Greatness

Last week's raid was disastrously under-attended but this week we had a full guild run with a couple of folks who came out of the shadows to lend a hand and we cleanly knocked out 8 hard modes and the Full House achievement on Lady Deathwhisper after one false start.

Took just over 3 hours and every boss was a one-shot except for Lady Deathwhisper (took one wipe to figure out how to taunt swap the boss), Blood Princes (tweaked our strategy to go for 2 tanks instead of 3 and it worked just fine, three wipes later, when I stopped exploding the healers or pulling an extra boss) and Dream Walker Valethria (where one of our healers had a misstep but the kill came on the second pull and was super, super clean.)

I think these nine bosses are easy mode at this point. Of course, I'm nervous and excited about Thursday - will everyone show up again? With this team, even with the inexperience and the slightly lower gear-curve, I'm confident we can knock out the last two bosses standing in our way. I've been giving a lot of thought on how to kill Sindragosa and Putricide on Heroic, and I have what seem to be solid strats in mind based on the way other folks have done them.

If Thursday doesn't pan out, I might just extend the lockout since I'm really bored of even the hard-mode bosses and while I enjoy watching guildies get tier tokens, I also want progression at this point, and we've proven our prowess with the nine bosses already. We know how to do this shit. Seeing the guild work last night was really gratifying. The folks we've brought in and our veterans are performing at a very high level and our healers and DPS are just off the charts. Absolutely amazing work across the board.

But at this late, late stage of the game, with so many of us within grasp of the final prize, it's time to bring the beacon in. The next two bosses I kill will be Heroic Putricide and Heroic Sindragosa.

Farming Hardmodes

Last night proved that we're getting our sea-legs with the Hard Modes. Seven bosses killed on Hard Mode including two end-wing bosses, and we only skipped out on doing Princes on Hard Mode because our raid comp wasn't really ideal (we were missing a 3rd tank - tried to range-tank it a couple of times but we kept loosing the Shadow Priest during Keleseth's empowered phase and as raid time was counting down, I just wanted to get another kill off of BQL so we just killed them.)

It wasn't just the fact that we cleared seven hard modes in 3 hours last night but the fact that we one-shot just about every one except for Saurfang (1 wipe) and Rotface (2 wipes, mostly 'cuz I was distracted and mistaunted the boss while Big Ooze ate healers. GG, Saif. Total fail.) After the raid, one of our members said that we just about cleared as much on hard modes last night as we did on normal modes most nights. That was a good point, and had we not wiped as much as we did, I'm sure we could have cleared through DWV as well and I think we're on track for a 9/12 Hard Mode night next Tuesday. /flex!

Of course, that leaves the two nasty buggers still undefeated - Le Bon Professeur still lives on as does Sindi. The two hard modes we haven't mastered yet, and our Thursday night this week is messy due to an unexpected absence from two of our top players which means we're probably going to just clear the remaining bosses on normal mode and maybe pick up achievements for folks that need it.

But last night was a solid, solid performance and being short 1 person, we brought in two undergeared people (an awesome if undergear healer we're wooing and a social guildie who has recently returned after a long beeak) both of whom performed incredibly well so really, we were a tad bit handicapped but pulled off some awesome kills - Saurfang went down with only 2 marks and a minute left on the meter (2 healing this makes it so much easier), Festergut died before he could cast a second Blight (even with 3 healees), BQL was sub-10% going into her second air phase - so that was some really, really solid DPS and performance.

I'm super happy with our progression right now. And to top it all off, Lana'thel was kind enough to give me my first Sanctified token. Maybe she will even relent to my repeated requests for a date next week...

Heroic Blood Wing Finished

The Blood Prince Council went down very calmly and quietly last night without a lot of fuss. Of course, after going over the fight, I pulled without switching to Heroic mode and our rogue began to panic-flail in /raid "NOT HEROIC! WIPE! WIPE!"and the panic spread as if we might not be able to wipe somehow!

Needless to say, we didn't not wipe. Which is to say, we did wipe. And came back, switched Heroic on and killed them very neatly, with the brief strategy I outlined earlier - the enrage timer is not an issue on this fight, just juggle the Kinetic Bombs, stay spread out for Empowered Shockwave, kite the Empowered Flame-Orbs and make sure the person getting hit has some kind of magical absorption (we tried to make sure they had Sacred Shield and a bubble from our Discipline priest, and if they were in range of our paladins, a Hand of Sacrifice as well.) If our Kelleseth tank had to move during his active phase to collect more orbs, we just had our rogue sit tight rather than have her run around to minimize the damage from Shadow Prison.

