn a void zone under me and I’d die.

Shadow Side Tanking (normal)

I’m going to pause to complain a little here about our Normal Mode strat.

For Normal Halion, the strat we use involves constantly spinning the dragon throughout phase 2 and 3. The tank keeps the single orb we can see on the dragon’s left hip, which means the other orb is over the tank’s left shoulder – this in general keeps the beam at a good angle through the dragon the whole time. But we turn him throughout this phase, not just when the orbs are about to activate.

Learning how to do this was…. fun. Yeah, that’s the word. Listening to Rhidach on vent figuring out how to turn constantly at the right speed certainly was fun. It’s got to be that “talk me off the ledge,” panicked tone in his voice sometimes.

I find it way too amusing when he panics & try to cause it as much as possible. I know, I know, I’m such a good offtank.

Then he left me All Alone a few weeks ago, before we’d killed Halion, and I had to do it myself. I failed miserably. Not going to lie. It was probably the most miserable failure I’d ever encountered in my time tanking. I did just about everything wrong that could possibly go wrong. I even lost threat to some DPS. So embarrassing….

So. End result – our normal mode Halion strat is hard on tanks. At least, hard on these two pally tanks. While the jury is still out on me, Rhidach knows his freakin’ shit when it comes to tanking. When I take a while to figure something out, I assume I’m just slow or stupid. When Rhidach takes a while to figure something out, that something is probably overly complicated. My assumption is that our Halion strat is overly complicated.

But in the end, this is how we learned the fight, and we both have learned how to do it now. So why fix what’s broke? That’s how we do it.

Shadow Side Tanking (heroic)

Unlike normal mode, on heroic our tank doesn’t constantly turn the dragon. Rather, the tank sits still and repositions the dragon as needed right before the cutters activate.

The other tank told me – and I firmly believe it – that this is so, so much simpler and much easier than the constant turning we do on normal mode. In fact, he told me he had no trouble tanking heroic once he’d learned where to watch. Then the raid switched to normal and he had a ton of trouble with our “constantly turns” strat and never quite got the hang of it.

I’d heard from twitter (always an excellent source of information – and I’m not kidding) that most people who do Normal Mode also sit still for as long as possible & only turn when they’re positioning for beam activation.

Boy, that sure would be nice.

Tank Overruled

After wiping a few hours on heroic, we switched the raid back to normal. I wanted to try the “Not Moving A Whole Lot” strat on 10, but the whole 10 man raid nixed me.

“The beam will be in the wrong place!” they said. “You get four reference points on Heroic. It’s much easier. But you only get two reference points on normal. It’s not worth repositioning the dragon right just for the cutters. You’ll tail swipe someone or something.”

I wasn’t leading the raid. I didn’t want to push 9 people into something new, seeing as they’d just wiped in the shadow realm for two hours while I /danced with void zones up top. I shut up and readied my strafe keys.

Honestly, now that I have figured out how to constantly turn, it’s not TOO bad… it still sucks though. I have figured out how to do my normal rotation while turning constantly, which is something I really should never have fucked up in the first place. I still need to practice strafing in a perfect circle. I stopped and started a lot, and it’s a good thing I’m way overgeared because I got hit by the beam at least once.

I really hate this fight.

I want to see Shadow Side on Heroic, mostly because I’m a lazy tank and I can’t wait to sit my ass down a little and rest between cutters in phase 2 and 3.

Welcome to another guest post by Anafielle! Rhidach is gone on vacation again and forgot to remove my guest posting privileges. Righteous Defense is mine! All mine! Be warned, the beta coverage is temporarily suspended in his absence. In his place, I’d like to talk about one of my favorite topics – 10 man raiding.

I lead a 10 man, something I stress out about on twitter all the time. I actually lead the second 10 man in the guild, while Rhidach leads the first. These raids are called Team Bravo and Team Alpha, respectively. Despite our names, my raid is actually the more progressed of the two.

How did this happen? Oh, this is one of my favorite topics…

A 25 Man Guild with Two Tens

Like many casual-progression 25 man raiding guilds, Enveloping Shadows has long had an unofficial “officer” 10 man. Rhidach leads and MTs it, and mostly takes the officers and a few top DPS. For a long time, this was the only solid guild 10 man.

