Good News, Everyone!

It's inexplicable, really. We've been trying for weeks to take Rotface down, bringing him as low as 3%, but never quite making it before being overwhelmed. Then, last night, everything just clicked - slime pools were circumnavigated, oozes were kited expertly, and everyone got the hell out of the way when they exploded. Fully expecting to spend at least an hour on the fight, we proceeded to one-shot it. *shrug*

What this meant, of course, was that as soon as we headed over and killed Festergut (who is essentially on farm status now - though he refuses to acquiesce to my demands for footwear), we would be facing Putricide for the first time. It's an interesting fight, and frankly seems less fiddly than the ooze-wrangling of Rotface. There are, in fact, oozes to wrangle, but dealing with them is wholly reliant upon proper player movement and sufficient dps, rather than a somewhat unpredictable pathing A.I.

We made solid progress as we learned the fight, bringing the good Doctor down to ~50% on our last attempt. It will be interesting to see how we handle phase 3; on one hand, no more gas clouds or volatile oozes to deal with; on the other, the tanks and healers will have more to worry about...

In other news, I've made the switch to a Marksmanship spec - having acquired the two-piece T10 bonus, its inherent potential for abuse in conjunction with a properly-timed serpent sting and chimera shots made this a foregone conclusion, and my dps last night definitively bore the assumption out.

It Never Gets Any Easier

The guild's raiding has, indeed, progressed beyond Saurfang in the weeks following my last post. In the interim, one group - once - has managed to take down Festergut. Full stop.

It is somewhat analogous to an unholy amalgamation of Patchwerk and Loatheb, except the spores in this fight, rather than boosting your DPS, boost your immunity to the incoming massive raid damage. The DPS is up to you, and boy howdy, do you need a lot of it! Festergut has a five-minute enrage timer, and 9.4 million health in his 10-player iteration. That means, assuming two tanks and two healers, a minimum of 5k DPS from everyone else, or you lose.

Yeah, we lost.

That brings us to tonight's attempt at ToGC. We were feeling cocky - ok, I was feeling cocky - I mean, we've cleared ToC dozens of times, and now we've even got a few pieces of gear from the next tier of content! What could go wrong?

...let's just say they don't call him Gormok the Impaler for nothing. Those poor, poor tanks.

There Ain't No Sanity Clause

Last night, I made my long-delayed entrance into Icecrown Citadel, and lo, it was good. Well, pretty good.

Being that it was in the midst of the holiday weekend, this was something of an impromptu event, with only a handful of signups and the rest made up on the spot. There had been two full raids earlier in the week, which meant most of our raiders' mains were locked out, leaving about half the raid to be filled with slightly less well-geared alts. I'm fairly sure this was what determined the upper limit of our progress for the night.

In broad overview, we successfully moved through Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, and the gunship event; we put in several very good attempts at Saurfang, but ultimately couldn't take him down. I found all of the encounters so far quite enjoyable. I don't believe any of them are difficult in terms of execution, but they do require everyone to pay attention, making for some engaging, interesting fights.

The Deathbringer Saurfang encounter is definitely a gatekeeper for the next segment of the raid. Last night our gear was well and truly checked, and found... wanting. The guild has taken him down in previous weeks, with our best-geared raiders, but that gear margin is clearly the difference between success and failure here. By our last attempt, we had what I feel is a sufficiently tight strategy: slowing the Blood Beasts with a frost trap while focusing fire on each, one at a time, kiting with everything we've got - Distracting Shot, Concussive Shot, Disengage - yes, hunters, rejoice, for this fight makes us specifically useful! The problem we ran into was the amount of time it took to kill each Beast; by the time the first was down, the second had made its way to a delicious healer. If there had been two hunters in the raid, I'm sure we could have kept them both occupied, but as it was, our DPS just wasn't sufficient. We ended the night on our best attempt, with Saurfang at 15%, and his mighty cleave dropping me to 0%, the bodies of my comrades strewn about the terrace.

Still, I'm happy with our effort, and looking forward to killing the bastard for many weeks to come.

From Hell's Heart, I Stab at Thee!

Yes, at long last, I've gotten my very own Yogg kill. Even after clearing the next tier of raiding content, and knocking out a number of Ulduar hard-mode encounters, finally beating He Who Haunts Orthodontists' Nightmares was still a supremely satisfying experience.

The night began with our guild's first attempt at the Assembly of Iron's hardest mode, killing Steelbreaker last. After learning and mastering the frantic shield-tranqing and add-killing of medium-mode over the past couple of weeks, the general impression was that taking down Steelbreaker last is, well... pretty easy. Yes, he has a 100% chance of killing whoever tanks him, but realistically, with fair DPS, he will go down soon after the first tank explodes.


We then made our way through Mimiron (within seconds of a death-free victory) and a repeat of Hodir and Vezax hard modes, and moved on to the endgame. This fight really comes down to execution on the part of the brain-room team; as long as everyone on the surface can stay alive and sane, getting to phase three well before the enrage is entirely a matter of pounding on Yogg's brain, and after a couple of false starts last night's group performed admirably.

Upon seeing phase three for the first time, my first impression was, "gee, there are a lot of Immortal Guardians!" This was followed quickly by, "gee, there are a lot of dead raiders!" But, with fewer missed portals during phase two the next time, and better damage allocation between Guardians and Yogg himself, our victory was secured.

We're Coming For You, Giant Constellation Man!

Last night's raid was a thing of beauty. Now that we'd got a handle on Yogg, it was agreed that there was no time like the present to begin pushing through the requisite hard-mode boss fights to unlock Algalon, as well as those needed for Glory of the Ulduar Raider along the way. So, with some trepidation as we were lacking a couple of key raid buffs, we undertook the initial task of retrieving the Archivum Data Disk from the Assembly of Iron. It took a few tries, but once we saw how Molgeim's adds behaved, we realized they could be AoE'd down before they had a chance to do much damage. Step one...

...complete!

Next up was Hodir. Since this hard-mode simply requires defeating the boss under a certain time limit, it is much like its normal counterpart - only moreso. Stacking all of the available buffs is non-optional. It is also necessary for the raid leader to know when to call for a wipe, to avoid accidentally killing Hodir after the timer has expired. Again, after a handful of tries...


...bam! We were rolling now.

Despite our newly-inflated confidence, we weren't quite intoxicated enough to push the Big Red Button, so after dispatching Mimiron the old-fashioned way, we decided to spend the last half hour of the raid on Vezax and the Saronite Animus. Without saronite puddles to stand in, mana efficiency becomes even more important for healers, which also means that not getting hit by life leech and shadow crash is even more important for the rest of the ranged. We gave it several attempts, the clock ticking ever closer to midnight, until, on what would have been our last attempt:


Victory!
/dance on a big dead lobster

So, yeah.

Gang of Miscreants Declare God is Dead!

When reached for comment, Friedrich Nietzsche said "told you so!"

Yes, after eight weeks, and at least as many hours, worth of attempts, The Pig and Whistle Society of Kirin Tor has defeated the Old God of Death!

...I was not present for this raid. FUCKING HEADACHES.

But nonetheless! I am profoundly proud of my guild. Where some might have jumped ship in frustration, we went back, week after week, until we got it right. And it never became a matter of banging our heads against a wall; every week saw marked progress. We went from wiping on phase 1, to wiping due to missing the brain-room timer, to making it well into phase 3, until finally... we just didn't wipe at all.

Now, on to hard modes!

Rock Lobster - Down!

With Vezax having smugly rebuffed our attempts to crack open his carapace and eat him with butter during last week's regularly-scheduled raiding, last night we initialized the Emergency Last-minute Boss Owning (ELBOW) protocol, and took on the last two regular-difficulty bosses in Ulduar.

It took a handful of attempts, but everything finally came together, and Vezax fell over. That left only Yogg-Saron and his crazy girlfriend.

Our best attempts saw us make it to the beginning of phase two, where we were overwhelmed by an excess of Guardians of Yogg-Saron. We had some trouble with people hitting clouds, and Guardians blowing up before they could be herded to Sara. We finally called it a night after... a lot of tries... but, we killed a new boss and saw a new encounter, which makes it a good night in my book.

Making Friends

Egads, what a weekend.

Beginning Friday night, we cleared both the Siege and Antechamber, getting our first Orbital Bombardment in the process (Two emblems of conquest! Only ten more weeks, and I'll be able to buy something!). We are now beginning to hone our runs down to a level of efficiency at which we should be able to do a full clear in two nights of raiding, ala Naxx. I am especially proud of our progress in light of the fact that we have something of a rotating cast of raiders, with at least one or two Ulduar-virgins every week.

Saturday night was no less rewarding. We finally repeated our first Hodir kill (ok, so you don't actually kill any of the Keepers...), and even managed an accidental I Have the Coolest Friends. We then moved on to Thorim, who we had only faced once before, and not successfully. But, after a couple of attempts in which we got the hang of taking down the constantly spawning adds in time without pulling aggro off the tank (ahem... >_>), we defeated him quite easily.

Next was Freya, who none of us had actually attempted before. Our plan was basically to get some easy emblems from the three Elders, and then put in some time learning the main encounter. We went about clearing the trash (protip: according to one of our Paladins, the dragon mobs are immune to Repentance) and the Elders without much trouble.

The first couple attempts on Freya herself were indeed learning experiences; Snaplashers killing tanks, Gifts of Eonar not getting cut down in time, etc. But on try number three, everything just clicked, and, well...

(Protip #2: since the Snaplashers won't attack melee who are not on top of their threat list, Hunters can hit them with a distracting shot once their debuff roots them, allowing melee DPS to continue hacking with impunity)

Finally, we moved on to the Spark of Imagination (a.k.a. Mimiron's workshop, a.k.a. coolest trash pulls ever. I'm not going to spoil it for you - it was a neat little surprise for all of us :D). We rode the bullet train (You heard that right. Seriously, Ulduar really does get more awesome the farther in you go.) to Mimiron's inner sanctum, said hi, and were promptly vaporized. It was after midnight at that point, so we called it a night, content in the knowledge that the Old Gods and their minions will soon fall before us.

And, because I know you care, here's the weekend's hunter loot haul: Belt of the Blood Pit, Boots of Unsettled Prey, and Shawl of the Shattered Giant.

Being Frozen Blows

Or, "Raid Composition Matters".

Last night we spent two hours wiping on Hodir, getting him down to 14% on our best attempt. Seeing as last week's group succeeded in taking him down, the task at hand is to isolate the factors which caused our difficulty.

1. There were a couple of people who had never seen the fight before, and were unclear as to how the Flash Freeze/snowdrift mechanic worked. However, this was soon explained and became less of an issue. Last week's group had at least one newbie as well.

2. Ok, the elephant in the room - the types of healers we had. The Hodir fight is a ludicrous piling-on of raid damage; between frozen blows and biting cold, toasty fires notwithstanding, everyone is taking damage all the time. Now, last week's group was ideally staffed to handle this: they had a priest for various AOE heals and a big ol' stamina buff, and a shaman for, well, what shamans do. Last night, on the other hand, we had a druid and two paladins. That means very little multi-unit healing, and two healers who have to stand still to do anything.

That being the case, I applaud our group, and especially our healers, for getting as far as we did. But I must also resign myself to the fact that beyond filling a role, sometimes class still matters. At least until everyone so outgears the encounter that it doesn't anymore.

Of Snowmen, Infernal Machines, and Meta Achievements

/wave

Hello! Yes, I'm still here, just lacking much of substance to post. Some hardware hiccups kept me from raiding this week, which means, sadly, I wasn't present for our guild-first Hodir kill!