That's pretty much it. The fight takes a while (our kill was ~7 minutes) but it's just about whittling them down with steady control. Huge props to our healers on making it a two-shot. It's funny, how easy it is to muddle through this fight on normal mode but hard mode requires you to pay attention to every individual factor.

Afterward we killed Heroic Blood Queen again very cleanly, except for the part where I ran in to my bite target before the Blood Bolts were out and, yeah, you can imagine how that ended. Me with my face on the floor. But she died and our lovely guild leader got her tier piece.

We spent the rest of the night with Le Bon Professeur and man, that Unbound Plague is a horror. I think we might just spend a whole week on him to get him wrapped up. I don't think Sindragosa will be as difficult, to be honest, it's her massive health pool that intimidates me. Just before end-of-raid time, we switched to normal and knocked out the achievement very easily (Nausea, Heartburn, Indigestion...) so that was nice.

Anyway. I'm super-happy with a new boss down, and we're down to Putricide and Sindragosa before our drakes. Well, and a couple of more achievements (Full House, All You Can Eat, and Been Waiting A Long Time For This) but I'm not too worried about that.

I'm pretty excited. It'll be good to wrap up this project and move on whatever we want to do next. :-)

H:ICC 10-man Progression

So, after a week long break from Heroic ICC we went back in last night, and it went a lot better than I was expecting.

I've written about the lower tier of bosses before but since we've seen most bosses on heroic now, I think I have a better gauge of the difficulty level. Last night, in about 3 hours we were able to clear 5 heroic modes and worked on 2, and gave up on 1 just to keep going.

Anyway - if I were going fresh into ICC, here are the bosses I'd tackle on Heroic in order. Each list goes from easiest to hardest in its block.

EASY: First time in, I'd focus on these five, though I could skip Marrowgar, he can be a bit finicky until you learn the rhythm of the fight and H:BQL is a moderate DPS gear check but really shouldn't be an issue at this point. These are bosses most groups can consistently kill every week, I think.

• Gunship (What is this. I don't even.)
  
• Rotface (3 healers make this easy, ranged stay at, uh, range, and avoid the puddles.)
  
• Festergut (If 5 of your DPS can beat the enrage timer, 3 healing this makes it very easy.)
  
• Marrowgar (3 heal this and coordinate the Bone Storm park locations on tanks, everyone else stack in the middle and kill spikes.)
  
• Blood Queen Lanethil (Just a very strict DPS gear check. Tanks will take increasing damage as you make more vampires, otherwise it's the exact same fight.)
  

MEDIUM: These can take work, especially Deathwhisper - she has a number of new abilities on heroic, and Phase 2 can be challenging if you don't have any rogues or hunters. They are rewarding fights, though, and worth the glory of the kill.

• Dreamwalker Valethria (Remind the healers to heal themselves while they collect stacks, tank the blistering zombies, and if you can, solo tank and go with 4 healers to make it go super fast. Tanking this is fun. And will give you an ulcer.)
• Blood Princes (This is a stupidly long fight just because your ranged will spend all their time juggling kinetic bombs who drop very fast and take a lot of focus to stay juggled. 3 ranged make this a lot less complicated, and 3 healers give you breathing room, 3 tanks will also make this less stressful which leaves you.... one DPS killing the bosses full time. Better geared teams might be able to get away with 2 healing this. Shadow Prison is a bitch. Just make sure people stay spread out for Empowered Shock Wave, that bombs get juggled, that targets of Empowered Flame Orbs get absorption shields and kite the orbs, and you should be fine.)
• Lady Deathwhisper (lots of new mechanics make this challenging - phase 1 more or less the same, just kill the Adherents first their bubbles are stupidly powerful. Taunt immunity and Mark of Insignificance make phase 2 very interesting with incoming adds, actually dangerous ghost explosions and Mind Controls. Having two rogues (or two hunters, or a rogue and a hunter...) makes the threat thing a non-issue. Make sure DPS sit on their hands, use their own threat-drops, and get Hands of Salvation from paladins. Fun fight!)
• Deathbringer Saurfang (2 heal this if your DPS is good enough to kill him before he gets 3 marks out, otherwise use 3. Paladins are OP healers on this fight. Add-kiting and killing is actually challenging if you don't get slows/stuns on them. I am thinking of swapping my spec around for this fight just so I can guarantee stuns on every add-wave.)

