So remember a few months ago when I outlined my philosophy of utter pessimism? Yes, well, we’ve been in one of those upward ascents for a month now, but I’m getting the impression we’re starting to go down the spiraling ramp of the dramacoaster. Blergh indeed.

Despite all this, last night was a great night raid-wise, second only to last week’s roflstomping of ToC, Ony, and VOA. While all in all I’m really proud of how everyone has mastered ToC25, I’m perturbed at how awful people were being on time for the raid. Invites went out at 7 server, Ony was declared the first destination, and everyone was told to start hoofing it in case there was pvp. And sure enough there was, an Alliance squad was camping out on the hill just behind the stone and jumping anyone that went to summon.

Slowly the minutes ticked by and by 7:30 we still had about 5 people scattered about the world. It takes all of five or eight minutes to hearth, port to TB, and fly to Mudsprocket. What the hell takes 30 minutes? Lazy bastards.

When we get to Onyxia we wiped the first time because a couple of people bit it on Deep Breaths (lol) or stood in front of the big adds (lolol) or got cleaved by Onyxia (lololol). I think next time we go there I’m going to have to pass around Amber’s guide to Onyxia. It basically says all that needs to be said about this encounter.

Second attempt we down the old lady. Gear went out and everyone headed over to ToC. By now it was 8 server time, two hours on the clock remaining.

We did two strategies differently from previous weeks. One was on the worms we just burnt down Acidmaw and let Dreadscale soft enrage. I personally found that having the poisons removed early was a huge dps boost, although some perpetually aggrieved healers (ahem) might disagree. This new strat allowed us to kill the beasts faster than we have yet. I’m wondering how well it will translate into heroic 25man…

Other new strategy is a carry-over from the heroic 10man. On Twins we tanked both in the center and let splash damage hit both. We didn’t get the Salt and Pepper achievement (mostly cause some dopey folks got gibbed by orbs) but we did an impressively fast kill. Most of the Twin Pacts were interrupted by the time they hit halfway through their cast bar, and that was without the opposite attuned people changing colors.

All in all, we one-shot the whole place, so well done ES. Now I just wish people could be on time. /grumble

Tonight’s our first foray into Grand Trial of the Crusader (25). I’m cautiously optimistic about how we’ll do, but we’ll see.

Well last night wasn’t a complete wash. We got Twins down, and rather easily so once we worked out the kinks in our strategy. Anub we were not so lucky on. Phase 2 was a mess, and that we’ll need more time with.

We had Phase 1 down pat, the shifting of Anub over, dragging the second set of Burrowers away, etc. But time and time again Phase 2 was a cluster-you-know-what. People I think kept panicking and rather than paying attention to spikes or helping kill the Scarabs, they were too busy running around like a chicken with their heads cut off. It also didn’t help that the Burrowers kept Shadowy Striking when I was trying to drag them into position and thus wasn’t on my game to do interrupts. Gah.

The Glyph of Holy Wrath is awesome in this fight (awesome idea, Yoggie). Though… I think I still have it on… eek.

But, Quel’Serrar, Serrar. We’ll put in more attempts this week and hopefully have a better time of it.

Oh, also, had an amusing run in with another pally. This guy initially apped to my guild, and was rejected because we heard he was a little overbearing/bossy. Moreover, he’s currently the leader of his guild, and I’m not a fan of aiding and abetting someone ditching a whole guild of people that trust him as their leader.

So lately he’s been whispering me trying to discuss various things and obviously ingratiate himself with me to get a second shot in the guild. And it almost worked! I was feeling kind of guilty, thinking “oh, he seems like a nice guy” and it wouldn’t hurt to let him reapp. While talking I mentioned casually I wanted the Libram of Valiance for a threat set (I mean, we all have different sets for different situations, correct?) which he interprets as me saying “I can’t hold threat evar HALP”.

So, bless his heart, he looks up my armory and immediately lets me know he’s discovered the problem–my spec is crap! You heard it here first, folks.

Now I’m not the be all-end all of pally tanking. There are folks far, far smarter than I and far better at “the biz” than I am. I’m just the lowly messenger. However, I was a bit incredulous at being told I was “doin’ it rong.” This kind soul informed me that my threat is bad because I have too many points in Ret. Oo-kay. He goes on to let me now SotP is the superior threat talent and I should really be going into that, rather than Crusade.

