The Lich King Awaits

In contrast to Blood Queen, Sindragosa wasn't that bad. Last week was our first week to seriously work on her. On Wednesday, after we killed Blood Queen, we gave her 6 pulls (we had technically done 2 pulls several weeks prior - but they were unflasked just to get a look at her). People kept dying to the Blistering Cold and our tomb strategy was confusing people so we decided to clean those up.

So we got everyone to enchant their boots with run speed (something we had strongly suggested before) and we changed our tomb strategy to do all the tombs in the center of the room, so we didn't waste so much time moving around. We didn't get a kill, but we were clearly doing better - our best attempt was 11%. So that was about twenty attempts on Sunday.

Tonight we went back and kicked her ass. We still had the working tomb strategy from Sunday, but people were more familiar with it, and not tired like at the end of Sunday night, so on our first pull we had a good feeling about the night. We were still having a lot of problems with people dying in the sub-35% phase, but a strategy changed fixed that. With all of our DPS, we weren't in any danger of missing berserk, so instead of having some DPS break their buffet stack on one tomb and the other DPS break it on the next, we told all DPS to break stacks on every tomb, but told the ranged to not hit the tombs at all - we didn't want them dying too quickly.

The first pull like that didn't quite work - people weren't used to it and so it failed, but it was working much better for the healers. We tried it again, and sweet, sweet victory.

So, on to the screenshot. You can see I'm dead for the kill, but as you can see from the screenshot - I'm not alone.

Blood Queen Bites the Dust

Blood Queen is finally down. And it took us only 3 pulls(this week). It's been a long painful road to get here though. On the first week, we put her off until Sunday so the 10-man groups could try her. They reported she was pretty easy, but of course it's much easier to spread out in 10 man, and with 25-man gear, she's not much of a DPS race. On Sunday, we had 10 attempts left (after spending 5 killing Putricide), so we decided to hit ToGC first to warm up. Unfortunately, when we got done there, we couldn't get an instance ID for ICC, so we had to flush the first 10 attempts away.

The next week we came back with another 10 attempts, and learned a bunch about the encounter, including verifying (as far as we can tell), that we have to stop wearing those shiny trinkets from Saurfang. We didn't really get close, but hey, it was our first week.

The next week after that, Sindragosa got unlocked, but we spent our time on Wednesday doing Blood Queen pulls (about 17 of them I think - it took us 3 to kill Putricide). The air phase was still a problem for us - we only had 1 attempt where everyone survived to the end - with an agonizing 2% wipe.

Every week after that we'd have at least one, maybe more sub 2% wipes - always because somebody would get MC'd at the end instead of biting someone else, and losing 1 person (plus whomever they killed) would get us.

But last week did make 1 big positive change. I had been loathe to do it, but we finally just started assigning positions for the air phase. That increased our survivability a lot - still a few kinks to work out - but cleaned it up.

Unfortunately, that continued our 2% wipe problems (including one 400k wipe) because of the MCs - but tonight everyone seemed to understand what the problems were, and over the 3 attempts tonight, there was not a single MC. Everyone either bit the right person, or in an emergency, bit an acceptable substitute rather than get MC'd. Our first pull failed (700k) due to a death, and our second pull failed early to healer death, but everyone was on the ball and despite having some DPS die on the second air phase, she died with a few seconds to spare.

So awesome job everyone.

In lieu of our traditional "Stand around the body", I'll be providing the actual kill shot. The good part is you get to see the moment she dies. The bad part is my ugly UI.

Great news everybody!

Just an ordinary boss fight. But watch out! This is no ordinary boss fight! You've only got 10 attempts per week, and he's actually pretty difficult. But now he's dead - it took us 18 attempts total, last week and this one.

The first week was learning how he worked, everyone sort of getting used to things. Finally, we thought we had it all under control... and then we found out he had an enrage timer. So clearly our "control fight" method wasn't working. Plus, people were dying anyway so it's not like our control was all that hot.

This week, we cleared to him on Tuesday, and did Trial of the Grand Crusader on Wednesday - earning a Tribute to Mad Skill (congratulations everyone! No wipes on pre-Anub bosses, and Anub killed in time to earn the chest). Both of our 10 man groups, now familiar with the fight, killed Putricide and we were ready to kill him tonight.

