Call me Ishmael

Some weeks ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no gold in my bags, and nothing particular to interest me in Northrend, I thought I would raid a little and see the inside of Ulduar. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.

Demogar castigated us, “But what’s this long face about, Enveloping Shadows; wilt thou not chase the white whale! art not game for Thorim?”

He went on to explain, “Aye, aye! It was that accursed watcher that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round the Storm Peaks, and round the halls of Ulduar, and round the inner sanctum, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, guildees! to chase that Thorim on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and gives up his purps.”

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Demogar, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Thorim. He piled upon the watcher’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Cairne down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering Thorim; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

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.

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.

Get me outta here!

I danced around the issue in my last post but now I’m going to just say it outright: I am sick and tired of Ulduar25. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that Titanguard is an elaborately constructed hoax, or that thanks to a delayed strike of the summer slump we’re having trouble clearing simple farm content.

We started off the night somewhat dimly, with only 24 raiders online and I had each and every one of them invited. We probably had about 18 or so regular raiders, and the rest were people whose time in Ulduar was severely limited. Usually it’s fair to say that doesn’t bode well.

One enjoyable part of the raid was in the run up to and the fight with FL, we had Palehoof in the raid. I seldom mention it but He Of Green Text is one of my guildees and his schedule has precluded him from raiding for a while now.

He’ll soon be able to start joining us regularly which is pretty cool, but in any case, it was pretty funny seeing Pale and his father in the same raid. His dad (also a hunter) joined us at the end of Naxx and started raiding with us regularly through Ulduar. It’s been interesting to watch Pale’s father going from being RAFed up and then slowly but surely getting decked out in better gear (and seeing more content) than his son.

It was–blech, I’ll use the word–cute to listen to them interact in vent during the pre-FL clearing as the father drove and the son was the gunner. Palehoof saying things like “dad I’m out range of the pyrite” and the father giving advice on how to shoot down choppers or pyrite barrels… like something out of a father’s day card. I opened up iTunes, cranked up Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle,” and let it warm the icy recesses of my shriveled, jaded heart.

But anyway, enough of this happy crap.

Actually, on second thought, I’m not going to dwell on this too much, because I’m sure it gets to tedious to read a blog where every other post is “waa waa raidz r harrrrd” (this isn’t LiveJournal fer chrissakes). Suffice it to say, the fallout of all this nonsense is probably when the Coliseum comes out we’re probably dropping down to 10man groups and going through a rebuilding period. Any dps that thought it was ok to coast and do 3k in a raid will soon find themselves benched, and I can’t wait for the questioning of why they’re not taken to raids anymore. The lootz will be less epic, but honestly it’ll be worth it not to drop 80g on repair bills in one night.

(Is it patch day yet? How about now?)

Time’s running out in Ulduar

When typing out the title to this post I realized I wrote a similar post way back in March (good gawd, so long ago) about Naxx winding down. And that was a month before Ulduar came out.

We’ve now been delving into the titanic prison for the last 14 weeks and most likely this will be the last full raid week before the next patch drops. Tempus fugit.

The question I keep asking myself is: will Ulduar still be worth doing after 3.2? The short answer is probably no. The gear is a half-tier worse than 10man Coliseum (normal mode), and a tier and a half worse than 25man Coliseum (normal, again). That’s a HUGE jump in iLevel, akin to the jump from Naxx10 to Uld25. Moreover, considering the badge haul is less than what you can get from doing a full Naxx clear, it’d be hard to justify an Ulduar run on those merits.

Obviously though we have unfinished business in Ulduar. Yogg needs to die, and it makes me sad we won’t be able to kill him until we’ve basically “cheated” and powered him down in a higher iLevel of gear. Will we probably keep raiding Ulduar three nights a week (or, at least attemptedly)? Probably not. The Coliseum is small enough we can probably devote a day or two to it, and just use the rest of the time to scratch the raiding itch Ulduar.

I can’t imagine outside of learning the encounters it would take that long to down five raid bosses. Even with a stuttered release of one new raid boss per week.

Also, I’m still trying to wrap my head around a raid instance with five bosses. I wonder what the difficulty tuning is like and if it’ll be as hard as Ulduar was when that first came out, before all the nerfs. Can you imagine how freeing it would be if the Coliseum was relatively easy and you only had to spend one night a week in there for loot better than Ulduar (which requires so much more).

That actually sounds pretty nice…

In any case, after 3.2–basically, starting next week–my WoW habits are going to change considerably. The Daily Heroic will be a bigger priority than ever if I want to eventually deck myself out in all the new emblems loot. Including eventually all five tier pieces, which I’ll need the emblems to purchase. And if raiding does turn into a one or two night affair then I can honestly say I’ll probably become a bit more “casual” in how I spend my time in-game.

PS. Titanguard… damn you Titanguard… tonight is your last chance!

On a roll-duar

Last night was probably the absolute most stressful raid night I’ve had in a while. Not because we wiped endlessly to a farm boss, or because there was some major loot drama. No–even worse–I had to lead it!