Nevermind the mountains of data at Maintankadin, this fellow knew the score.

After that episode I grabbed any lingering guilt I had, stuffed it in a box, and pushed it right out of the sewer pipe leading out of Dalaran. It’s the carrots’ problem now.

In the past few weeks we’ve been running two 25 nights, doing most of Coliseum on Tuesday and then VOA and finishing up Coliseum on Wednesday. Worked well, we got stuff done, people got their purps, everyone was happy.

So I wake up Tuesday and find out that Blizz is throwing a monkey wrench in the works: they’re releasing patch 3.2.2. Obviously, I’m shocked. I wasn’t away from WoW so I was not expecting a patch to come out–

Actually, I’ll explain this. Running joke is patches only come out when I’m on vacation or traveling for work. For example, 2.4 came out when I was in Florida for work (bee tee dubs, running Heroic Magister’s Terrace on a crappy hotel wireless connection while loaded on minibar booze = best thing ever), 3.0 when I was in Marseilles, 3.2 when I was in New Hampshire, etc.

Right, so back on topic: suddenly we had Onyxia to squeeze into the calendar, and by squeeze, I mean we actually had plenty of room for the old girl. To appease the masses yearning for dragon’s blood we decided to go after her after VOA that night. Moreover, the initial thought was Onyxia was resetting Tuesday night so it’d be stupid not to kill her when we could do her again the next day. Though, as we learned, not so much.

So we rip through VOA25 and then get our butts down to Dustwallow for Onyxia. The pvpers were out in force with a contingent of Horde sitting on the summoning stone, making getting the stragglers a little easier.

Once inside we burnt our way through Onyxia’s trash until we were face to face with the Brood Mother herself. Now, my only experience with this encounter was once at level 70 when I completed the huge quest chain for the hell of it, and then a few times at level 80 to gather scales for cloaks and to nab my t2 helm and Quel’Serrar (originals, both). I was not familiar with how the mechanics would work when at the proper raid level, aside from what I learned from the hilarious and classic Onyxia Wipe Animation.

So ES charges down the hill with the DK picking up Ony and me hanging in the rear on whelp and add duty. We get her to 70% quickly and she takes flight. The whelp train leaves the station and I immediately do my best to round as many as possible and help with the burn down. The AOE must have been intense because my fps dropped to 19 quickly, when it’s usually 60 in raids. A few people actually got dc’d, hah.

The adds go down and someone cries in vent “Deep Breath, look at her and move away from it!” Contrawise, the mouth breathers all stare at the ceiling in confusion and get roasted alive. The rest of us darted away and fall back together to deal with the eventually descending Onyxia. Of course the DK tank bought it, so I ran over and grabbed Ony to position her for phase three. The priests start rotating their Fear Wards and I used a bubble/debubble macro to slip out of one fear.

After going through the fear-break fear cycle a few more times Onyxia dropped to the floor and gave up her purples. A hunter and warlock helm dropped as well as the Sharpened Obsidian Edged Blade which is damn sexy. I was one for my Ret set. Loot is distributed and it’s only 7:30 server time, we’ve only been raiding for 45 minutes or so, amazingly.

A couple of us tabard hearth to the tournament and begin summoning the rest. We all pour into the Coliseum and start working our way through… and one shot every boss. We were out of there in two and a half hours, a few minutes shy of the 10pm ST cap I put on the raid.

Faction Champs in particular was an absolute joke. Usually we lose 5-8 people in the encounter, but with the nerfs done to overall damage we didn’t lose a single person. Sure, some of that can be explained by “practice makes perfect” and all, but the whole danger feeling of the fight was lost. Anub itself was also a cake walk. They toned down the damage the Burrowers were doing to the point where I never felt threatened, even while holding three of them at once. I’m not going to lie, I was kind of disappointed.

Well, that was Tuesday night: VOA, Ony, Col25. All cleared, all one shots. Amazing night.

And then last night we were kind of at a loss for what to do so it was decided we’d finally put to rest one of the ghosts haunting our guild: Sarth25 3D. We went in and did two learning wipes to figure out the finer points that most guilds knew of months ago, and then killed Sarth easily on the third go. So lots of folks got their titles and my pal Gulli got the drake for his mount collection.

Speaking of progress, I was looking at wowprogress, at the suggestion of Falowin, to see how our guild was doing there. Apparently we’re ranked 10th on our server and hilariously got the 17th kill in the world of Twins25 (which obviously doesn’t mean much, considering there’s a billion guilds tied for 17th along with us). All this progress and we’ve never killed Yogg. It’s kind of funny.

After Sarth I put together a dream team for ToC-10 heroic. It’s been our goal for a while to start working on that, and after Monday’s bloodlustless snafu we marched in last night with renewed vigor, determination, and shammyness.

Beasts we amazingly one-shot, and this was after wiping to them 13 times on monday. I’m assuming there must have been a stealth nerf in there, because I swear we were too slow to kill Gormok but the worms died sickeningly fast. Then Icehowl we just went through the motions with and burnt down with a minute left on the enrage timer. A nice morale boost for sure. 50 attempts left on the clock.

Then Jarxxus we had some trouble with initially with getting the portals down in time until we decided to shrink it down to one tank and six dps. This made life so much easier, because basically if you find yourself with two Mistresses of Pain, you’re looking at a world of hurt. That’s two counterspells going around, two healers that can be pounced at a time, it’s chaos. On the attempt we killed him we executed the fight perfectly. Portals went down very fast so we were never left with more adds than there would be in the normal mode. Took six wipes to learn, but when we got it, it was a thing of beauty. 44 attempts left on the clock.

Then onto Faction Champs–and oh boy did we luck out with group composition. We had the pally and druid for healers–that is, the two easiest to control. And no warrior, which made Zilga, the one clothie breathe a sigh of relief, even if the DK was still there (ZILGA DOWN!). So the kill order we settled on was Enhance Shaman, DK, Hunter, then Druid, Pally, and Shadow Priest. Nailed the fight on the second go, leaving us with 42 attempts left.

Unfortunately that was it for the night, have hit the time most people had to bail. We’re reforming on Monday and hoping can clean up the place and score the A Tribute to Skill achievement.

Overall, though, an amazing raid week. One I’m proud to be a part of with a great bunch of people.

Tuesday night we basically repeated what happened last week, when we killed everything up to Anub’arak but couldn’t down the last boss before everyone had to split because of lateness. So Anub rolled over to last night and we rolled in to take him out.

What screwed us up Tuesday night was too much experimenting with some pretty fail alternate strategies. We tried using AOE to burn down Burrowers and damage Anub at the same time, which was slow. The DK tank also suggested making the pursued person run far away and get bubbled or something, but that just spread everyone out, and turned out to be pretty fail as well.

What did work was what we did last week: kill 1 add from first pair of Burrowers, I hold the other 3. Also, we burnt Bloodlust once the first add was down, so we could assuredly make the enrage timer. I think with this strategy, on the attempt that we killed him, we only had two Burrow phases. I may be wrong… strong emphasis on may.

So, alas, I think that’s the strategy we’re sticking with. It’s sloppy but our tanks and heals are leet enough that it works.

With Anub down we then metered out the two groups for TOC-10 and in a short hour I racked up enough emblems to grab my third piece of T9.245, as well as a nice achievement.

Random thought: I really need to get into Heroic TOC-10. It’s a sin we haven’t started clearing that place out yet.

Now, speaking of T9.245, I think order of attack on emblem purchases will now be Headplate of the Honorbound and Liadrin’s Breastplate of Triumph with the order depending on if I win a trophy before accumulating 75 emblems. The Headplate will serve as a placeholder for when I (hopefully/eventually) win the tanking Judgement helm from the new Onyxia.

Lastly, I am proud to announce that I have officially beat Demogar to 40k hp unbuffed. Despite being disadvantaged by neither being a Blacksmith nor a cow, I managed to pick up enough gear while he was on his honeymoon to close the gap and sprint across the finishline.

Of course, the gear that got me to that point is horribly lacking in hit, so I probably won’t be rocking that much stam outside of sitting in a Demolisher on Flame Leviathan.

Woo hoo, superior stam scaling.

Last night was messier than I would have preferred. We started off with VOA25 and burnt down the three guys in there pronto, mostly scoring some pvp crap. Then we hopped over to Coliseum and started to make our way through it.

