So there we were, in the mountains. Ulduar, to be precise. The mission was to continue our lockout from two weeks ago and finally finish the damn place once and for all. As I have recounted in the past, our history in that place is a bit checkered. Between the endless weeks of attempts to kill Thorim, and the most hellish night ever on Vezax, we hadn’t even seen Yogg in a 25man context.

That was all going to change however.

Actually, no, I lie. No change yet. Instead, true to form we headed into the Conservatory of Life first to knock off one of the two Keepers we needed to drop to head into the basement. “20 minutes, tops!” the rallying cry went out. Ahem.

Once we were done with the six or so wipes we suffered in that room we then one-shot Freya. I tanked all three of the elementals, which might have been a bad idea. Snaplasher still hits for a ton, so sadly I needed to bubble and beg Pain Suppressions for those moments.

Clearly we were more interested in just brute forcing our way through the trash. Sadly, being a tier and a half ahead doesn’t give you as much currency with trash as you’d think it would. Once we actually, you know, coordinated a bit on the pulls, and used some (ahem) CC, the pulls were obviously a lot smoother. Also, it helps when I don’t assume Demo is DC’d (seriously, if we go 20 seconds without him saying anything in vent, it’s safe to assume something is wrong) and pull a different mob nanoseconds before he charges after one of his own choosing.

Mimiron was similarly choppy. It took us a while to get down the hallway because someone started up the tram before everyone was on board, and left myself and the healer contingent behind to rot on the platform. Once we actually grouped up and started the fight, despite warning vociferously about the Shockwave/Nova thing, people still died to it. It’s a ten minute long fight, so I hope they thought about while they did while hugging the floor.

FINALLY after about two hours (two Keepers in two hours! arrgh) we finally got down to Vezax’s room. Cleared out the trash with a liberal application of CC and coordination, and set up for the big guy himself. Interrupt rotations were assigned: three groups of three interrupters basically ordered to get their interrupts off as soon as possible. Everyone is pumped to go…

And then Demo DC’d for 10 minutes. Le sigh.

Alright, well, then he got back. Ok, show time, let’s do this.

First Searing Flames comes up and I’m watching the cast bar and suddenly time slows down as eat decimal on the countdown begins to reduce. Nines become eights, and the numbers to the left of the decimal point get smaller. Oh god, flashbacks. A cloud of red surrounds my field of vision. The blood drains from my face. All I can hear over the ringing in my ears are the screams of pain and horror as a wave of Searing Flames washes over the raid.

Flashbacks. What the flying feck just happened?

Next cast–ok–that was a blip.

Another flame sears us all. Oh god. Interrupters–DO SOMETHING. Anything!

Eventually, Vezax has the compassion to put us down.

Once I’m down having a nervous breakdown on vent, we regroup and lined back up in front of the boss. We rush back in and start going through the motions. First interrupt, group one is up. They nail it. Group two next. Next flames is cast, and interrupted. I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s going to be ok.

We unfortunately wiped on that attempt, cause a few folks didn’t know the deal with Shadow Crashes and mana loss, so burnt out early or got burned up early. Either way, lost a lot of dps early and wiped at 3.6%. Gandy, one of the rogues, actually evasion-tanked Vezax from like 7% to 4%, holding threat only with a wave of the pigtails. Pretty awesome.

Alright, we got it this time. Everyone lines up, charges in. Interrupts go flying. Finally, finally, Vezax drops.

That night the top alliance guild on the server got the server first for Yogg+0. Interesting juxtaposition.

Got back from my vacation yesterday at around 5pm, after driving through a torrential rain and thunderstorm that somehow managed to span the entire breadth of the state of Massachusetts. What a summer this has been so far.

Demo was secretly rooting against me getting home in time for the raid, I suspect. The running joke between us as you can imagine is Titanguard, which as of 5pm last night had failed to drop for the last 11 resets (aka every single FL kill since 3.1 dropped). And after last night that number bumped up to 12. Yeesh. I swear I’m going to put up a counter showing how many weeks in a row the RNG has been pushing me to alcoholism.

I might even organize a “We Are the World” style telethon where all the Pally tanks in the blogosphere will get together and sing for the benefit of getting me a Titanguard. … Or not.

Anyhoo, the night did not solely consist of the 30 minutes I spent weeping in vent with my push to talk key down. Oh no, there was more. We decided to be masochists and did a serious push for Thorim again, getting to his sparkly behind with about an hour left in the raid. Unfortunately, after two attempts one of the linchpins of our strategy (the FoK rogue) had to go to work so we really couldn’t continue. Putting Thorim off for tonight we wandered over to Freya’s area.

I am happy to report that Freya’s trash is very much a cakewalk these days. Gone are the hour-long wipefests to clean every nook and cranny of that room of various vicious flora. Now we can easily pick off all the groups and the elders that need to die in a tidy 30 mins or so.

One thing that bothers me about this fight though is how badly some people (read: dps) need to be walked through the encounter. The key to the various waves of adds are twofold: don’t kill stormlasher/snaplasher/water spirit unless they’re all low health and don’t kill all the detonators before the healers can get everyone up. During the fight Demo will constantly have to bellow in vent “STOP DPS STORMLASHER” “ON WATER SPIRIT” “STOP WATER SPIRIT” “KILL SNAPLASHER” “SLOW DOWN ON DETONATORS” “GIVE HEALERS A SECOND”, etc.

And if he doesn’t everything will go to hell.

Shouldn’t have to be that way! DPS should have half a brain to notice “oh hey stormlasher is at 30%, time to switch to next mob” or “hey, everyone’s health looks kind of low, better not nuke all these detonators.” Makes me envy the jerks that only have to show up and faceroll their way to 3.5k dps rather than do the serious thinking about how the encounter is going. (Not that all dps are like that, but some most definitely are the mouth-breathing, facerolling type.)

After the kill, Freya once again had a Conqueror’s pants token in her cache, but I couldn’t bring myself to win it. I need to save my dkp for the tiny, minuscule chance that maybe Titanguard exists.

(A man can dream!)

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.

This is Falowin (also known in our guild and among the ranks of the Dark Touched Warriors as “Failowin”). I promised him in my previous post I’d write a little bit on the topic of “why I love Rogues” if he made the raid that night. He did, and unfortunately I didn’t manage to capture a screenshot of his corpse at any point, so I’ll have to deliver on the topic in haiku form.

Fail to win, he says!
Like a Forsaken carpet
He keeps the floor warm

My kidding aside, he’s actually really good dps. And he doesn’t die as much as he used to. Always a plus!

But, I digress. As to the raid recap …

We started Tuesday, as most raid weeks are wont to do, but in a slight panic. 8pm server hit and we only had 20 raiders on, which made the chances of the raid that night look somewhat bleak. We decided the best course of action was 20man FL and hope that a few more people hop on by the time it dies so we can keep going.

Thankfully luck was on our side and we had 25 people before we even pulled FL. The last few trash clears before the Leviathan consisted of people logging on, saying in guild chat “any room in raid?” and being quickly /invited.

So we had our full raid group and quickly downed Flame Lev. But, for the umpteenth week in a row Titanguard refused to drop. Alas. Maybe next week (when I have more dkp than Demo…).

In any case, Tuesday was a banner opening raid night for us, because we overcame the initial rough start and proceeded to steam roll right through Razorscale, XT, Iron Council, Kolo, and Auriaya.

Then with a decent amount of time left we turned out sights on Hodir. I enforced my rule about not leaving trash pulls up because I know, deep down in that shriveled black nugget I call a heart, that some knucklehead is going to bound right into one of those puffing snow mounds after a Hodir wipe, and we’re all going to have to each another 10% dura loss because they weren’t paying attention.

You better believe I body pulled every snow mound from the first pull to Hodir’s cavern.

Once we were at Hodir we kind of reinforced our previous strategy (as much as we had one) and put in a few attempts. Our best shot got him to 20%, which obviously meant we were doing something right (not completely though, there are some changes we need to make to our approach). But, after about an hour or so of wiping, tempers were flaring among some of the guild’s more… impatient… raiders. One of them declared in guild chat “F[e]ck progression. F[e]ck.” And then DC’d. Hrm.

In any case, we put in a few more attempts, but it was getting late, so we called it.

Still not a bad night, and more importantly, I was then 3 badges away from my Conqueror’s Aegis Faceguard.

Then last night we had something of the same issue, 8pm server time hit, and only 20ish raiders were on. With WG in Alliance hands we decided just to form raid, go plug away at Freya’s tree buddies, and wait for the last few souls to come on before we moved to Hodir.

Before we even pulled the first tree miniboss, the raid filled up. We stayed the course and downed the three (giving me my last 3 emblems, woo hoo) and then with all the trash cleared a consensus formed of “hey let’s give Freya a try.”

Surprisingly, the fight is very easy if you can manage the three pack that she summons. The way we handled it was I held Storm Lasher and the Ancient Water Spirit, and a druid tank grabbed Snaplasher and pulled it away. We nuked my two adds to 20% or so, then swapped to Snap and took it out, then switched back to my two to finish the pack off.

We had some initial difficulty, but once people realized how to moderate their dps, and learned to pay attention to the random healing tree that would spawn, we started making progress. We probably had two bad learning wipes, then one really close attempt (Freya had 30 stacks of attunement left when we died), then on the fourth shot we had a flawless execution on all the add summons and took her down. Our first 25man Keeper kill (so to speak)!

Two pairs of the Warrior/Hunter/Shaman pants dropped, which is honestly for the best. I need to get the Saronite Plated Legguards so I can justify to myself passing over the T8.5 dress.

After the rejoicing following downing Freya we hopped over to Wintergrasp and downed Emalon for some extra emblems and to nab some more tier pieces. I know that between Freya and Emalon one hunter got two tier pieces that night.

And of course, the second people stopped paying attention to me, I slipped away back to Dal and grabbed my new helm.

Hawt.

After WG we headed back to Ulduar (disjointed, I know) and gave Ignis a few shots. We initially had some difficulty, but at my suggestion Demo and I swapped spots (him tanking Ignis, I helping with adds) and thanks to his extra cooldown and better survivability (in addition to the syngergy I can give the raid with Divine Sacrifice/Hand of Sacrifice), and my natural acumen dealing with adds, we downed him easily.

Obviously it’s pretty disappointing that the raid was at a disadvantage with me tanking Ignis, but I’m not going to gimp everyone for the sake of my own ego. This is just the state Pally tanking in Ulduar is right now, alas.

Ultimately, it was an awesome night all around. Lots of people got loot, a few people (including yours truly) got their T8 2-set bonuses, and most importantly it gave the guild fresh hope that with a little elbow grease we can meet any challenge in Ulduar in due time.