(Demogar, you are dead to me.)

I’m sure those of you who regularly lead raids are thinking “oh shut the hell up” at this point. And I agree, not a huge deal in the scheme of things. I’m just so used to being the guy in the background, crunching the numbers, and devising new strategies that to have to do the actually leading… it’s a thing of terror. I’m not as up to date on the dkp system as I should be, so there were some missteps on my part, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed after the raid on the guild website.

Anyway, the raid didn’t solely consist of me sweating uncontrollably and taking frequent afks to weep gently in a corner. Oh no, much more than that!

We started with Razorscale and then jumped over to Ignis. Ol’ Fire Crotch proved a little bit of an obstacle only because our tanking was different than how we’ve just about always been doing it. Usually I’m managing the adds with someone else but I had to swap in as the Ignis tank. Normally this is fine, but the add management was, shall we say, lacking. Healers frequently got mauled by golems and general panic ensued. However, after the wipe a quick switch in tank assignments saw me in my element and we downed it with little difficulty.

After Ignis we dissolved the Assembly of Iron Governor General-style and rolled on to knock down the two remaining Keepers we have on farm. Freya, as faithful readers of my ramblings know, is sometimes of an issue for us because our dps tends to tunnel-vision. Considering how important it is for the three elementals not to be killed too far apart from each other (chronologically speaking), it kind of necessary dps pays attention to the freaking health bars.

Thankfully Demo was back on by then, so I was able to rotate him in to the raid so his melodious bellowing could sheperd us to victory.

And we did the inconceivable: everyone paid attention and we one shot Freya. No resets, no wipes, no setbacks. Just a clean kill.

After that we marched over to Mimiron to encounter him the second time in a week (we previously killed him for the first time on Sunday) we were pretty much ready for the fight but there was a nagging fear in some of us (ok, in me) that Sunday’s one-shot might have been an accident, or just serendipity. But thankfully, we one-shot Mim again, definitely proving that Sunday’s success was not a fluke (it was a much cleaner kill this time around, as well).

Now we have Sunday completely free of anything but Thorim, and hopefully Vezax. I’m sure that with no distractions we’ll be able to focus and get Sparky down once and for all.

Leading them to slaughter! (of Mimiron)

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

Blocking with a dress, and the Spark of vindication

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.

Getting back in the swing of things

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!)

So close. So very, very close.

New raid week, kill number 11 (every week since Ulduar debuted) on the Flame Leviathan, and dontcha know it, no Titanguard. Again. I hate you RNG.

Like I described in a post last week, Thorim’s been a bit of a headache for us these last few weeks. For this raid period I had a new strategy formed and ready to go, and in order to get a shot at trying it we steamrolled through FL, XT, Kolo, Auriaya, and Hodir to get to ol’ Sparky himself.

Slight diversion: After we killed Kologarn a bunch of us bounded across the bridge to hit the cache o’ loot failing to notice that a pack of rubbles didn’t despawn, and they were chewing up the healers that hung back to rez. Oops. (See screenshot above!)

Anyway, so we get to Thorim and explain my crazy scheme. One mage is designated as the Evoker Marker. It’s his job to use the following macro:

/target Dark Rune Evoker
/script setraidtarget(“target”,6)

This basically makes him immediately target an Evoker and mark it for melee. Melee uses an assist macro on the Mage to target his target and start burning down the marked Evoker. The Mage watches the Evoker like a hawk to spellsteal any Rune Shields that the mob puts up on itself.

That’s the biggest prep work that needs to be done. When in the arena, the group that’s assigned to that part of the fight will stack in the copper circle in the middle. Yes, I know there is the occasional silence, but that’s just something that needs to be worked through. The closer we are stacked the easier AOE is going to be for burning down the mobs.

So, one tank is in the middle (this was me, last night) with the arena group and one tank stands just outside. This tank is assigned to pick up champions as they jump into the fight and tank them away from the stack. champions tend to whirlwind and kill in short order any squishees. So, they must be kept away at all costs. Likewise, three ranged are assigned to kill the champions and focus on them the entire time. That way the second tank doesn’t get overwhelmed with champs.

Big game changer that makes arena easy: Fan of Knives. Have two rogues (at least) and make them spec into improved FoK and apply the glyph for it. Then just have them mash the FoK button like there’s no tomorrow, with the stack tank as their Tricks of the Trade target. It’s unbelievably effective at taking out the trash.

Last night this strategy was doing wonders during the hour of attempts we put in on this fight. Clearly the execution was just what needed refinement. We even had one attempt that we absolutely would have had, no one was dead in the arena, the gauntlet group was almost at Thorim… and then the champs tank DC’d. And the champs ran into my group and the clothies got cut to ribbons. We absolutely would have had it that time had the DC not occur.

Tonight we’ll be heading to Thorim first.

Programming note: I’m away on a trip for the next few days, which means unfortunately I won’t be blogging again until Wednesday. I’ll be occasionally tweeting, though, in desperation about how much I miss WoW. Do join me for that!

This is MADNESS

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.