I’m delaying the UI post one day so I can tweak some things tonight. It will go up tomorrow! In the meantime you can see my new UI in these screenshots.

Friday we were supposed to wrap up ICC-10 and finally kill the Lich King. Hell, I even named the calendar event “The Dethroning”. I was going all in on any possible, and probable, jinxes. Unfortunately, raid didn’t happen. One invited person didn’t show and two couldn’t make it. And those in guild were either severely undergeared or all ready saved. To salvage the night we instead went for some good ol’ fashioned Uld10 hardmodes.

They went last weekend (when I wasn’t around) and cleared up to Firefighter but couldn’t down that fight. So Friday we started on Mimiron and after finally managing to scrape up a healer (one of our super geared raid healers came on) we were good to go. We then defied our expectations and easily one-shot Firefighter. The glories of severely overgearing an encounter!

With that easily acquired feather in our caps, we then double backed and opened up Algalon’s lair. Because, why not? We had the keys, none of us had ever seen the fight, it would only take an hour max. Might as well take a few whacks at it.

Algalon is, to put it lightly, a very intense fight. I can only imagine what it was like to do this when it was end-game content rather than the playground of a pack of drunkards. There are multiple counters letting you know when different dooms are going to befall your raid, the least of which was definitely not the Big Bang. The way we ended up handling that was Morvain, the DK, would tank initially then when I picked it up from him, after my first phase punch, the first Bang would occur.

I’d get hotted up and a everyone would go in a black hole and the hit would typically proc Ardent Defender, and the hots would push me back up to nearly full health immediately afterward. The second one Morvain would take, using a guardian spirit for similar effect. The third I would have AD back for, so I’d eat it and maybe pop Divine Protection if I got uncomfortable.

We did a bunch of attempts just working out the various mechanics, usually wiping to some little mistake that would kill someone and then domino effect into a wipe. That would lead to us quickly sprinting back to our corpses ASAP to get another lick in.

With about 30 minutes to go I was getting a bit nervous if we were going to get it that night. Then that attempt everything clicked, I guess, and we pushed it to the sub-20% phase for the first time. Suddenly waves of enemies were appearing and Morvain and I just went crazy taunting as much as we could. In a blur, Algalon dropped combat with us and then went into his monologue. It was pretty cool to get to see the fight, let alone kill it, however cheap the victory might have been.

Also, Algalon is hands-down the most beautiful boss encounter I have ever seen.

After Algalon I started debating with myself which Keeper I wanted to send down for One Light. Normally you’d want Thorim to get rid of the Immortal Guardians, but at our gear levels Phase 3 would probably go by really quickly, and I would be capable of holding a huge number of the guardians. As long as I kept them far enough away to prevent Yogg from getting free heals. I was trying to talk myself out of sending down Freya who would bend the difficulty curve a bit by giving us sanity wells.

I eventually settled on sending down Freya, dooming that lockout perhaps. Nonetheless, during my epic wasting of time up top running back and forth between Freya, everyone continued to clear down to Vezax. Once I got down there we finished off the trash and then went on to one-shot Vezax’s hardmode with little difficulty.

The real challenge was, as I suspected, Yogg. And not because of the hardmode. A lot of us were tired, some of us were clumsy, others rusty. It was pretty late and we kept stalling on the normal mechanics of the fight. People not getting out of the brain room in time and getting mind controlled, not enough dps being done to the brain, etc. If it was earlier in the night, I doubt that fight would have been much trouble. We ended up calling it at midnight, server time because a few had to go.

On the last attempt, as we were wiping, I ran into a portal to check off at least one the visions from my In His House He Lays Dreaming achievement. The wages of being a tank, eh? Certain achievements you usually have to finagle or trick your way into getting, like Hot Pocket or Denyin’ the Scion or Take Out Those Turrets, or snatch them mid-wipe.

Then yesterday was, in addition to Easter, the beginning of Noblegarden. The latter being the last holiday I needed to get my Violet Proto. And of that holiday I only needed three achievements: Chocoholic (I was 25/100 on this), Desert Rose, and Spring Fling. So in the morning I buckled down and headed over to Falconwing Square, which was crawling with pink bunnies darting from egg to egg and I was immediately reminded why I hated Noblegarden so much.

I eventually just camped in one spot in Falconwing that had near me three to four different eggs, and just darted between the four spawns grabbing them as they popped. Eventually my eyes started to bleed, so I bought the Spring Robe for Desert Rose and moved on to Brill, determined just to do Spring Fling and not hunt anymore eggs.

Then I saw how nearly deserted Brill was and what easy pickings the eggs there could be. I found another fruitful camping spot and hung out for a while, getting enough eggs to finally put me over the top for Chocoholic. From there I finished up my epic rabbit breeding journey and then did a quick tour of the various dry spots in Azeroth. Finally I finished up the last achievement of the last holiday I needed for What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been.