There was no real second 10 before I arrived. Several of the DPS had tried to start one, but they never quite got enough tanks and ran into troubles. There was, before I came, a fair amount of resentment focused on Rhidach’s 10 as the only successful 10 man. “They steal all the best players,” “They don’t care about the rest of us,” “They have all the guild tanks” (this was true), etc etc.

Enter Anafielle ….. I randomly appeared on the server, a mainspec tank just as geared as Rhidach, and one of the first things I told the guild was, “Hey, I like 10s. Is there a 10 man that needs a tank?” Needless to say, within hours of my server transfer I was approached by a bunch of people about the “second” 10 man.

Thus a second guild 10 man raid was born. The “officer” 10 became known as Team Alpha and my “second” 10 became inevitably known as … Team Bravo.

The Team B Underdogs

We were the underdogs from the start. No officers. Scattered schedules. A rotating roster that never looked the same from week to week. Even our name meant Team B. Fueled by passion and stopped by nothing, full of righteous indignation from months of watching Team Alpha get 10 man progression kill after progression kill, my raid started out like a beat up rebel with something to prove. We had a chip on our shoulder the size of Texas and a nasty streak as wide as the Mississippi river.

The DPS in my raid knew they were good. They had all spent time at the top of Recount. They knew they had the capability to get all those achievements – they’d just never had an organized raid to do it with. I was less a leader and more a guide, funneling their skill into useful accomplishments.

Our First Big Kill

I still remember our first progression kill. I carefully stacked my first Team Bravo raid for Heroic Saurfang specifically because I knew Rhidach’s officer 10 hadn’t downed the fight. (Me? Competitive? Nooo.) I picked out the top ranged DPS I could, spent so much time learning the strat, and carefully assigned CC and kill targets.

When we killed H Saurfang, I went wild with glee. It was a guild first! A GUILD FIRST! TAKE THAT, TEAM ALPHA!

I barely knew Rhidach at this point. He’d just recently trusted me with his cell phone number in case of emergencies. I knew I couldn’t misuse this power. Giving an Internet E-Friend your cell phone number can be dangerous and is definitely a sign of trust. But, in my euphoria, I had to brag to him and he was rude enough to be offline. So I took a screenshot of our kill, labeled it in big obnoxious letters “WE WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!”, transferred it to my cell phone and text messaged him with it.

Man, I’m such an asshole!

Team Bravo, The ES Progression 10

Over the last few months, despite setbacks, Team Bravo has risen to glory. We have gotten almost every single recent guild 10 man first. Most importantly, three weeks ago, Team Bravo achieved Glory of the Icecrown Raider.

It hasn’t been a completely smooth ride for Team Bravo. We’ve suffered from all sorts of ups and downs. I’ve personally fucked up all manner of things, from scheduling to simple Raid Awareness issues to leadership decisions like how we do a fight. Scheduling has really been the worst – our roster has rotated a ton over the last few months. Only now are we settling down into something approaching a regular schedule and roster. And still, I struggle with it… I’ll have to do a whole blog post on this, because scheduling a raid is the absolute bane of my existence as a raid leader.

Anyways. Our glory and success.

Team Alpha vs Team Bravo

I’m under no illusions – Team Alpha has often not run, and has been very casual about the fights they hit. It’s hard to be proud of beating someone who’s not really fighting back. They really only started focusing when we started beating them!

By contrast, Team Bravo was very, very focused. We started basically from scratch, but we had our eye on the goal from Day One. This is probably my fault – I was absolutely obsessed with getting my drake. A 10 man drake was my private dream, and I was not shy about telling everyone that I planned to get it for myself and for everyone around me. The 10 man was my personal vehicle for the drake. I privately thought of it as a fair trade – I would MT and lead for them, and my raid in turn would carry me to a pretty skeleton mount.

We finally made it. It took a lot of work, but three weeks ago we triumphed over All You Can Eat and Heroic Putricide (our last two hurdles) and scored our drakes.

And then, of course, we went back again over the last 2 weeks and killed pretty much every fight a second time to finish drakes for everyone who’d worked with us. I had always been very clear about my promise of drakes for everyone who was there for “the hardest fights”, and I spent a very long time carefully planning our last two weeks of raids to finish drakes for everyone I could manage. A raid is a team, and I was determined not to leave anyone out.

