Ow, my face
He exclaimed, after hitting the brick wall.
Actually, I’m being too harsh. Wednesday’s raid went extraordinarily well. We one shot Ignis again, despite some hecticness with the add management. Out of the three people that handle the adds (myself, another tank, and a boomkin for rooting/zapping them) only I was on vent. So it was really hard to coordinate the tanking and the rooting, and the zapping. Very messy but we got ‘im down.
And then we headed over to Freya with the memory fresh in our minds of last weeks roflstomping at the hands of her voluminous trash. Last time around it took us around an hour so to clear out all her little buddies, and then we had trash respawns come up during out 8 or so attempts. Total shit show.
This week however we did much, much better. Trash was cleared out in about 20 minutes with no accidental body pulls of Elder Stonebark or additional trash coming in to join the fun. CC was cleanly done and reapplied on the fly with little trouble. Altogether, it definitely was a good portent of how the night would go.
When we finally got to Freya we adopted the strategy of if the fight turned sour (like two waves of adds at the same time) we’d run out to reset it. We ended up doing this a few times initially because we had a couple of new folks who didn’t know the fight. After the first handful of false starts we got our house in order and pushed the fight all the way up to right before the last phase. She had about 30 or so stacks left and the last wave of adds were almost dead, but we lost a few folks, didn’t kill them in time and a wave of detonators was summoned.
Shouldn’t have been a big deal, we finished the wave that held us up, started to down the detonators, and then all of a sudden a green flash and most of the raid was dead. Turns out the stacks were reduced to 0 after that last pack of adds, so she dropped the exploded pods everywhere while we were occupied with the detonators. Woops.
After that attempt, with revenge searing in our hearts, we then went and took her out in one clean go. It was a thing of beauty, every add was reduced to the proper health percentage and targets switched like we called out. Detonators were killed quickly, but slowly enough that healers didn’t fall behind. And no one died to explodey pods. Always a plus.
With Freya freed from the whammy and having bid us adieu, we cracked open her cache and distributed the loot. Among the booty was the token for my tier 8.5 legs which I bid 100 dkp on, though truthfully wasn’t really interested in winning. For one I think we can all agree that the 4 piece bonus is unmitigated crap, so that had no bearing on my decision. Moreover, I’m pretty enamored with the EH of the Saronite Plated Legguards. Lastly, I’d rather not tank in a dress. As a blood elf, that’s a little… on the nose… dontcha think?
In any case, as luck would have it (and I mean that sarcastically) I won the legs. I immediately pawned them off to the #2 bidder who would get much, much more use out of them. Lesson learned: don’t bid on gear you’re wishy-washy on.
After Freya the next logical step was Thorim so we headed over to his (thankfully) trash lite hallway and forced our way into the arena.
Right now Thorim is totally and completely our brick wall. Like Hodir I am beyond confident that its not ability keeping us from his cache, but execution. We’re having serious issues with Evokers overrunning the arena and making it impossible to kill trash. Demo and I did a lot of research, and I think the next time we head in there we can do it. I’ll post more on the strategy if it works.
Even if we don’t down Thorim, this has definitely been our best week in Ulduar to date.
Armory Feed
Blood elf and all, I DARE any warrior/OP knight to tank in a dress.
We make it look GOOD. Period. I like my Kilt.
And hell yeah, grats on downing Freya. Flux has killed Auriaya as of last night, and ready for the Keepers of Ulduar “headbanging against the wall”, YAY!?
Oh and our GM got the first Fragment of val’anyr from Kologarn (We let him keep it just to see if that could help him yell at us a bit less on wipes, and because it was his birthday)
Good luck with Thorim.
We just initiated a strategy that effectively gets us through to Phase 2 (I normally tank the Arena) and even Phase 2 is now running very smoothly (phase 2 is more about DPS execution than anything else). This week we nailed him on the 2nd or 3rd attempt and are foreseeing smoother kills on him going forward.
Great fight!