I’m so glad that’s over.

… I should do Noblegarden on my druid if I’m going to use him in Cataclysm. Ugh.

Over the last two months I’ve been steadily accumulating various pieces of Holy gear. Some spellpower plate offspec drops from ICC-10/25 (gotta love guild only having one raiding Holy paladin), ToGC-10, and the new heroics. Altogether I have a pretty decent set with (pardon the GS reference, I do it just to help you imagine the iLevel) about 5250 gearscore. The one glaring issue with my gear is my offhand. It rates a 10 for RP value, but I can enchant or block with it, so one could say it’s lacking a bit.

Nonetheless, I gemmed everything with int, more of less, then enchanted it and Saturday afternoon I was off to the races to heal my first heroic.

And… I don’t know how you Healadins do it. I mean, it’s generally pretty straightforward: Sacred Shield and Beacon the tank, Flash of Light for the little, steady damage intakes, Holy Light for bigger hits. Beacon is doubly awesome because I can generally ignore the tank and just heal the rest of the party. I find myself consistently forgetting to pop cooldowns or remembering to occasionally judge to keep Judgements of the Pure up. Stuff to work on.

All in all I healed four or so heroics this weekend: UK, OK, ToC, and HoS. Each was pretty easy (I didn’t have any of the hard ones, thank god) and no crazy wipes except for in Old Kingdom when the tank pulled a huge pack of spell flingers and everyone died in about 3 seconds. I barely had time to urinate myself. (Sorry, gross joke.)

It was interesting seeing heroics from a different point of view. In Halls of Stone we zoned in and I started blessings and the tank just up and took off. I’m sitting there blinking and yelled “hey wait for meeeeee!!” while running far behind without even Pursuit of Justice to help me catch up. Damn inconsiderate tanks. The Brann event was a little more lively than any of the boss encounters I did before, just had the aforementioned tank Beacon up and kept HLing anyone who stood in the beam.

Tons of fun overall and has definitely shaken up heroics for me. I’m tempted to start doing my daily random as heals, but I’d like to get an actual shield first before I expose myself to the piercing gazes of full pug groups.

More Uld10 hardmodes

Partly spurred on Tijeras’ recent scoring of a Rusted Protodrake, and thus my incessant nagging to do so, a group from my guild got together again to start work once more on Uld10 achievements.

We started with Orbituary for those that didn’t have it, which was a total breeze. I completely wrecked the dps chart on that fight with my Demolisher tricked out by my 264 gear. Flame Lev never had a chance.

Razorscale’s dwarf cooking wasn’t really seriously attempted. Although funny enough, all this time I assumed the counter reset every week or something because my total was always zero. Just turns out I’ve never managed to roast any dwarves before. I got three last night.

For Stokin’ the Furnace I single tanked Ignis and we got him down about two minutes into the fight. Heartbreaker went similarly well. Ditto I Choose You, Steelbreaker, who we killed before I even got to explode. I just DI’d a healer to defuse myself.

At that point we started racking up sigils from the wing bosses. Hodir was pretty straightforward. Thorim was interesting to say the least. With two healers, one in the arena and one in the gauntlet, right at the end a chunk of the gauntlet team bit it but two of the survivors (just dps) managed to make it back to the arena with Sif. Poor Ildara then went on the single-heal the second phase while I single tanked it, Unbalancing Strike and all. I think she nearly had a stroke by the time Thorim dropped.

Freya was a bit more tricky, with a couple of missteps thanks to your truly starting to feel the effects of my chain chugging drinks during the raid. At this point I was about half way through a bottle of gin (I like to drink like I raid–with class–ok?) and getting a little sloppy. The first attempt I got too close to the shore trying to kill a tree and managed to pull the adds on the opposite side. The second try we had to reset because a few people died during phase two. The third try we knocked her over easily and scored all three versions of Knock on Wood.

After Freya we dug in for Firefighter, which eluded us the last time we tried Ulduar hardmodes. The good news is, last time we failed miserably to fires, and this time we got Mim to 10% on our best attempt, which was also our last attempt. That was also the attempt, I’m told, where during P4 I yelled out “he’s spinning up!” ran directly away from the boss, banged a 360, and then ran right back into his Laser Barrage. I have no recollection of this.

We had to call it after Mim because one of the dps had to go, but it was then drunkenly decided in officer chat that we’d go try Undying with whoever was left… because why the hell not? And we did a lot better on that than I expected, managing to get all the way to the second boss before someone died.

No reason to continue we left Naxx and the soused express rolled on to Wyrmrest to do Sarth+3. I barely remember the fight (my gin-life-force nearly extinguished) but apparently we killed him.