But, far from being frustrated, I'm actually very happy, and not only for the success of the group that actually took him down. I'm happy because now I can feel confident that Hodir will not be the brick wall to our Ulduar progression that it appeared he was becoming. It seems that last night's group put in several attempts on Thorim afterwards, but never quite made it. Hopefully, I'll be along to describe the situation in grisly detail next time.

And finally, it appears my little blog has reached 200 unique visitors! I hope everyone who has stopped by has gone away better informed, or at least mildly amused. Ya'll come back now, ya hear?

In Before De-claw

It was reported today that, among other things, the latest PTR build has seen the threat of Auriaya's Sentries' Savage Pounce, arguably the most difficult aspect of the fight, cut in half. I could question, as many others already have, the logic behind nerfing content that everyone already seems to be progressing through rather swiftly, but I won't do that.

Instead, I will glory in the knowledge that my Guild and I two-shot the bitch on the first night we attempted it! /flex

After a false start in which our DK tank didn't get behind his pillar quite fast enough after dropping a Death and Decay in Auriaya's path, we went on to achieve a textbook execution of the fight - no one got pounced, no Feral Defenders were left to void zone it up in inopportune places, and everyone stayed bunched up on her crotch like an eager boyfriend.

Hodir... didn't go quite as smoothly. At first, a lot of people couldn't seem to grasp the whole "don't stand in the big circ- NOW! NOW IN THE CIRCLE!" mechanic of avoiding Flash Freeze. Everyone eventually seemed to get the hang of that, but we were still taking too much damage from Frozen Blows for our healers to deal with. It seems frost-resistance gear may in fact be called for.

Overall, for a two-nights-per-week raiding guild, I am quite happy with our progress. I expect us to be knock-knock-knockin' on Yoggy's door three or four weeks from now. Or next week, if Blizzard doesn't get off of their knee-jerk nerfing kick...

Our Raid Brings All the Dragons to The Yard

And they're like, "rawr rawr rawr rawr."

Last night's Ulduar run was an ambivalent mishmash of highs and lows. We began the night by easily clearing through Flame Leviathan and Deconstructor in order to get in as many attempts as we could stand on the Assembly of Iron. Unfortunately, we never got farther than phase two (doing the normal-difficulty progression); Overloads, and later Lightning Whirls, were just beyond our ability to keep under control. We did, however, do much better than last week, and I wish we would have tried a bit longer last night. In any case, I fully expect us to get them down next time.

But, we finally retreated, and swung back around to clear Razorscale and Ignis. Over the course of the night, we ended up earning a handful of unexpected achievements through sheer badassery. In addition to the dragon murderin' noted above, we also got

Tonight's plan is to do Kologarn again, and then continue working on new content with Auriaya and, depending on how that goes, Hodir.

We Passed

Last night's Ulduar run was a thing of beauty.

Wednesday night's attempts (which I was unable to attend) saw the guild taking down Razorscale in two shots, but hitting a wall with Ignis. So, we went in last night expecting to work on Iggy until we got him, and then make a few attempts on XT-002 Deconstructor just to learn the fight.

Instead, we proceeded to one-shot Ignis, and deconstruct XT in three. Then we spent half a dozen attempts figuring out how best to position ourselves to deal with Kologarn's lazer vision, but he, too, did fall. In the end, we couldn't beat Moe, Larry, and Curly, but we learned the fight, what to expect, and how to deal with it (Brundir can be silenced? Are you shitting me?).

*sigh* Sometimes I wish we did progression raiding more than two days a week. I can't wait to get back in there.

Oh, no you di'n't!

Oi, what a week.

The guild was hit hard by a rather unexpected dramasplosion, when a simple disagreement over loot procedures brought long-simmering personal differences to a head. Things were said. Prominent members left. Mistakes were made.