@Rhidach
29 June 2009 at 11:22 am #
@Ian: Thanks for the tip and the kinds words! :)
@J: Glad to hear it, best of luck to your guild. Hopefully we’ll have the same luck next time we try the fight, haha.
@Vorian: Ah that’s rough! I’m paranoid about situations like that so I always keep a list of gear upgrades I want handy so I won’t accidentally let them pass by.
I love your blog! Just wanted to pass on a change that helped my guild make it thorugh Thorim on 25 man. We used to run with 2-3 tanks but no we roll with 4. We run with two tanks in the arena and two tanks in the tunnel.
Both of us in the arena are tankadins who glyph and spec just like you. We have two rogues who do nothing but spam fan of knives and tricks of the trade to help us pick up aggro on everything that comes our way. We like to have everybody kill the big guys first and then just waste everyone else as soon as possible. Usually I wear a couple of block set items on this fight.
The main tank in the tunnel is a warrior who is accompanied by a ret pally who goes prot (dual spec FTW) just to help keep things fast in the tunnel. The prot pally puills the first group and the warrior runs ahead and begins working on the next one. The the prot pally picks up the remining mobs as the warrior heads straight away into the next mob. That way things are going really fast in the tunnel so that arena is not given a chance to get overwhelmed. By the way, this strategy requires awesome mobile heals!
Anyways, thanks for all the great work and effort you out into your awesome blog! :)
@Ian: I really like the overall tanking strat, but I would like you to elaborate a bit more on the Dps comp for both groups please.
had the saronite plated legguards drop last week… and for some reason i was just totally not paying any attention… i usually keep my RB to not ignore gems and when i saw the loot i was like meh.. the other pally tank had it and the DK didnt want it all obv… went to offspec >.<
kicked myself later when i was checking some BiS lists..
i have possibly never raged like that before *sigh*
We use a six healer/3 tank strategy (Sinners and Saints/The Scryers) to do…well pretty much everything since we don’t have a real 4th tank.
Tunnel – DK tank, Disc priest, Holy Paladin, 2-3 hunters, boomkin, and some ret pallies or maybe a feral druid (six DPS total).
Arena – Bear tank, Prot Paladin, 2 trees, a resto shaman, and me (holy paladin). Plus the rest of our DPS. Rogues use ToT/FoK to help with agro, and we point DPS/assist the targets instead of AoEing them (equals greater survivability). On nights with no Protadin – I heal 51/20/0 and run RF.
I’m not quite sure which targets they kill first – I think the big guys with the WW and/or the healers in close order – then AoE down the rest if there are no ‘special’ mobs remaining.
Once P2 starts, everyone spreads out and avoids the lightning, with the tanks taunting after unbalancing strikes. Sacrifice/Pain Suppression/etc are rotated after 5 or so stacks.
Good luck! Fortunately, while he’s a tough normal boss – he’s fairly easy on Hard Mode (wear the Frost Resist ring) compared to the other 3.
I found the hallway to be a very easy fight. Especially if you have a healer looking up the hall to tell you which side to go to. However, we never really got a chance to get up the stairs which, if I recall correctly from 10 man, was the harder part.
As for the arena. My biggest difficulty was identifying the next target. As things get pretty crowded in there I find that a large amount of DPS is lost running around looking for what it is I am supposed to be hitting. The marking is sporadic and the targets never seem to be in the same area. The tank is running around trying to grab aggro and the DPS is chasing behind. It sort of feels like Razerscale did in our very first Ulduar runs. Alot of people running around trying to do damage to God Knows what.
@Adgamorix: Thanks! the setup sounds good, I guess we will have to tweak it to suit our needs, since we only have 1 tree, and no bear tanks, but we do have 2 good Warrior tanks, a very good DK tank, and 2 Pally tanks, and all of them except for one of the warrior tank, have a DPS offspec or a healing (The other tankadin), so i guess Its doable for us. SEE YA and thanks a lot for the info