And then, because dammit, we were drunk and the world was our oyster, we should go do ToGC-10. So we did, and by some alcohol-fueled miracle we completed the place with 43 attempts to go. No mad skill unfortunately, but we did it nonetheless. I think this was also the first time we’ve done it with three straight healers (rather than making a healer go dps, or switch out for one, like we did when learning the place months ago).

I passed out sometime after that, though truth be told I barely remember anything after Naxxramas. It was a good night.

Some honest-to-goodness ICC progression!

After shaking off my hangover, Sunday night was spent rerolling the Wednesday crew back into Icecrown Citadel to finally bring down Dreamwalker and get some cracks at Sindragosa. We experimented a bit with group make-up, initially trying two tanks, five dps, three heals but that wasn’t working as well. We then swapped some specs around and went two tanks, four dps, four heals, which was getting the dragon up a lot faster, but the adds were taking a lot longer to die. After a few more close attempts (with one at 92%) we then tried me single tanking, five dps, four heals.

Single tanking Dreamwalker wasn’t so bad, the only thing that really needed to be tanked were the Aboms. We settled on a kill order where dps would burnt Blazing Skeletons when they appeared, then Aboms, then Suppressors, then anything else still up. A hunter was in charge of kiting any Zombies. Towards the end it was getting really hairy, we had two Aboms, a Zombie, and a few casters on me. It looked like we were about to wipe. I had no idea what the dragon’s health was at but imagine my surprise when in my darkest hour suddenly Dreamwalker stood up, bellowed, and nuked every add. It was pure awesomeness.

Great encounter. I enjoy it more now that we can actually kill it.

It was a fun surprise after Dreamwalker when we got into that weird hallway with the giant circle room and cobwebs everywhere. It was obvious what was going to happen. I still feel like I wasn’t prepared for all that trash though!

Only downside to our inevitable victory was the healers that kept running back into the room to skin the spiders. Bad healers.

Finally, it was time for Sindragosa… and what a fight that was. We didn’t have enough time to get some serious attempts in, but honestly, it didn’t seem that bad. The only hard part seemed to be dealing with the awful, intense, bellowing, Scottish woman that was apparently trapped inside her. That voice was terrifying.

I’m half tempted to extend the lockout next week and just jump right back to her. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get people to go for that, though.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was pretty optimistic going into last night about our chances with Mimiron. We did pretty well on Wednesday, pushing Mim to P4 with ease at the end. I thought maybe after an hour of wipes maybe we’d be able to down him. Hell, we had at least three hours to plink away at him. And yet, the unexpected happened…

We one-shot him.

It was a pretty incredible kill (which I’ll detail in a moment) and more so because Mimiron25 was supposedly an impossible boss. He was clearly nerfed into the ground, but I thought that’d be mostly affecting the normal mode, not heroic. On Wednesday when I made the command decision to divert our efforts on Thorim to Mimiron I was accused in officer chat of “leading the raid to slaughter.” It couldn’t be done, they clucked. Now: sweet, sweet vindication.

But I digress–here’s how we tanked it.

Phase 1

Demo main tanked Mimiron while I stayed prot spec and built second threat. The priests rotated through their various cooldowns while Demo did the same to get through the first three Plasma Blasts. Unfortunately a quick snafu hit and Demo died while running out of a shockwave that was happening during a Plasma Blast, so Mim ran over to me and I tanked him in the middle. At this point Mim was at 10% health and we easily push him to phase 2.

Phase 2

Demo was brought back up and everyone was topped off for phase 2. Because there isn’t any threat on this phase the trick is to minimize raid damage by not standing in front of the boss if possible. I spent the majority of this phase running through the boss, Hammering, Shield Slamming, Judging, etc. Just weaving in and out of his LOS (keyboard turners are at a natural disadvantage here).

A key, key talent in this fight is Divine Sacrifice. The most critical aspect of this phase is to limit raid damage and get through it as fast as humanly possible. Taking 30% of the raid damage off the top was a big boon to the healers, I felt. I just wish the other three pallies in the raid had DivSac as well so we could layer them for some serious damage reduction.

If you can make it through Phase 1 and 2 with the entire raid intact then you are very well set up for the kill.

Phase 3

At this point Mimiron takes to the air, so the tanking of the head falls to a caster or some other ranged dps. Usually Cendra (hunter) takes care of this, but last night a warlock was particularly insistent he have the opportunity this time around so he took over that role.

What this phase does have for you to tank are two different things. One is the Assault Bots, which are heavy-hitting robots that like to cast a magical debuff on their tank that increases damage taken by 30%. This can be cleansed off though, which makes a pally ideal for tanking them. The other mob that needs to be controlled are the Bomb Bots which spawn under Mimiron’s head and bee line for a random raid member, to explode and do heavy damage. To control these guys we had Demo stand under Mim’s head and just taunt them as they spawned, and soak the damage from their explosions.

