I received a foreboding suggestion this weekend:

Let’s go for the rusted proto-drake.

Um, okay, that’s an interesting idea. Sure, we haven’t kill Yogg, but I can’t imagine only one Keeper up would be that much more difficult… right? Oh, we’re screwed.

So that odyssey began last night. And by odyssey, I mean “thing we should have been doing two months ago.” We formed up at normal raid time and entered Ulduar determined to start the arduous process of banging out the various hard modes that make up Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10).

Nuke from Orbit

First on the list would be FL with 3 Towers up. We’ve done this on 25man and it really wasn’t much of any contest. We launched two people at the start, a warlock and ele shaman. They bloodlusted and burnt down the turrets causing a shutdown in record time. I keep a 10 stack of Pyrite up the entire fight and ended up pulling 126k dps. Very, very easy.

Heartbreaker

We actually already had this one, but a few were itching for the Aesir’s Edge so we decided to do it again. I tanked XT on the northeast scrap pile and just enjoyed working through my rotation. On the first tantrum I did a bubble+div sac to take some slack off the healers and then Hand of Reckoning’d him at the last second of his cast bar and cancelled bubble to repick up aggro.

During the fight the warlock actually DC’d, but the healers kept him alive to the point that when he reconnected a minute or two later he was able to jump back into dpsing. The only hairy part was when a certain warrior may or may not have died twice to gravity bomb-induced void zones. Ahem.

No Aesir’s Edge, alas.

I Choose You, Runemaster Molgeim

This was an interesting fight to say the least. We approached it like normal mode, I dragged Steelbreaker off to the side and the other two were taken to the other half of the room. Once Steelbreaker was down I went and peeled Molgeim off of the DK tank and held him in my spot, while the dps ran over to kill Bruundir. Once Bruundir was down the real hard mode started and the DK took Molgeim off me so I could turn into Capt. Utility Tank.

When Molgeim is last to die, his two big things are: Rune of Death *really* hurts, and adds are summoned. The adds explode it they reach their aggro target, so ranged needs to dispatch them. I attempted to do my part with Cobalt Bombs and the occasional shield toss, but really I spent most of my time dpsing Molgeim. As long as everyone stays on their toes, it isn’t too hard.

With Open Arms

We already had Disarmed, so we figured we’d give this one a go.

This one’s fun. Basically, you only dps the face and try to avoid doing any damage to the arms. The first two times someone got gripped we broke them out, but it was getting kind of worrisome how low the Right Arm’s hp was getting, so we decided to let everyone die if they got gripped. Three dead raiders later, we got the achievement.

Also, in terms of aggro, I started the fight by building a lead with Avenger’s Shield and an HotR, and didn’t use either for the rest of the fight. I didn’t have any issues keeping aggro with shield slam, Judgement, and Hammer of Wrath (when in execute range).

Crazy Cat Lady

This one was a good gear check for me. I insisted we one tank this and made the DK go dps. We used three healers as well, which I initially doubted but I’m glad we did. At certain points in the fight the damage intake got slightly intense (fears especially) and that extra oomph really helped. In the normal “stand still and do rotation” moments, the damage wasn’t as bad. Damn it feels good to be a shield tank.

I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare

The one hard mode I was truly looking forward to, because it had two pretty sexy tank upgrades for me. Of course, of the two I wanted The Boreal Guard more. I’m a sucker for shields.

We already agreed that if it looked like we weren’t going to get it, we’d just wipe and try again. We had a good group, everyone was competent, there’s no reason we couldn’t down this guy.

So the first go one of the dps died early and we decided it probably was going to be difficult to recover, so we wiped it. Then, the second time we got it to like 30% and that same dps along with the Void Zone Avenger bit it to standing in bad runes. Wiped it again.

Last try, right out of the gate everything went smoothly. Ranged was wailing away, I was keeping the threat ceiling high, no one died to runes. Eventually we pushed it to execute range with a minute still on the clock. Holy shite, I thought, we were going to get it. Hodir drops snowpiles and I scramble on one, ready to leap back into the brink. And then Big Wigs flashes on my screen “Frozen: [Warrior] and [Ele Shaman]“. Oh, and the DK dc’d. Dammit.

“Should we wipe it?” someone asks. 8%, 35 seconds left. Hellz no. Burn that mother down.

The remaining batch of us rip through Hodir and we down him with 26 seconds left on the clock. I immediately sprint over to the frozen cache and spot this sexy beast hiding at the bottom. Like some green-clad stereotype, I leaned into the glowing box, reaching in to grapple the shield, and then popped out with this verdant masterpiece held aloft and triumphant above my head. I could say that I was very excited.

Siffed / Lose Your Illusion

This one was a little more difficult than the others leading up to it. Basically, getting to Thorim in under the hard mode time limit means that during Phase 2 you have Sif flying around and hurling frost bolts at the raid, along with other annoying crap (like freezing people in place). It’s just some added chaos, not too difficult in the great scheme of things. All we did differently was Frost Aura went on when Thorim jumped down and everyone was on their toes with dispels/cleanses and avoiding the lightning bolts.

As you can see we had a little trouble with it. The DK tank died so I ended up tanking Thorim while eating Unbalancing Strikes. If the fight lasted a few more seconds we would have wiped, but we managed to pull it out in the end.

Fun fact: Thorim was actually married to a character from some terrifying Japanese porn.

Been busy with some non-Uld25 things lately, the least of which being the fire festival. I’m a huge fan of anything that gets me to explore Azeroth and be reminded of how vast it is, especially if there is a fair bit of coin involved as well. And oh boy is there, I’ve already made up a huge chunk of the hit my wallet took after stupidly buying those six runed orbs.

Only drawback: farming Slave Pens to get my pet-crazed friends their scorchlings, haha. As you can see above, we’ve made some progress. (Grats Gul, I hate you).

On Friday one of the officers has been doing a semi-hardcore/semi-fun run of Ulduar 10, with the goal of knocking off a few hard modes. Hanging out with a friend this past Friday, we decided to jump into the run.

Raid started off trying two towers on Flame Lev which we initially wiped on because we didn’t notice that someone who had never tossed a passenger before was riding a catapult. Oops. You can imagine how that went. I managed to pull down some obscene dps in my demolisher thanks to my mostly-226 gear. It’s kind of satisfying seeing 100k crits when you’re usually stuck with the low numbers in normal raid circumstances.

We then ran up to XT with the goal of downing his hard mode.

Our first two attempts went well, we had the dps (even with three healers) but the raid damage was apparently too much for the healing set up we had going. After a dps had to drop out we brought in Ildara with her crazy hots. One-shot XT after that.

Best strategy seems to be this: tank XT like normal on the wall. Melee dps XT on his back right, ranged directly in the back with a healer on the north side and one on the south side. After the heart is shattered, whenever a light bomb hits someone, they run over by the north scrap pile (just far enough away not to damage anyone) and when the spark spawns melee quickly takes it out. If someone gets hit with a gravity bomb they run over to the south scrap pile and drop the void zone there.

All in all, the fight is pretty simplistic. I wasn’t taking much damage and usually got lucky with no large robot spawning off the first heart drop. If a robot does spawn, have a hunter MD it to you then focus it down to minimize how much damage you’re taking/stress on the healers. You can kill it yourself as long as you pay attention to your threat levels on XT.

Past XT the raid was pretty straightforward in the consistency of our roflstompings of the various bosses. I used Thorim as a chance to study the Evokers a bit (a little anthropology outing if you will). It looks like they don’t put up the Rune Shield immediately so you have a small window to burn them down before they become a huge pain. Not sure if they’ll exhibit the same behavior in heroic mode. Further study is clearly necessary.

The last boss that we attempted that night was Mimiron, which I was dreading. I still clearly remember how awful that fight was when we first tried it and how painful it was to work our way up through the phases. I know they nerfed the fight a bit but… honestly Blizzard? We one shot the guy… with no difficulty. It was a total cake walk.

I suppose I should be relieved to have downed this boss after all the anguish he inflicted on us. At the same time the victory feels a tad hollow, considering how obviously nerfed to hell this once mighty foe was. Rest now, sweet prince.

Nonetheless! After Mim we called it, because it was 2:30 in the morning, and dammit I needed my beauty sleep. Saturday they went back and down Vezax (woo hoo) which left us last night to try Yogg-Saron.

A slight diversion if you’ll grant me the luxury: I hate multi-phase fights. With a passion. They go on forever and it’s a bitch to progress in them because you have to hope that someone doesn’t screw up an earlier phase so you can get to the phase you need to work on. I understand why they exist, they make the fight longer and more epic. And obviously the last fight needs to be that much more difficult, but it’s such an artificial difficulty increase.

Perhaps I’m venting because this fight wasn’t the cake walk that that little voice that tells me to burn things, or commands me to steal from old people, let on.

I hate you. Yeah you, you toothy bastard.

So I don’t sound so downbeat I should emphasize before we hit the “oh god I’m so sick of wiping, let’s switch to wiping on phase 1 so it takes less time” point, we were doing pretty well. We hit phase 3 pretty easily a few times. Phase 2 is pretty much down, phase 1 depends on how much everyone is paying attention. Also would have helped if the DK wasn’t playing with 1000ms… but I digress. And Phase 3 is terrifying and I never want to go there again.

We’ll get him eventually. Though, I can’t even begin to imagine this fight on heroic difficulty.

Last night Uld25 didn’t happen (which is baffling… it was Wednesday!) so after levelling a bit with the DK I was asked if I wanted to try hard-mode Flame Leviathan in 10 man. We attempted it once beforehand, half-heartedly, just to see what it was like. We left the Freya tower up, which turned out to be somewhat difficult.

This time we left the Hodir tower up which wasn’t as bad as some descriptions make it out to be. Basically the three changes are: all our vehicles move 20% slower, FL gets 50% more health (giving it around 34 million hp), and these two roaming columns of white light randomly chase down someone and attempt to freeze them in place. If you stay constantly moving they’re cake to avoid.

The biggest thing about this is shutting down FL as often as possible. That means the fight starts with people getting tossed up, you’ll have a shutdown less than a minute in,  have bikes retrieve catapultees and bring them back to be relaunched as soon as FL starts moving again.

Also one of the deciding factors on that last attempt was when Cen hopped off his bike and into my demolisher to nab me a pyrite barrel, that gave me 5 more pyrite rounds for the last shutdown, which definitely knocked a major chunk of health out.

The best part of it all? Hard mode drops 2 Emblems of Conquest! I am now 11 emblems away from my T8 helm.