Amazing. Absolutely phenomenal. I look at my raiders and their drake, and despite the 30% buff… it feels like a real accomplishment. I feel really happy to have helped us achieve something really great, something indicative of hours and hours of work!

I have learned a ton about raiding, raid leading, management, and scheduling from my raid. And despite the stressing out I do about leading… my nights with Team Bravo are, without a doubt, the most fun I have during the week.

More Posts!

So, as you can tell, 10 man raiding is one of my favorite topics. While Rhidach is gone, you can expect some posts from me on 10 man strategies and a very long Drake Achievement guide for those of you trying to work your way to some pretty mounts. Stay tuned for more fun stuff!

Interestingly enough, I haven’t done a raid recap post in a long while. Nothing much to report lately–we’ve been plugging along on Heroic Sindragosa, having our first real night on her last night. Our showing wasn’t very impressive, we’re having some trouble with the whole buffet of what the fight demands: block positioning, Unchained Magic people not blowing others up, etc. Survival issues.

So, I’m thinking next week we’ll do what we did when we were learning normal Sindragosa: max survivability. DPS wears extra frost resist gear, add a seventh healer, then the goal is to live til the enrage timer. Once we make it that far we’ll dial back survivability until we can find the sweet spot that gets us in under the clock.

This is a strong contrast to last night with our second kill of Heroic LDW where we were mastering the hardest parts of the fight, people were failing at the easiest, most fundamental part of the fight: the ghosts. A ghost would pop up next to someone–melee, ranged, heals, whatever–and they wouldn’t notice til it exploded, or notice late and not be able to get away. We did about four attempts of differing degrees of success, each splashed with the delightful stench of ghost ‘splosions, and each time I got a little closer to completely Franking out. (Yes, it’s a verb now.)

Finally, before the last attempt I snapped and let Frank take over. I told everyone that we were not going to spend two hours on the fight. I don’t care if we wipe, but it was not going to be to ghosts. Everyone was on notice, one more ghost-induced wipe and we would switching it to normal and move on. I felt like crap after declaring that, cause I don’t want to be that raid leader, the Troxxed-style douchebag that issues ultimatums and leads by making people feel bad.

Frank was vindicated when we then went on to perfectly kill H LDW, with no deaths by ghosts. It was… shocking. I don’t know if I should feel good that we pulled it off, or worse that it could so easily be done. I guess we’ll see next week!

Anyway, back to last night. As I tweeted yesterday we were starting the night with our Shadowmourne guy, Nordicslayer, having 48 shards. He’s been collecting them slowly, but surely, since May 11th and we’ve had the extra drop chance of heroic modes since the beginning of June. His poor luck aside, the raid was pumped for him to finally finish the damn axe that night. Or to listen to him cry when he only got one shard from the five bosses we were doing. Either way.

Much to my surprise, a shard dropped off of heroic Festergut, first boss of the night. And then the last one he needed dropped off of heroic Rotface. Finally, some luck!

A parade of us then ran downstairs to watch him turn in the quest and the shards and finally collect his damn axe. Nevertheless, this was months in the making–congratulations Nordicslayer!

I tried to get a nice screenshot of him for the guild site, but he must have moved at the last second, only leaving behind the swirling soul that apparently used to inhabit Antigen’s mortal shell.

We reached Sindragosa at around 7:45 server time, giving us a good 2 hours or so to work on the fight. But you know the rest.

To give us a break, I switched it to normal and we dropped her easily and then moved on to the Lich King to collect the Sealed Chest. The Lich King was another clean kill, excellent for the second wave of dpsers getting dropped off the side of the map. Oops. Personally, I was most excited that that was the first time in a long time I didn’t have to go into a rambling 10 minute explanation of the fight for some new person. I’m sure everyone else was pretty stoked about that too.

Nordic looted the Sealed Chest, and per our agreement he kept one of the vanity items for himself and gave the other four up for the guild. He chose the mount, I took three items to hold to give as prizes in a series of off-night guild events/games, and then per my constant nagging requests over the last four months, took the tabard for myself.