Beasts went down somewhat okay, but more people died to silly stuff than I’d like. Jaraxxus was a huge cluster-you-know-what. Two dps pulled off of the DK tank and got killed, and a few others bit it from standing in fires or the incinerate AOEs. The entire attempt was a slow attrition on a ranks and I saw the specter of an enrage wipe looming ahead. We probably downed Jaraxxus with less than a minute left on the enrage timer. Sloppy, sloppy kill.

For Faction Champs, we are basically still learning the fight, and it’s pretty difficult so I’m not going to offer any criticisms of our performance. We did kill them all in probably one of the more epic boss fights I’ve ever done. I think at the end of it were were looking at about 11 people left standing.

The order I put forward (and I’m open to suggestions on this) was burn down the priest first, then the druid. The holy pally was being handled by a rogue, so we skipped her and downed the enhance shammy next. Then the warrior (who I hate), dk, and rogue. Back to the pally, then hunter, shadow priest, and warlock.

I spent most of the fight following around the shaman, taunting him when possible, and cutting down his totems. My main goal was to keep him from getting a windfury proc and one-shotting a healer. I used shield tosses and Arcane Torrent to contribute to the healer burn. After the shaman was dead I shifted attention to the melee, trying to keep them occupied and off the squishies.

Like I said, pretty epic battle, and definitely a kill we earned. Thankfully the Champs coughed up the Juggernaut’s Vitality, which puts me at 39.1k unbuffed health. Delish.

Speaking of gear, I’m having a huge issue with hit rating right now. I’ve been eagerly gobbling up 245 gear, but in doing so I’ve been steadily losing hit. Earlier last month I was capped at 263 on the dot, and now I’m at a measly 108. To remedy this I can add 53 with the T9.45 legguards I’ll be getting in 8 emblems. I might have to enchant my weapon with Accuracy too. Considering the threat nerf we’re getting in 3.2.2, I really don’t want to take my chances with suddenly being so far under the hit cap.

But I digress! So after Champs we started up Twins, which was new to some people… with predictable consequences. First attempt was marked by people dying to Vortexes (I so badly want to call them “vortices”) and Twin Pacts going off. Part of that was me being a huge idiot and calling out during a Lightbane Twin Pact, “Everyone grab light and get Lightbane!!” I think I confused the hell out of people and that was not a bubble sundered.

Of course it also says something about the raiders that they didn’t have the critical thinking to recognize I screwed the pooch on those instructions and compensate. One guy even said “What? I just do what I’m told.” Great ‘tude champ. Yer gonna go far.

So first attempt on Twins was a wipe. Second time we were doing well, but somehow it all went to hell towards the end. The DK tank bought it and I ended up tanking the two of them in the center at like 30%. Somehow we lucked out and didn’t have anymore Twin Pacts, and I somehow managed to hold both through a Vortex. It was pretty crazy, but we got them down.

Then the ground fell out from under us and we got to finally face Anub as a 25man raid… and I totally dropped the ball. I didn’t do my due diligence on this guy, neglecting to look up strategies while thinking that it would be a carbon copy of the 10man incarnation. It wasn’t. The enrage timer is much, much tighter and requires a different approach.

Too late did we realize that having dps focus down both Burrower groups each above-ground phase was a bad idea. We spent about three attempts wiping that way, and only on the last one (declared as such because a lot had to scram after) did we obviously have the right approach. We pushed it to phase 3 easily, but then wiped because the DK is squishier than I am. I’m probably going to have to take Anub from him when that phase starts.

At least I know we can easily kill him tonight. A one-shot hopefully. Assuming everyone shows up.

After that disappointing conclusion to the raid we headed over to Uld10 to continue the Hard Mode Party. Our main goal, as you can imagine, was I Choose You, Steelbreaker, which had eluded us last time we tried it.

This time we had the same issue at the start, people didn’t realize Fusion Punch left a dot that needed to be dispelled, so when I blew up and the DK took over he was killed pretty quickly by being falcon punched to death.

The second attempt we cleaned that up but didn’t have enough dps to down Steelbreaker… although we definitely had the wrong approach by bringing me back to life and attempting to do a second tank switch. That just gave Steelbreaker another chunk of health and more damage to boot. To fix the strategy we had one of the healers go dps (so 2 healer, 6 dps) and we resolved to let the DK blow up if that’s what was going to happen.

So the fight starts, we hit phase 3 (side note: the three sweetest words in the English language are “ fades”) and I get my Overwhelming Power. I pop wings, go to town and at 10 secs on my meltdown the DK taunts and I bright for a safe distance. I explode, get a brez, and settle in behind Steelbreaker to do some measly dps and take over Cleansing duty.