We still had some troubles with people learning the fight, but the very first pull got him to P3, so we knew we had it. We had a 5% wipe, and a 2% wipe... and finally, agonizingly, a kill. Great job everyone involved on any of our 25 man or 10 man attempts.

Anub'Arak down. Then resurrected by the Lich King. Now down again!

After something like 180 attempts (when you list the number like that it's amazing we were willing to keep trying it) we got Anub'Arak down. It took us a lot longer to do this than expected, not just in number of attempts, but in number of weeks. 180 attempts sounds like something you could do in 4 weeks, right? 45 attempts per week (below our average for getting to Anub'arak) x 4 weeks = 180.

Well, such are the perils of a 3-day-a-week raiding guild, and a boss with very tight raid roster requirements. Barring a few pulls, we always went with 4 paladins, and we really only had one tank who could handle the adds, and we needed the misdirects etc, so we had to call off a number of attempts on him because we just didn't have the group.

That's the bad news of it. The good news is that we were clearly getting better, especially at the end - I have no doubt we can repeat that. We actually had a heartbreaking 130k HP wipe about 3 attempts before the kill. 130k. That's 1 second of raid DPS on the boss with the whole raid up. Literally our DPS. But of course we didn't have the whole raid up, or it wouldn't have been a wipe.

We had a 3% or something wipe after that, and we'd had successive wipes at 10%, 9%, 8%, earlier, so we were sure to get it. And we got it. And damn did it feel good.

Congratulations OOT, to those who were there for the kill, to those who contributed all that learning time but couldn't make it, and to those who sat patiently on the waitlist, providing a safety net if someone dropped and moral support as we did all those attempts.

It was a very Merry Christmas indeed.



And then, to make it clear that that's not a picture of a normal mode kill:

Madness takes its toll

Ladies and Gentlemen, Yogg-Saron is no more. Earlier tonight the brave men and women of the Order of Thrones brought that bastard down, ending his threat forever. It certainly took us a while, we killed Vezax on May 10th, 5 weeks ago, but Yogg caused us a lot of problems. Until last Sunday we couldn't get cleanly into Phase 2, and without that, everything was kind of doomed. But even though raiders were getting frustrated with our constant wiping due to phase 1 (since even if we died in phase 2, it was due to phase 1), we perservered, and last Sunday, July 6th, at the end of the night we could repeatably get to 30%. But 4.5 hours of raiding is a lot, so people were tired and our attempts got worse for a bit at the end of the night there.

Rested and ready to rock, we came back on Wednesday and got him to about 6% on 2 pulls, doing phase 2 in 3 brain phases both times. On one we learned that he has a *very* hard enrage. It's not a Brutallus enrage where you attempt to burn the last few percent of his life off. No, he burns all 100% of your life off, really quickly. And the other wipe at 6% was just a tank death.

But tonight, tonight we came back and we were ready. We were a bit disappointed that the hotfix went in before we could get a kill, not because we thought we needed it to get a kill (none of the changes would have turned those 6% wipes to kills, those were all p3 execution issues), but just for bragging rights. We warmed up with a few pulls to get portals sorted out and remind people of what we were doing, and then we kicked his ass.

It was a pretty clean first kill, we only had 2 deaths(1 in Phase 1, and 1 in Phase 3) and It was a very clean p3. We had just over 6 minutes and he was losing 5% of his life every minute, so we were good to go. At 1 minute left, the melee group heroism debuff had worn off, and we turned to face him and heroism... and he promptly fell over. Awesome job guys. And to everyone who was there Wednesday and couldn't make Sunday - you saw everything, you did everything we need to kill him, kudos to you, and kudos to everyone else who helped us learn.



Time for some hard modes.

The Burning Crusade, Down!

Felmyst went down on Wednesday October 15th. The next raid, on Sunday, Order of Thrones easily dropped the Eredar twins(I missed it, so I don't have a screenshot). The ledge boss was still equally difficult, but the other nerfs and talent changes certainly made the rest of the fight easy once the ledge boss was conquered. Unfortunately, Mannoroth started hitting all sorts of lag problems, so they weren't able to get M'uru that night.