It’s weird. Achieving Shadowmourne feels like we’re turning the page on one of the last chapters in ICC. I know we still have Heroic Sindragosa to kill, then Putricide–and then by some miracle a choir of angels is going to come down and push Arthas off the side of the Frozen Throne for us–but it feels like we’re running out of time in there. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m starting to get some major ennui about ICC. Not bad ennui (if there’s such a thing), just… 9 months is a long time to do an instance, you know? It’s time to move on to bigger Internet dragons.

But then again, we have a much more literal Internet dragon to work on right now.

Sidenote on the latest beta build: I’m not going to do too much prodding with the changes, because we know things will be majorly changing again soon. I will however check out how hard ShoR is hitting for tonight. I’m hoping to have a post titled “IT’S OVER 9000″ tomorrow.

It seems like a lot of guilds out there have stopped progressing really this summer, which makes me proud of my plucky little guild that we’ve continued plodding along in ICC 25 even in the middle of the summer doldrums. We racked up a latest progression kill last night, on heroic Lady Deathwhisper 25. Obviously the 30% buff is a big help, and helped us cheese a few aspects of the fight (I’m specifically thinking of making ghost explosions 30% less deadly than they could be) but ultimately I don’t think that diminishes our accomplishment. Just reduced how much wall-head-banging was required.

In any case, we started working on this mouthy lichess last week and put about 2 hours in before I switched it back to normal so we wouldn’t fall behind for the week. Our best attempt we got her to around 30%, which is not to shabby.

Then this week our very first attempt and we got her to around 23% before the raid wiped in a ghost-ignited explosion. I was filled with hope, but then on the second go we had some serious issues with ghosts and wiped at around 40%, which me start to Frank out a bit, like Bruce Banner after getting a paper cut. I reiterated my philosophy of “ghost=death” and insisted that melee get away as soon as they come up to prevent a ghost that was perhaps zeroing in on a tank from turning them into a puddle.

Third attempt was much, much better on the ghosts. It still ended ingloriously, but seeds were obviously planted. There was little to no tunnel-visioning and I heard very few tell-tale ‘splosions from the raid.

Fourth attempt we got it down to 7% before we were completely overwhelmed by adds and the raid was finished off. I was officially in full-blown “we can do this” mode.

Fifth attempt I set up a dedicated adds team of three ranged and two melee, rather than just assigning people on the fly based on their position in Omen. Adds as a result went much smoother, and ghosts were awesome, but it got really sticky at the end. As her health plummeted we had a really bad ghost explosion in ranged that took out a couple of healers and a few ranged. We steadily worked our way down to the 3% and I was holding my breath just doing whatever I could via Hands, Raid Wall, or screaming “GHOSTS” to keep the raid going. A cold sweat pouring down my face, we finally knocked her over dead.

We didn’t even have to do the first kill via bubbles post-enrage. I think that’s a first for progression.

In any case, another few seconds and we surely would have wiped, we were severely overwhelmed. So you can imagine how proud I was of the raid for holding it together in those crucial last seconds.

Next week I’m sure will see a much, much cleaner kill.

On a different tangent, I was also really happy with the two newest recruits we brought into raid last night. One was a DK who did great dps, and the other was the equally awesome Antigen of Haz Mace, Will Raid (I am collecting paladin bloggers it seems) who had a great first showing in his first 25man with us. I love when recruits click.

Great night over all, and the best thing is we’re ahead of schedule this week. I think we can turn that around into a full clear of ICC25 tonight.

I had forgotten how much fun 10man is. And no, that isn’t sarcasm, last night’s ICC-10 was the most fun I’ve had in WoW in a while.

25s is all business for me (I can’t help it, I’m too focused on the success of the raid to really ever enjoy myself), but 10s is where I let down my hair. So to speak.

Last night was the first time in a long time I’d managed to get “Team Alpha” together for an ICC run. We initially were going to go and bang out some more hardmodes, and hopefully catch up to the much-more progressed Bravo Team. Unfortunately, the OT didn’t show, so Cendra got on his 232-geared Druid tank and we still went through the first three hardmodes. We opted to skip Saurfang’s hardmode, because the general consensus was both Cen’s Druid and the healers weren’t equipped to handle a frenzied Saurfang mashing up some bear paste.