At about 10 seconds on the DK’s Meltdown, Steelbreaker coughs up his purples.

I think tonight we’re going to follow up Coliseum with working on the Freya hard mode.

My favorite season has unofficially drawn to a close. My condolences to everyone who has to shuffle back to school/college/what have you.

BWL. To celebrate the end of summer, along with the demise of Door Boss, I put together a BWL raid on Friday night. It was mostly an achievement run to tick off another requirement towards the Classic Raider achievement, but I also wanted to get the Elementium smelting book for Cendra (to be my reliable Elementium smelter) and collect any ore that would be kind enough to drop. Unfortunately, only one Elementium ore dropped.

We hit a funny bug on Razorgore. Apparently when his MC drops off during a switch, if he has nothing in close range to aggro, he explodes and wipes the raid. This happened twice until we figured out what the deal was. After that I spent the encounter baby-sitting him, and tossing a Hand of Reck on him when MC fell off.

The last time we did BWL we only had four people so Vael was pretty much a no-go. People blew up way too early, and we were still in Naxx gear so we weren’t putting out quite as much damage as we do now. With an additional four people it was no contest. Although of course I still blew up.

It was a fun raid overall, and I walked out with the aforementioned new piece of Ore (bringing me to 5 total), along with the Elementium Reinforced Bulwark, and the Judgement Gloves (4/8 Judgement, now!).

We attempted Heroic TOC 10man last night, but that was a bit of a snafu. DPS was good, but we didn’t have a bloodlust and we kept having Icehowl come out when the worms were at 10-20%. We need to be about 30 seconds faster than we were, which is a pain. I think we can do it, just need a little more gear, a better group makeup, or maybe get fancy with two healers and six dps.

One thing that I think helped healing a bit was we’d start the fight with the DK tanking Gormok, and holding him to four stacks of Impale. Then when I taunted off him, I’d also give him a BOP to knock off his stacks. I’d then hold Gormok to four stacks, and the DK would taunt off me and I would Divine Shield + Divine Sacrifice to drop my stacks and ease up the healing for the closing stretch.

It was annoying that our execution was pretty well-tuned but we just couldn’t kill stuff fast enough. If not for the timed releases we’d be able to do it. But, that’s the point, eh? A challenge to rise to.

Uld10 Hardmodes. After our faceplant in TOC we headed over to Ulduar to stomp our some hard modes for our Rusted Proto Drakes. First one of the night was Orbit-uary which after an introductory wipe we killed it easily the second time. I’m proud to report that I did about 40% of the dps, basically standing still as much as possible and keeping my 10 stack up the entire time. It probably doesn’t hurt I’ve got a lot of 245 pieces to boost my dps.

We then burnt through Heartbreaker and cleared trash to the Iron Council. After downing Molgeim last pretty easily last week we wanted to try our hand at Steelbreaker last. We put in about three attempts before a couple of people had to ditch due to lateness, but honestly it was very easily. The only thing that screwed us up was the first time we were in phase 3 I exploded and killed the other tank (didn’t realize I needed to run for it) and then on our last attempt the tank switch went flawlessly, but then the DK got nuked by three ticks of Fusion Punch. I think I might have been coddling the healers with my self-cleanses.

Playing the auction game a bit. Lastly, in a non-raiding note, I’ve found a new source of enjoyment to the game being a Jewelcrafting tycoon. Once having overcome my crippling laziness, I started buying raw epic gems off the AH and cutting them for resale. Business is ramping up but I’ve already made a few thousand gold, which is pretty nice. I’m attempting to be super careful about not overposting, like only doing three at a time of each cut so I don’t have too many up.

Right now I’m buying the raw gems for about 150-170 gold and then reposting cuts of 210-230, so a slow but steady profit. I find that Bold Cardinal Rubies are selling best right now, but only because I seem to be the only one cutting them at the moment. Today should be a pretty good day for sales with all the raiding and upgrading going on.

I fully intended to write a post today about how we downed Anub25 and the loot flowed like milk and honey, but Door Boss somehow managed to snake his laggy tendrils in my raid and kill it.