Next week the lag problems kept going. Lag stopped Order of Thrones from getting the Eredar on Tuesday and M'uru on Wednesday, but on Sunday... Sunday we had a good, lag-free experience. M'uru went down in about 2 pulls, and we finally faced Kil'jaeden.

Here is M'uru's unimpressive corpse:



So we started working on Kil'jaeden. Obviously the nerf has made him easier - the DPS requirements were much lower allowing us to bring an extra healer and get through the phases faster. But it is still a complex fight where raid damage can easily kill people and we can slowly fall towards a wipe. Even with the nerf, it felt roughly on difficulty with learning pre-nerf Kalecgos - a lot of execution to learn.

With all that to learn, we obviously didn't get him the first day. We got him to 14 percent but we just were losing too many people in phases 4 and 5.

This week lag hit again and prevented us from getting the Eredar Twins on Tuesday, but they died in 1-shot on Wednesday and M'uru died quickly thereafter (since we didn't have to learn him again). We spent about an hour on Kil'jaeden teaching a few new people the fight but still didn't get him.

So we thought about it, and enough people became convinced that we just needed to get that dragon haste breath that we changed things up a bit. We made a change to our strategy that gave us a chance of instantly wiping (if he fireblooms or flame darts right after the phase 3 or phase 4 darknesses), but did wonders for removing the chance of us slowly wiping by making it easier for everyone to stay alive, outside of that chance of everyone dying all at once. Since we were slowly dying every time anyway, it's something we should have tried earlier, and I'll look for opportunities like that in future raids.

With that change in strategy, our 4th pull got us a 1% wipe (75k health) due to a couple of late mistakes that killed half the raid. But our strategy was basically sound, and the very next pull we killed him with at least 80% of the raid still up.





Congratulations to all my fellow raiders in Ordr of Thrones, both those who were able to make the kill and those who weren't, but helped us on all the bosses along the way. We beat the expansion pack. A year ago the guild had stopped raiding and many people had left, but we built it back up and started with Magtheridon and Gruul again and pushed our way back. We got Kael and Vashj down before the patch that removed BT/Hyjal attunements. We got Illidan down well before the 3.0.2 patch that would have made him a joke. We got Kalecgos and Brutallus down when they were at their full strength. And yes, the rest of Sunwell Plateau was certainly made *much* easier by the change (with our gear, we'd never have gotten M'uru in time before WOTLK), but Kil'jaeden is *still* a good fight to learn, so kudos to everyone.

Felmyst down!

So the new patch has arrived. It took its toll on everyone. For the players on Mannoroth, it took away our server last night, and one of Order Of Thrones' three raid nights. It also took away the first 45 minutes of our raid tonight as people cleaned up mods. On the other hand, it took away 30% of the hitpoints of all bosses and took away Sunwell Radiance. Throw in the talent changes and the bosses were... easy.

On Kalecgos we had 4 tanks(what we had cleared trash with) and 8 healers. Before the 2nd portal the dragon was about 50%. We had to just stop DPS and chill while the demon caught up. The entire fight took less than 2 full portal rotations, about 4 minutes. If we'd shoved more DPS down the first portal it would have been even faster.

For Brutallus our pets wouldn't attack, we had 3 tanks (prepping for Felmyst), 9 healers, and several of us were still wearing our arcane resistance from Kalecgos. And despite all that, we had 1:22 left before enrage. So yeah... he's easier.

Felmyst on the other hand, does similar raid damage as before. Same raid-wide 1k damage every 3 seconds, same gas nova, same encapsulate. Of course, with the tanks easier to keep up, the healers had a bit more freedom to heal the encapsulate target. Whatever it was, our healers were able to keep encapsulate targets up a lot more.

Avande also figured out how to call all the breaths perfectly, so people had enough warning to move (they didn't always, but not her fault).

We proved we could get through a ground phase without losing anyone. As it turned out, we never got through 2 phases back to back without losing everyone, but the nerfs and the buffs were enough that we got her down on a slightly late night. She entered her 3rd air phase at 8%, but our skeleton tank died shortly afterwards and we lost most of the remaining raid. With about 9 people up she landed at 6%. We clumped up, prayed for no encapsulate, and burned her down.



Success!

Her corpse disappeared before we could take a proper screenshot (we had some bad server lag and it took us a while before we could loot the body), but there's an action shot of Kalecgos heading over to open the way for us.