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.

Brutallus Down!

Logging on for the raid, it didn't seem like we had the people on to get Brutallus. We were short DPS, and we were short healers. But we'd never hit the enrage, and people were still chaining burn on each other occasionally, and we hadn't really had much time on the boss (3-4 hours at that point) because we never seemed to have the right groups, so we went for him anyway.

We got the positioning down so people weren't chaining burn to each other and the tanks weren't dying at the start. However, half the burn victims seemed to die With only 1 shadow priest and 7 healers, some of them undergeared things weren't great, but we had gotten a good handle on the basics. After 2 hours we finally got some other healers to log on, so Ronery went back to shadow and we decided to try 8 healers. Eight healers is more than ideal, because it can be done with seven, but we'd been frustrated with only 1 shadowpriest (vampiric embrace helps a LOT) and having people die because when they got burn they were already low.

So we tried 8, and decided to see where we were. We had 1 pull that did ok, and at least showed we could survive burn with 8, so DPS started going full consumables. And you know what? We finally hit the enrage, Brutallus at 8% when the last persion died. So we DPS'd a little harder, and worked on our enrage strategy and hit 5%. After a stupid 20% wipe due to some DPS dying early we had all our cooldowns ready to go. At 2% he enraged, but our paladins were ready with a taunt rotation. We still didn't have that perfect so at 1% he killed half the DPS with a meteor slash, but in the end, he died. (And, in true OOT fashion, 90% of people still up had burn, having chained it to each other, so except for the rogues who could cloak of shadows, the rest of the raid proceeded to keel over)



Thank god.

A word of warning about screenshots though. As we were getting ready, one of our raiders warned us not to AoE or we'd pull Felmyst, who was circling through the air. With this carefully in mind, we posed for the screenshot above. And then Vast said "Ok, do your flashy effects!" With those people who remembered the admonition against AoE screaming in horror(I admit I had my finger over volley and stopped just in time) AoE begain.

And Felmyst arrived.

Kalecgos Video

Lunatics apparently recorded our entire first kill, so here it is in all it's glory:

http://files.filefront.com/Kalecgos+OoTwmv/;11478926;/fileinfo.html

If you read chat at the end you can even see where several people were pissed off we had wiped at 1%, only to realize we hadn't.

Kalecgos down!

Last week we had a 1% wipe on Kalecgos when Sathrovarr killed the human form Kalecgos (early tank death put more pressure on him). Just a tiny more DPS or tanking would have kept him up, and the dragon was low at the time and probably would have gotten killed.

Well we went back this Tuesday and had a bit of a rough start because we had to teach some new people, and our 3rd tank wasn't as well geared as our 3rd tank last week, so healing was a bit rougher at the start, but everyone pulled through. The kill itself was nearly a model of perfect execution. Until 25% dragon/15% demon everyone was alive, in good shape etc.

We just did a little too much DPS to the demon and hit the enrage at about 21% dragon. So we started losing tanks. At 6% he was basically running around 1-shotting people, and we're watching his health drop and just hoping. He gets to 1%, and I see him run over to kill one of the two remaining DPSers (Feign Death Scoresby, Feign Death!) and suddenly he rears back and turns friendly.

For a second we weren't sure. Was that the exit combat due to a wipe or was that him turning friendly because we won? Well, as you've guessed from the title of the post, it's because we won. Woo!!

Not our cleanest first kill ever, but it was a really clean kill until I messed up the DPS balancing at the end, and we still got him, so good job everyone.

Now, the kill shot you're about to see isn't very exciting. First, Kalecgos didn't stick around for it - he just flew off and left us with a typical demon-armor corpse (like Magtheridon). And that corpse looked so disappointing I guess some of our guild mates teleported to Shattrath to look for more exciting corpses. But we of course took a shot anyway.

Here it is:

ILLIDAN DOWN!

After spending last Sunday teaching a new tank to tank phase 2 (one of our regulars was unavailable), we were ready tonight with 3 tanks who knew how to do it. Our first pull was a 29% wipe when our tank failed to get any heals when shadow prison ended. But everyone was in good spirits - we clearly had what was needed.

We made a few more failed attempts - always wiping AFTER phase 2, thankfully, and then we had the kill. We lost several people right near the end but we hung on and managed to burn him down just as he entered demon form again.

Of course, we didn't manage to *survive* the kill. Someone had parasites and they quickly mopped the floor with us, especially when people tried to melee them.

But at least he was down, and we got our loot.

ZA Timed Run Complete

Another milestone accomplished by OoT. Rawr?