Enraged just means it’s a more exciting kill

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

Why I love Rogues (a raid recap)

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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)!

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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.

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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.