That being the case, we are no longer able to put together 25-person Naxx raids, as we had just begun to do, which leaves many of us in the unexpected position of basically stagnating until Ulduar (Malygos and various iterations of Sarth notwithstanding).

So what am I doing? Well, leveling my Death Knight, for one - we're perpetually short on tanks (some of the best of which left in the schism, along with some great healers). On my hunter, I'm mainly just doing dailies for gold (soon, my precious, soon) and rep achievements.

Still, Naxx isn't entirely barren of upgrades - just tonight, I finally replaced my Spaulders of the Black Arrow with Heroes Cryptstalker Spaulders, finally scoring me the 2-piece set bonus, for what it's worth.

I'm hangin' in there - more to come, no doubt.

We're Taking This Ziggurat to Panama!

This past weekend was a raiding watershed for my guild. It was the first all-guild full-clear of 10-person Naxxramas. Now, for a serious raiding guild, only just now completing Naxx would be an embarrassment, not an accomplishment. But we are not a serious raiding guild.

We are, first and foremost, a bunch of friends and people with similar interests, who are in the guild to socialize and draw upon a reliable, competent player base for running heroics. We are casual – raiding is entirely optional, an opportunity that guild membership presents as a kind of bonus. People must be sufficiently geared, of course, but groups for heroics (not to mention advice on gear, enchants, and talents) are easy to come by.

Yes, we’re casual, but those of us who choose to raid take it seriously. We’ve been doing Naxx10 two nights a week for maybe a month and a half, now, along with Sarth and VoA10, and even a sprinkling of 25-person raid nights with some allied guilds. We have slowly but surely gotten past the phase of getting everyone geared up, to the point where we really had a shot at defrosting Kel’Thuzad’s freezer. And last night, we did it.

Friday and Saturday were our regularly scheduled raid nights. Friday saw our always-shifting cast of guildies (minus myself; work, work, work…) breeze through the Arachnid and Construct wings, and Saturday we did a similar job on Military and Plague. The night was young, and we weren’t about to leave Sapphiron’s bones undisturbed for another week. We proceeded into the Frostwyrm Lair – and a fight none of us had actually participated in before. Say what you will about the relative lack of difficulty in the current endgame (and I’ll probably agree with you), but I still largely attribute the fact that we killed Sapphiron (and don’t get too comfortable, Maly) on our second try – ever – to a raid leader who is very on top of things, in terms of both strategy research and in-battle direction, and some totally kickass healers.

We were feeling pretty damned good at that point, and charged (as circumspectly as one can charge, anyway) onward to Kel’Thuzad. We gave it three good tries that night: first attempt, we got him to about 45%, even though our ret Pally disconnected about two minutes in. Second attempt, Pally’s computer completely dies, with similar results. We called in a warlock to pinch-DPS for one last try, and got him down to 19% before we wiped. By now it was late, we were tired, and we decided to call it a night, research the fight some more, and come back the next day.

Fast forward to last night. We established that Saturday night’s group composition may have been suboptimal – we’d been running two healers and two tanks, one of whom would pick up the Guardians of Icecrown when they showed up. This seemed to inevitably lead to one of the tanks getting caught by the chaining Frost Blast, and either the Guardians or the lich going wild. So, last night we had one of our Paladins switch from Protection to Holy, and handle tank healing. Bingo – we took him down in two tries.

And oh, mercy, it was a hunter-loot-stravaganza. We’re talking Helm of the Lost Protector, Nerubian Conquerer, and, eh… Staff of the Plaguehound. As much as I wanted that gun, or even the helm, to make wearing my Heroes’ Cryptstalker Tunic closer to an actual upgrade, I passed; I’d won some nice boots and the aforementioned chestpiece the night before, and there were three, count ‘em, three other hunters in last night’s group, two of whom were significantly less geared than me. Remember what I said earlier about my guild? A bunch of friends? Yes, I meant that. Congratulations, Pig and Whistle Society!