As we were headed towards Princes to maybe get the guild first heroic kill for that (our 10s are woefully unprogressed, as you can see) the OT logged on. We did a quick roster shuffle with Gulliveig dropping out, since he was having router issues. Cendra got back on his hunter, and Nordic came in to OT.

We then proceeded to one-shot heroic Princes.

It was a little hairy, with Princes being one of those fights that is markedly harder on 10man than 25. The room stays the same size, and you have to cover orbs that spawn throughout the width and breadth of it with fewer people. Rather than having one pet class watching each corner of the room, I had one on each half. A little too close for comfort!

Having two melee for the attempt made it a lot easier. Rather than a pack of floor-huggers-to-be scattering like cockroaches when the kitchen light is turned on, I had to worry about two Rogues breaking in opposite directions every time Valanar went to do an empowered vortex. Indeed, tanking Valanar is a pretty boring affair. I mostly spent the encounter just watching other people and agonizing over perceived eventual demises that would be visited upon them. And judging when possible to get the Heart of the Crusader debuff up.

We then plowed through heroic BQL, Festergut, and Rotface until we reached Putricide. The goal was to put away an actually meaningful hardmode kill, and match Bravo Team in the tennis game we call competitive progression. It was about an hour before end time so we’d have to move fast.

It’s a pretty hectic fight, to say the least. But a lot of fun. There’s so much crap going on you’ll find your head spinning.

We did about six attempts, getting it to 27% our last try. The biggest thing we need to work on execution (obviously) considering this fight is like an execution ballet.

What usually did this in was diseases being passed to the wrong person, or hitting one person in melee, then another immediately, throwing off the order. We got six solid attempts in, making progress each time. Despite having to call it, we’re all pretty pumped for future attempts and will probably end up downing the sucker on Sunday.

And then the 264 Unidentifiable Organ will be mine. Oh yes.

Like I said on Thursday, I was concerned the make-up raid scheduled on Sunday wasn’t going to happen. Thankfully it did, everyone showed along with some standbys and on-time we assembled inside the instance.

The menu that night was Heroic Dreamwalker, then normal Sindragosa and Lich King. Assuming we made it to Arthas, this would be the first time we’ve faced him since our first kill a few weeks ago. We’ve been bogged down progressing through hardmodes, and with our two raids a week schedule, didn’t really have the time to get to him on the second night. However, after our amazing showing on Wednesday, he was definitely within reach.

Anyway, Heroic Dreamwalker first. If you’ll recall on Wednesday (last callback to an earlier post for now, I swear!) we had some wipes. In hindsight this was clearly because one of our best portal jockeys was having connection issues and DCing, based on the success we had when he could actually stay on and heal. Last night, we were going through the paces, as I frantically tried to manage adds on my side and keep healers from getting eaten (I think a zombie got through).

I honestly thought we were going to wipe that attempt, we hit the 75% mark–”Press on heroes!”–and then a blazing skeleton got three ticks of Lay Waste off. Miraculously, no one died. Probably thanks to the warbling solo provided by Garrosh. In any case, we pressed on, and before I knew it the dragon stood up and blew the Scourge all to bits.

At the moment we succeeded I felt like I was drowning in a rotting sea of zombie parts, all hope lost. It was kind of amazing seeing the dragon suddenly lift up and end the encounter. Like Gandalf cresting the ridge, but less dramatic, and I don’t remember any white light.

Dorkiest simile ever; I apologize. Either way, it was pretty sweet to one shot the fight after the initial trouble we had Wedne–DAMMIT.

After Dreamwalker came Sindragosa and this was going to be the first time we did her since AVR was broken. As I’ve always maintained, I loved AVR for its ability to put marks on the ground, which removed a lot of the thinking from Frost Beacon placement. … Ok–ALL the thinking. Nonetheless, I read off the beacon placements and everyone wrote it down on a piece of paper in front of them (how… antique) and we got to work.

We didn’t have much of any issue with the beacons and easily dropped her. There was a short hiccup at the end where I disconnected but thankfully I’m not that critical. It was at like 3% and everyone autopiloted the encounter to its conclusion.

