Great success!

Phew! My fears were alayed and doubts subsided after the raid we had last night. Without going too much into the drama the one-group policy engendered (another topic for another day), it was definitely a good idea to make an “A-team.”

We entered Ulduar last night at about 7 server. We streamrolled through every both we had already seen before (FL, Razorscale, XT, Kologarn, Iron Council, and Auriaya) and about an hour and a half later we were sitting outside the entrance to Hodir’s wing, rested, readied and fully ready to wipe and learn the Keeper fight.

Oh, small loot digression: I picked up the Stormtempered Girdle, finally replacing the only non-BiS Naxx piece I had. Sa-weet. Of course, now I’m 1.4% away from being melee hit capped, so obviously I need to tweak my gear a bit. But, I digress.

Anyhoo, we were expecting some serious wipe-learning. And then we two-shot Hodir.

Of course, we did it easy mode, the primary goal being to learn the fights first,  and worry about the purps later. I think it’s fair to say we have Hodir pretty much down now.

With Hodir down we then switched focus to Thorim (who I was heavily pushing for because I want those shoulders so damn badly… I’m such a sucker for Tier sets).

This fight… hrm… how to sum it up? Ok, so assuming you’re tanking the Arena–which, believe me, if you’re a paladin you probably will be–it’s like you died and went to Tankadin Hell.

Never-ending waves of adds until the Gauntlet team makes it to Thorim. Adds jump randomly down into the arena, seemingly always bee-lining for the healers. You need to be fast with taunts of else they’ll go squish. Hand of Protectioning is a must. And, to top it all off, there’s a delightful silence that will occasionally limit you to only HotR for a few seconds.

Delightful.

This was an interesting fight to say the least, and required every ounce of me. You can see from the screenshot above I may have been a wee bit frustrated, but in the end, we prevailed and Thorim went down.

And in his cache were the Conqueror shoulders! Eek. Of course, not to build up a long story for nothing, I didn’t win them. Moral of the story: always roll last. It seems to be less disappointing to fail to top someone else’s number than to wait in horrible, gnawing suspense for your number to be crushed like so much volleyball.

So Night One is done, and we have 8 of the 13 (let’s be realistic and not count Algalon) bosses down. Thursday we roll back in for Freya, Mimiron, Vezax, Yoggy, and the cherry atop the Ulduar Sundae: Ignis.

No, we haven’t attempted him yet…