Thanks to all the server repairs that Blizz has been performing on Lightninghoof recently, we had the absolute worst server lag in Col25 last night, and of course it hit hardest during Champs. We wiped about five times because we couldn’t react fast enough (I spent about five seconds at a time trying to chop down a Healing Stream Totem). We realized it was pointless to continue wiping on account of the lag monster, so we called it for the night.

Pretty disappointing as you’d imagine.

On the bright side, Door Boss seems to be dead in his previous incarnation. I managed to get into Molten Core last night and resume my epic quest for Binding #2.

Yesterday my server came back up at around 8:40 server time. Usually we start raids at 7 server, so we were pretty delayed. I understand that the extended maintenance was because of extraordinary reasons (supposedly the Blizzard techs were doing a raid on Door Boss), so I wasn’t too miffed the Col25 raid was delayed for so long that we pushed it back to tonight.

They actually brought Lightninghoof down again this morning, which is good and necessary, because Door Boss was definitely not dead. More like pushed to phase 2.

Ildara, Cendra, and I somehow managed to slip past DB and get into Zul’Gurub on our first try last night (for the return of our weekly mount runs). Part of the desire to go there was also farming raptors for the pet, which the RNG gods surprisingly shined their countenance upon us and let drop. Grats to Ildara on her baby, giant-headed raptor!

After ZG we flew over to Blackrock Mountain where I was fully expecting to get into Molten Core after one-shotting Door Boss. Alas, we went on to wipe on him for about 15 minutes.

Hopefully they finally fix this ridiculousness with the extra maintenance today. I’m really itching to get back to farming my right Binding of the Windseeker. (Time’s running out!)

Hrm, I need to back up a little.

We did actually end up raiding Col10 last night, right as the servers came back up. I through together a quick run and we totally roflstomped the place. Aside from a sloppy first attempt on Beasts, everything else was a one-shot. Even Anub!

Amusing bug, the corpses never despawned, which was slightly annoying. However, also amusing when the Lich King strode into the Coliseum to taunt Tirion, walked into Icehowl’s corpus, and then the recently deceased Yeti began to castigate us for building a tournament on top of a Nerubian empire. [HIS] EMPIRE.

So then the floor collapsed, and poor Icehowl and Friends joined us in the cavern below. Requiescat in pace, my furry foe.

… Right–where was I? Anub. Oh, what a nub he is. Now, I’m not one to bandy about such terms, but I think it’s fair to say this gentlebug was quite the loot pinata.

The whole fight consists of three phases: Anub above ground, Anub underground, and Anub at <30% health.

In the first phase appoint a dps to bring down the frozen orbs that float above the fight. Doing so will drop patches of permafrost on the ground. Movement is reduced by 80% on these, but it’s a good thing because adds cannot burrow through permafrost and regain health, and Anub’s spike on phase two cannot penetrate these spots.

For tanks, one is going to tank Anub in as big a permafrost patch as you can manage. If Anub’s hitbox is completely in permafrost he can’t burrow and start phase two. Try to make that happen. Moreover, an add tank is needed to pick up Burrower adds and bring them to Anub and tank them on permafrost. All dps need to burn down the adds asap to make life easier. If adds are not tanked on permafrost they will go underground and regen lots of health.

One thing to look out for is every so often Anub will freeze the tank on him, which means no avoidance. That’ll be a neat little damage spike.

Now, after a while Anub will burrow (unless you have enough permafrost to prevent this) and go underground. He’ll then “pursue” someone and send spikes that them. The person with the pursue debuff should run away from the raid and stand on patches of permafrost so they don’t get spiked.

Meanwhile, scarabs will spawn, so the rest of the raid should group up and AOE the scarabs down. The bugs put a pretty nasty dot on anyone they melee, so ranged needs to be on the ball with dispatching these.

Eventually Anub will pop back up and dpsing will continue until his health reaches 30%. At this point the fight enters phase three, and Anub immediately puts a debuff on the raid called Leech Swarm that will absorb health. This part of the fight is tricky for the healers because if people have too much health it’ll just go right to healing Anub, so everyone should be left at no more than 40%.

The only two complications with this are the frozen dot that he’ll put on someone occasionally, which will need to be healed. The tank’s going to take normal damage, so they can be healed to full (better safe than sorry). Last night I was being topped off to 100% and it wasn’t negatively impacting the fight in the slightest.

Just pop bloodlust and burn this pest down, and he’ll spit up purples in short order. Very easy kill!