Two one shots and we were only like 45 minutes into raid time. That gave us a solid (almost) three hours to go tussle with the Lich King. And, dontcha know it, we one shot him too. Scored achievements for a swath of folks that couldn’t make our first kill, along with the 2H sword and the caster staff. Of course, by the time that was done we still had about two and a half hours left in the raid.

There was some discussion what to do with the rest of the night and we eventually we decided to go to Ulduar and bang out some hardmodes and hopefully grab some more shards for Ildara’s Val’anyr (heh, now that’s a work in progress to say the least).

We ended up getting Orbituary, additional Ignis and XT achieves for those who needed them, and then spent about 30 minutes working on the Iron Council. A lot of people left between ICC and Uld and unfortunately we didn’t have enough folks to push that last 20 seconds of the fight. On the bright side, we did get a shard for Val’anyr, so that expedition wasn’t a complete wash.

One day we’ll finish that stupid mace. I’d like to do it now, but it’s impossible with our two-night schedule to dedicate any time to a raid two tiers back, so the pieces that Ildara has now will continue to rot except for occasional half-hearted attempt to augment their numbers. Even if the mace still BiS, from the looks of it.

At least we’ll be making a Shadowmourne pretty soon! That’s a bright spot on my otherwise abyssal Legendary record.

I love each time Garrosh manages to get his Warsong out a little louder. Last week we killed 5 of the twelve heroic fights, with multiple wipes on Festergut and Blood Queen. This week we one shot both of those, easily. Part of that was of course knowing the intricacies of the fight a little better after the kill, but another huge help was surely another 5% more awesome.

Not to mention all the delicious HPs! I wants them all.

Er, but moving on… To add to our plate, the schedule called for adding Heroic Princes and Dreamwalker. I was initially (hell, still am) concerned about the raid schedule this week ever since Tuesday was a no-go. We have a make up night scheduled for Sunday, but even so I was very worried my all-important goal of Heroic BQL or bust every week was out of reach if we didn’t get to her last night. Mostly because Sunday has the possibility of being iffy.

So after two wipes on heroic Blood Princes, Frank started whispering into my ear dark tidings and it being an hour away from raid end I was beginning to debate in officer chat if it made sense to kill Princes on normal to guarantee BQL being down this week. The other officers (rightly) told me to simmer down and we did another go.

And killed them that next attempt. Egg on ma face!

As we running up the ramp and clearing to BQL I noticed my ShoR icon was faded out. My shield was also unequipped. I immediately panicked, thinking I sold it or destroyed it by accident, and searched my bags for them. I looked up at the top of my screen and my durability number was at 44%.

Not able to find the shield, and in near full-blown panic, I opened my character sheet and saw the shield still equipped, but at 0/120 durability. All my gear was at 44% but my shield was completely broken. Ye gods.

I don’t know why I announce these things in vent. I’m just giving Anafielle fodder for her eventual coup.

Anyway, we briskly one-shot Heroic BQL, which was pretty impressive. Though, after my moment in the sun, any plain-jane kill just feels so… pedestrian. Loot dropped and it was basically a carbon copy of last week. Anafielle got the heroic token, another Dying Light went to another mage, and everyone else groaned. At one heroic token a week right now, these things are hot commodities.

With about thirty minutes left in raid, the lot of us dodged over to Dreamwalker to start plugging away on her heroic mode. We had a few abortive attempts with one of our best portal-jumping healers disconnecting, so didn’t get very far unfortunately. 10 server rolled around and the sun set on our second, and best, night in 25 heroic modes yet. Very exciting stuff, 6/12 in one night.

Now let’s hope Sunday happens!

I had the casa to myself on Friday night and I was determined to over-imbibe that night before I had to trudge off to an… interesting… wedding the next day. To help me along in my personal goals, we convened a drunk raiding night. The initial plan was Blackwing Lair (to get Gulliveig the Broodlord’s head), then BT for rep and a shot at some cool Illidan items, then whatever else we had time for before we pared the raid down to 10 people and went to wrap up the three achievements a few folks needed to get their Uld10 drakes.

Because we were starting with BWL, of course a group of unattuned folks had to do the caravan through UBRS and the Rend event. I don’t know if anyone’s done this lately, but the bane of these trips has been that if you kill Rend before he jumps off his dragon, the event bugs and you need to reset the instance. Thankfully, we didn’t pull that this time!

