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.
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.
posted by Harwin at 9:01 AM
