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.

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.