Last night wasn’t as bad as I originally dreaded. Yeah we started the raid with 24 people in group, but once we got through the Ignis trash (for the second day in a row) we picked up a 25th person. The first attempt was attempted and somewhat shortly ended in a wipe. Eek, I remarked.

On the bright side, while attempting to run out Ignis stuffed me in his fire crotch and recognizing my chance for an achievement I popped LOH and furious Flash healed myself. When I dropped out unscathed I continued running away, but he snatched me up again. The second time I wasn’t so lucky. Oh well, mission accomplished.

Part of the reason we wiped wasn’t due to heals or anything like that, but some confusion with the adds. The person in charge of popping brittle golems wasn’t familiar with the job (not his fault, that was corrected) and one of the other add tanks was doing the job for the first time. The second try both knew then what to do and executed their tasks with ease. So Ignis dropped and my fears that last night would be a repeat of Tuesday’s shite show were allayed.

We then moved on to Iron Council and one-shot them as well. And, proudly, I didn’t get instagibbed at all by Steelbreaker! (Thank you healers).

Auriaya was next and after a false start with the pull we regrouped and put in a seriously attempt. Things were going well until Demo bit it and I took over the tanking, but a lot of people died to pounces or being feared into the void zone.

One particular Shaman, who’s a nice guy, has an awful connection and often DCs. And as you know I’m sure, this is one fight where a DC is really painful, because if he’s standing outside of the stack, the Feral Defender is going to pounce at him, then back at someone else, and back and forth ad nauseam. I appreciate the healers hate letting someone die, but let him go! He’s causing raid damage and keeping him alive gives less benefit than just letting him die.

So anyways, Demo’s dead, I’m tanking, and a lot of dps bit it too. We had something on the order of 12 people left, 30% of Auriaya’s health remaining, and the clock was ticking on her enrage timer. We’re just focusing her down and I’m watching her health slowly tick, popping wings when I can and dpsing as hard as my measly tank damage will allow. Eventually we’re down to 8 or so, 30 seconds, 10% health. Clock keeps ticking, people pouring all they have into her. Then 10 seconds, 5%… her HP keeps going down. Finally at 2 seconds before enrage timer we heard that horrifying shriek as Auriaya’s corpse falls to the floor.

Phew.

After the excitement of that near-wipe died down we shuffled over to Hodir’s hallway and took his frosty behind down as well. I was pretty happy to be able to indulge in a little dpsing for once, since the new third tank didn’t have a dps offset and two tanks is overkill as it is on that fight.

And finally after Hodir we went after Mimiron who’d up til last night we had one-shot every non-progression attempt. I say “up til” because unfortunately we did wipe, and during Phase 4 as well, which hurts because that’s a good 10 minutes or so into the fight. Mimiron is so long that any wipe deep into the encounter is a huge amount of time spent.

One thing that definitely hurt us wasn’t spare heals or tanks eating too much of a plasma blast, it was idiots eating mines or shockwaves. Both in the first attempt, and after phase one of the second, the same two people had died to the same, stupid, shite. A tad frustrating since we explicitly call out in vent “SHOCK WAVE” so you have enough time to take your face off the keyboard and high tail it out of there.

So we’re on phase 2 in the second attempt with those two mouth breathers sucking tile and feeling pretty good about the attempt nonetheless. We get through phase 3 with another person or two down. Still doing pretty well. Then in phase 4 we start suffering serious attrition. People bite it to the intermittent shockwaves, others to the spun-up lasers. It was definitely a race against the clock.

Eventually there were only a handful of us left, once again staring down the enrage timer. Cendra’s reading off in vent the health of the three parts while we furious dps as hard as we can. The second tick down but it looks like we’re not going to make it, when finally in a burst of luck Sated dropped off. Gulliveig blasts off a Bloodlust and we close the gap down to 1% each piece. Then the enrage timer hits 0 and Mimiron turns gigantic and red. It looked like the end, but we successfully dropped the parts to zero at literally the last second.

Probably shouldn’t have been that close, but a kill was a kill.

It’s been a pretty lackluster raid week thus far, but at least we’re only one boss shy of our usually kill count. So, could be worse.

I seriously need to make sure to always sign off on posts with a little optimism about the upcoming night’s boss attempts, because that does the trick every time. Our one and only goal last night was to down Auriaya, or at least learn the fight some more, and we got her.

But the story isn’t that we downed her, it was how we did it.

It was our fourth attempt and things were starting off very well. The pull went smoothly, no one dying from pounces, and the adds were properly under control. We had learned how tightly we needed to pack to prevent the Feral Defender from being able to pounce, so that damage was kept to a minimum.

After four kills on the FD, we decided it’s damage was minimal enough we could focus on Auriaya so her health was starting to tick down. 60%… fear, interrupt, recovery, good split on the sonic screech… 44%… repeat cycle… 24%… same deal…

Time was starting to tick down on us. She was at around 5% and we were riding the enrage timer hard. At around 1.3% is was declared in vent that she was as good as dead, no worries. And then she feared, and all the dps scattered. The enrage timer ticks the final few seconds. Everyone reforms on the tank and desperately tries to plunk away at that last remaining health.

Only a few thousand hp remain. And then she enrages.

A 92k Sonic Screech immediately wipes out the entire raid.

And then a hunter’s killshot ticks for 11k and kills her.

The achievement flashes on everyone’s screen and we all erupt in shouts and laughter. What an awesome kill! …a little close for comfort, but nonetheless.

Of the loot the Unbreakable Chestguard dropped, which I snatched up (sorry Demo). It’s a nice direct upgrade from my T7.5 chest. Basically BR/BV to more BR/BV, so no avoidance loss, plus a nice gain in stamina and defense (of which I am now stacking WAY too high).

And then after this heroic victory we plunked away at Hodir for a bit, making some significant headway. But then 10 server rolled around and the EST early risers had to go, so we called.

We’ll get him next week.

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.