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: