Finally, some progression

I think it is sporting to say my guild is a bit, er, stalled when it comes to Ulduar 25. Our scheduling of raids has been crap which leads to people not coming on for raid nights (because they don’t know when they are) and then any ad-hoc raids that due form tend to eventually fall apart because we can’t keep a sustainable number of raiders in group.

Last night was therefore a happy rarity, and Ulduar 25 raid. The night was young and we had one farm boss to whet our appetites before we banged our heads against the wall on Kologarn.

Iron Council was a cake walk after a quick initial wipe caused by yours truly. Steelbreaker started casting Fusion Punch while standing in a Rune of Power, so even though he was promptly moved out, he still did this:

Steelbreaker Fusion Punch hits Rhidach for 32564 Nature. (5250 Resisted) (5540 Absorbed)

Ouch. And then:

Steelbreaker melee swing hits Rhidach for 19681 Physical. (1579 Blocked) (1517 Absorbed)

Game over, man.

Clearly I forgot the rather obvious: pop bubblewall before Fusion Punch landed. That 32k hit would have been for only 16k and the subsequent 19k would have been halved as well.

To compensate for my noobishness we made a point of announcing when Rune of Power was being cast so I could preemptively move Steelbreaker before it popped up underneath him, and I was doubly sure to be more aware of bubblewalling if things went bad again.

In any case, second attempt we easily took care of the encounter, although there was definitely a significant attrition occurring during every Overload where one person wasn’t paying attention and couldn’t make it out of the blast radius in time. Silly dps.

After the Iron Council went down it was time to shift focus for that bane of our raiding existence, Kologarn. Of the last five weeks we’ve run Ulduar 25, if I recall correctly, we’ve downed him twice and let him completely road block us three times. How ironic he turns into a bridge then, eh?

I’m happy to report we two-shot the jerk after an initially spotty attempt (where the druid tank ran out to dps the adds, got beam focused, then walked the beam back into the melee stack /facepalm). The tanking set up was yours truly on adds (more on that in a sec) and Demo/said druid nub tank on Kolo. All melee was stacked up on the tanks, and the healers were out with the ranged.

The way I handled adds was I’d sit with melee and dps the arm until it was at about 10%. Then, I’d dash under the right arm, drop a consecrate at 2% or so and when the adds spawned it’d hopefully be timed well enough that the first tick would hit them. A glyph Hammer of the Righteous would trap four in my aggro, and I’d have to follow up with a quick shield toss on the one Rubble that didn’t get hit with HotR to make sure I had them all. When Consecration was off cooldown, I’d drop another and go to town.

That second attempt went very smoothly, despite one terrifying moment when some dps trying to race away from an eye bream almost brought it right to me, and Kolo soon perished. Though, unfortunately no Saronite-Plated Legguards (gawd, I want those so badly).

After Kolo we still had a solid hour of raiding ahead of us to wack away at Auriaya. And wack we did. The first few attempts were basically just figuring out the best way to do the pull. Unlike 10 man, she now had four cats with her, and they needed to be somewhat separated to distribute their stacking buff. All around nastiness.

Despite some pretty solid attempts at the end, we ran out of time. I think tonight if we can get the raid going on time and have a focused body of raiders, we shouldn’t have much trouble with her ultimately. The only thing holding us back in this fight is getting the execution down, and when that happens it’ll be cake.