After Coliseum–but before ZG, stay with me here!–the raid then hopped over to VOA to try Koralon. Another unsatisfyingly easy kill. This fight is basically just “Don’t Stand in the Fire 101.” As a tank, kite him around the room and make the offtank, or a melee or two, stand on top of you to split Meteor Fists damage.

Thanks for the free loots Blizz!

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love severely undertuned new bosses.

I know, I know, the Coliseum is meant to be easy on normal settings. Heroic mode is where the wheat is separated from the chaff. Still, I feel dirty after how easily we roflstomped the Twin Val’kyrs. I had high hopes that after the drubbing the Champions gave us last week that maybe the challenge was ramping up a bit. But, alas, no.

After the standard “we don’t know where the bosses appear” wipe, and the supplementary “testing out every aspect of the fight until boss enrages” wipe, we then killed it with ease on the third try.

The set-up

Before you start, split the raid up into two equal groups.

The thick black bar represents the large wooden doors that bosses enter the Coliseum through. Edyis Darkbane will appear on the left side and Fjola Lightbane on the right. When the fight starts, also, four portals will spawn. Two are light (white) and two are dark (purple).

The group on Darkbane stands on the left side of the Coliseum facing the door, Lightbane’s group on the right. When the fight starts the portals spawn and the doors open. Quickly click on the portal in front of your group (light for Darkbane, dark for Lightbane) and then run down to the portal by the door (dark for Darkbane, light for Lightbane) to pick up the boss.

What to watch for

There are two major events in this fight. I’m going to pair these explanations with what Demo would bellow as they were happening since it was a good way to simplify the event and let everyone know what to do.

“EVERYONE SWITCH TO [Light/Dark] [if you'd be so kind]”

Either boss will periodically summon a Vortex of their polarity which will do massive AOE damage to anyone who does not share the same polarity as the casting boss. So, for example, Darkbane will cast Dark Vortex. Immediately, everyone with Light Essence should click the portal next to Darkbane to gain Dark Essence. Then, while she’s casting Vortex still, run down to the light portal that was clicked at the start of the fight, and after the Vortex hits, click it to gain light essence. Then, bring Darkbane back to the dark portal.

“EVERYONE ON [Lightbane/Darkbane] [thanks in advance]”

Either boss will also cast a spell called “Twin Pact” that will put a shield on them and begin channeling a 15 second heal. The shield needs to be dps’d down and the heal interrupted before it goes through, or the Twins get 20% of their hp back. When one of them starts casting it, everyone on the opposite side of the room needs to click the portal next to their boss and run over to the casting boss to break the shield off. You won’t be able to do effective dps against the shield unless you have the opposite polarity of the boss.

So, for example, Darkbane casts Twin Pact. Everyone dpsing Lightbane clicks the light portal next to her and dashes across the room to Darkbane and breaks the shield down. The heal is interrupted, then Lightbane’s dps clicks the dark portal next to Darkbane and runs back to their original boss.

Other things to watch for

As a tank be careful for Twin Spike, which is a damage increase they get from time to time. According to the buff they get +100% weapon damage, but honestly, I didn’t ever feel like I was in any danger when this occurred.

Moreover, a boss will occasionally put a “Touch of [Light/Darkness]” on a random person in your group. Make sure everyone knows that if they get this debuff they need to run away from their group, because they’re going to do nasty damage on anyone with the opposite polarity of the touch they received.

Lastly, orbs will spawn from time to time and fly around the boss. They do negligible damage in normal mode, so just tell people to try to absorb as many as they can, light or dark, before they reach the boss. If the boss gets too many orbs of their polarity, they’ll soft enrage. But we spread out enough we didn’t have that issue last night. Moreover, if you catch enough orbs of your polarity you’ll gain an Empowered buff that will increase your damage by 100%.

But seriously

As complicated as I’ve made this seem… it’s not. It is a total and utter loot pinata, and as soon as your raid gets the mechanics down, you’ll one shot it every week.

Gone, all gone! I spent almost every bit of my dkp last night on two Trophies of the Crusade, so I am now sitting at 17 dkp. Egads.

Totally worth it though, the T9.45 shoulders are sezzy. Also have a Trophy banked for the eventual acquisition of the Legguards, so I think I’m in a pretty good spot. Even if I’ll be getting the other tank’s leavings for the next few resets. At least I’ll have my 2pc bonus… soon enough…

… I’ve made a huge mistake.