Once finally in BWL we quickly shot through the whole place in like 30 minutes. My person interest in the place is limited to the remaining three pieces of T2 I need–boots, belt, chest. A few folks needed the achievement, and I think someone else wanted the Elementium. In any case, it was a smooth run and in no time at all we were porting to Shatt and flying off for Karabor.

The transit apparently proved troublesome for a few of us. Those with the Touring Rockets decided to dump their passengers, so while yours truly is like a cat with buttered toast on his back, Anafielle was not as lucky.

Splat.

I’m currently really liking Black Temple. It’s huge but not drawn out. Boss fights are still somewhat interesting (I say this as someone who never ran the place in TBC), and a complete run has a Goldilocks duration. Plus the stuff off of Illidan is pretty awesome–the blindfold, the shield I covet, the creepy staff, etc. I think it took us about 90 minutes to burn through the place, and once the Betrayer hugged the floor, we decided to dodge to Silithus for an AQ40 run. Because, why not?

Once we were done re-enacting Starship Troopers and I was satisfied with pissing everyone off by constantly asking in a drunken manner, “Is this the gauntlet? How about now?!” we then finally broke down to a 10man to get some folks their drakes. I wasn’t planning for this to take very long, so I told the five that had to drop group to hang around and we’d run Hyjal or something after. 20 minutes, tops.

Anyway, while the 10 of us ran Orbituary, Disarmed, and Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare, Anafielle was passed out on her keyboard. And then there were 14!

Once the Ulduar fun ended we headed over to Hyjal and steamrolled through the place. After Archimonde fell, I realized it was way past my bed time and staggered off to wake up early the next morning, hungover, for my drive to the wedding.

The bug hunt

On Sunday, after having run AQ40 the other day, I noticed my reputation with the Brood of Nozdormu was around 31640/36000, within spitting distance of the next level and putting me one step closer to being able to really start the Scepter quest chain. So I flew down to Silithus to cash in my stockpile of Qiraji Lord Insignias and hopefully push it to neutral. As I was clicking through the multiple goes of the repeatable quest, I watched my reputation slowly trudge up to maxing out Hated.

After cashing them all in I was at 35640/36000. When I was done blubbering like a girl, I went back to farming carapaces.

Finally, 10 agonizing minutes later I had the 200 I needed, turned them and prepared for that delicious green swirl of neutrality.

Wait… that’s not right… Neutral is after… no… not more carapaces… NOT MORE CARAPACES.

/flex

I’m not much of a pvper, but when accidentally opening up the pvp window I noticed that it was AV weekend. So, on a whim I jumped into a match which was about to start. Someone asked in /bg who was the tank. Some guy in 232 gear speaks up first, but since I have a chip on my shoulder since the last time I was in AV, I volunteered as well. Some guy must have inspected us both, because he immediately decreed that I was tank.

We zerged right up to Vann, skipping the mage at the halfway point. Looks like Alliance was doing the same, because I never heard them engage our midway guy-person. Like I said, I never do battlegrounds. I don’t know these names.

Anyway, we get to Vann, I check to make sure people are behind me and I pull. 30 seconds later Vann went down, the results screen came up and yours truly was top damage done. Gogo aoe damage on five mobs at once.

Team Rocket Alpha Snowflake strikes back

We run two ICC-10 heroic groups on Sunday, which jokingly have adopted the names Team Rocket Alpha Snowflake and Team Bravo Sunshine Ponies, if I have those right. My team (Alpha) started an hour late because the second tank forgot we were raiding. Ana’s team meanwhile continued their lockout from last week, on time, which had gotten the guild-first kill of Saurfang 10H last week.

Swearing revenge, Team Alpha responded by spending ten attempts on the same fight while Bravo went to work on heroic Putricide. Finally, after about an hour we knocked over Saurfang.

Alas, Bravo managed to match our previous heroic kills (Fester, Rotface, and BQL) and then one-up us with Dreamwalker. While the rivalry flares up I’m just happy the guild is getting these progression kills. I’m a softy like that. Nonetheless, next week Alpha is prepared to take back the crown.

And, in other news, I really, really need to do strategy posts for heroic fights.