Also, if you’re tanking the Assault Bots, keep an eye out for red columns of light. Assault Bots spawn from these and if a squishy is standing next to their spawn, they kill them in short order before you have time to react. I warned the clothies and others to move away if a red column popped up next to them, and ran over to pick up Assault Bots the moment they spawned. (You have a second or two to grab them before they officially “activate”.)

Phase 4

Because Demo died in P1 I had aggro on the bottom third of Mimiron in this fight (the head and bottom keep their aggro tables from their respective phases). I tanked it in the center and just worked through my rotation keeping mind of the various danger moments the boss likes to throw at us. Ran out of shock, rotated the bottom so the middle wasn’t facing me for the spin-up, and kept an eye on nearby mines. Rockets didn’t seem to big of an issue because they favor ranged and people were a bit spread out.

Tanking in this phase isn’t particularly hard at all, it’s just being careful not to get shockwaved or shot by a super laser of some kind. Just stay on your toes and hope everyone else can manage to stay alive.

I think the best part of the fight was when I realized all three parts were at around 100k health each, and it clicked that we might actually kill Mimiron. Suddenly people were cheering in vent, giving the fifteen or so of us left the confidence to keep going. And finally we prevailed, and Mimiron’s creation slumped over defeated.

Lastly, a big grats to Demo on winning his t8.5 gloves and thus achieving his totally fair and balanced 4pc bonus. :P

Raid night number 2 and we had ahead of us Emalon, Ignis, Iron Council, and Thorim. About 10 minutes before the raid started the battle for WG began with Horde as offense, so it was pretty much as predetermined outcome that we would take WG and have access to VOA. Once said predetermined outcome was determined, we hopped to over to Lake Wintergrasp and began summoning the rest of the raid for a quick mop up on Emalon and Archavon.

We downed Emalon and lo and behold… he dropped my effing dress. The one piece of tier I hoped never to win. Damn.

Anyways, yes, I took it. It now holds a hallowed place in my block set for the 4pc bonus. I’m loathe to use it in my EH set at the moment, however.

Heading over to Ulduar we steamrolled Ignis (which I really enjoy tanking the adds during… I have a bad habit of popping my own brittle golems with a shield slam). I was very excited to see that the Blood Draining enchant dropped. I sent the mats for it to Gulli in exchange for a vellum with the enchant. I’m looking forward to finally having a survivability enchant on my weapon.

And yes, I know I poo-poo’d BD a little while back. I was wrong, dammit.

Post-Ignis the Assembly of Iron was dismissed from their posts and the raid was ready for some progression. Unfortunately our Thorim strategy relies on several linchpin players, least among them the tanks. And the DK tank that usually grabs Champions decided his Internet wasn’t working so he couldn’t be of much use to us. So, Thorim was shelved and I (because Demo was off fixing his Mom’s radio or something) made the command decision to try Mimiron.

I know, I know. It sounds psychotic. But I’ve had this nagging feeling for the last week or two that Mimiron, with all his nerfs, would end up being easier than Thorim. After last night I’m fully confident this is the case.

The first attempt we pushed him to phase 3 (purely a learning attempt, considering only 6 of us made it to P3). Then we had a few stalled attempts when Demo switched to DPS and I tanked P1, which didn’t go so well. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fight or class mechanics issue, just bad luck of plasma blast while everyone was scrambling away from a shockwave, and a moronic moment when I sat in the shockwave because I wasn’t sure if Mim would move with me or not, then taking out the dps around me. Like I said, was my fault. /shame

Nonetheless, we swapped around and Demo MT’d P1 with me backup tanking (and using Hand of Sac to help with the last plasma blast). After the switch the attempts became much more refined and towards the end of the night we were getting him to P4 easily and with most of the raid intact. Unfortunately, we only got to see P4 twice before the raid was called due to the time, but I think Sunday we’ll be able to down the sucker. We have three hours of attempts ahead of us that night and everyone was pretty charged by what was seen as an inevitable kill.

All in all, we made serious progress. To use an old cliche, Mimiron is “on notice.”

It was 11pm when the raid concluded, so Dara and Cen and I headed down to Stranglethorn for our weekly raid attempts. After some wrestling with Door Boss we finally burst our way into ZG and headed over to the tiger boss. I’m a huge sucker for the Hoodoo piles in the area before said boss, so I activated one and only got a Voodoo doll (alas). The other pile however mindcontrolled me. The MC’d Rhidach immediately popped wings, switched to Seal of Righteousness, and took out Cendra in short order, then swung around and killed Ildara.

I wish I was that good at pvp while controlling my own character!

After both mount-dropping bosses failed to drop their mounts we headed over to Kara to take out Attumen. Unfortunately, our luck failed us this time and we were unable to get past the front door. After about 15 minutes of running horizontally back and forth through the portal, we called it a night.

Damn you, Door Boss.

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.