Um, but I digress. Per my post last week I’ve already swapped out the Glyph of SoV. After equipping the shoulders I was at 32 Expertise, so ditching the glyph dropped me back to 22. Another Col25 piece will put me back over the top, so I’m happy where I am right now. And yes, I did replace it with the Glyph of Righteous Defense.

Also, speaking of loot and the side effects thereof, I’m sitting at 37.7k unbuffed hp right now. That is simply ridiculous. I remember walking through the Dark Portal at around 4k hp, stepping off the zeppelin in the Howling Fjord at about 18k, and walking into Naxx the first time with 25k. With all likelihood I’ll probably be walking into Icecrown Citadel with 40k hp. The number inflation is insane. Can you imagine what tank hitpoints are going to look like at 85 (or whatever the level cap is next time around)?

Last night we walked into the Coliseum ready for a better night than last week’s roflstomping. No need to relearn the fights, we know the mechanics now. One-shots inc! … right?

Er, not entirely the case. We lost a few folks on the Jormungars because they had never done the fight before and didn’t realize turning green was a bad thing. We entered phase three with half the raid dead somehow and I eventually got my face smashed in by what stank of parry haste. I wish WWS wasn’t failing to split the fights up properly. All I have to go by is Recount saying the two attacks were .1 seconds apart. It hurt. More likely though, he just used an instant attack right before meleeing me.

Jaraxxus on the other hand was a total rout, an easy one-shot. That fight is hilariously undertuned.

With the two farm fights out of the way it was time for some serious progression: the Faction Champions. I had originally perhaps set expectations a little high, dubbing the encounter a “loot pinata”. Oh, how I was wrong.

I mean, the PTR version I understand was pretty easy. It seems like these guys were buffed between testing and live.

When we first started the fight I was standing over where they dropped down, so of course the whole lot of them lept down onto me, and promptly began to tear me apart. It was horrifying. That first attempt quickly ended in a wipe.

Originally Demo and I switched to our dps offspecs for this, anticipating that we’d be more useful that way. After the first few wipes (yes… I said few…) we realized that prot was a better choice because it gave us the ability to harass the healer npcs. As prot, I was able to use a full suite of abilities on this fight: Avenger’s Shield for silences, Hammer of Justice with 40 sec cooldowns, Divine Sacrifice for the initial pull–and additionally Arcane Torrent and my engineering Frag Belt. I was pretty useful as healer control.

One huge caveat in this fight: watch Shaman totems! The healing stream one in particular does huge chunks of healing, and will make it impossible to kill anything. Keep nameplates on so you can see them. (Moreover, both Shaman npcs drop healing totems, so don’t assume the Enhancement one won’t!)

The full roster we faced was a Warlock and Felhunter, Hunter and cat, Resto Shammy, Holy Pally, Holy Priest, Shadow Priest, Warrior, DK, Rogue, and Mage.

My main job was to assist a rogue in locking down a Shaman. Demo worked on the holy pally by himself, and the dps burnt down the priest first. Once the priest was down everyone moved to the Shaman (who I shadowed on to watch totem drops) and took that out. Once he was dropped, on to the Pally.

The Paladin had a nasty habit of popping Divine Shield when almost dead, and then healing back to 20% health. Make sure someone is on the ball and ready to Mass Dispel or Shattering Throw the bubble when this happens.

After the Paladin dropped we moved over and took out the DK and Warrior to give the healers some breathing room. Then the Rogue, Spriest, Warlock, and finally the Mage went down. The Mage was probably the biggest pain thanks to his Blink with a one second cooldown. He was all over the map when we were focusing him.

We did this fight with six healers, which seems like a lot but your healers are going to be constantly harassed, and will be heavily dispelling. You should definitely help out with Cleanses if you stay prot. I didn’t do as many as I’d like but next time around I’ll be much more focused on this.

All in all, it is a good fight, and definitely a challenge–which is a good thing. The Coliseum needed a challenge fight, and it’ll be interesting to see if the Twins ramp that up, or if they’re similarly undertuned.

After the 25man was wrapped up we started a 10man group and steamrolled everything. Champions were much easier in the 10man, natch. 9 easy badges and I was off to buy my new shoulders.

It was a good night.