HARD: Bosses we haven't killed yet just because they're actually tough with new mechanical differences or just severe gear-checks.

• Professor Putricide (the two-add transition is not that bad, but juggling the unbound plague is what makes this hard.)
  
• Sindragosa (haven't spent any time on this yet, and while the exploding unchained magic looks like it's challenging, the real threat on this fight will be her massive health pool and whittling it down before her enrage while coordinating phase 3 and the unchained magic.)
  

Really Hard: Bosses I don't think are going to be within our grasp yet due to gear.

• Lich King (I don't know if our 10-man geared guild can kill LK yet - I see one guild in strict and small handful on casual progression having pulled it off worldwide, and our last buff to ICC comes in a couple of weeks so we'll see what happens then, but I'm not holding my breath. The super-strict comp (which we can actually meet!) and gear requirement makes me doubtful we'll get this but I do want to spend some time on him.)

So, that's all of ICC Heroic in order of difficulty in my experience. I think we're on track for wrapping up Glory of the Icecrown Raider sometime this month, unless I'm vastly underestimating the amount of time we'll need to spend on Sindragosa.

Here's hoping I'm right for once!

A bit of a break

Idunno what's going on with things lately. We can breeze through ICC 10 with our eyes closed at this point but hard modes outside the basic ones just seem impossible lately. I don't know what's up - either motivation, or boredom, or burnout... I don't know what it is. I made a little speech in raid last night before swapping over to normal modes and a couple of people have talked to me about things... but I don't know what else to say or do about it.

Next week is vacation week for me (I'll be at GenCon!), so we decided next week will be a Ruby Sanctum night on Tuesday and then the guild is free to do what they wish with their ICC 10 lockout the rest of the week.

But I've set a hard expectation that I want to get to 10 to 11 Hard Modes a week by the end of August and work on Hard Mode Lich King throughout September. I'm really hoping the 11 day break from ICC will let people come back in with fresh minds, fresh perspectives and we'll make some real progress again because, as I said last night, I have zero - zero - interest in farming easy bosses.

Once we swapped to normal mode, all the other bosses went down very smooth and easy. At least we got a few more people caught up on the BQ achievement.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Amazing Week

I woke up today and a blue tweety bird sat on my window ledge singing a happy song. Yawning, I went to the shower where the water smelled of mountain springs and lent me a manly man smell that was musky and appealing to the opposite sex. After eating six eggs, four pieces of thick beacon and a few sausages along with gallons of fruit juice and raw milk with slabs of marbled cheese, I rode my car which overnight transformed from a Honda Civic to a European car of some sort and sped through traffic that politely moved out of the way for me.

How did this happen, you say? What's going on with your life and how can I have a morning just like yours?

This is the morning after two nights of amazing raids. We went in with full guild runs both nights for ICC Heroics and man, man, is it satisfying to one-shot Heroic Marrowgar, DeathWhisper, Gunship and then, very smoothly and solidly kill Saurfang on our first pull!

After a bit of wrestling with what to do next, I decided to give Dreamwalker a shot and it took a lot of work, that fight is a bit brutal on Hard Mode but once the healers figured out the new cloud mechanic and started healing themselves and became better at holding stacks, and once we changed the priority order of kills and had our tanks coordinate the adds better - up she went, though the kill was super messy. I have plans to clean this up for our next kill.

Afterward, we went and killed Princes on normal mode just to get ready for Thursday and that was Tuesday.

Last night, though. Last night was glorious.

I logged in late (and I'm very seldom late) to find my lovely Guildleader had pulled the raid together and cleared trash in Plague Wing already! Awesome! We buff up, we pull Heroic Festergut, bang, one shot on hard mode. We run over to Heroic Rotface, we pull, BANG! Another one shot. On a whim, we ran up to Blood Wing, pulled Heroic Lanethil and down she went, even with me COMPLETELY fucking up the bite order at the end and giving out bite assignments on the fly neglected to include myself in the list (and I was DPSing).

Feeling like Gods, we ran up to Putricide and did some pulls on Heroic and... man, that's a messy fight. We kind of have half a plan to deal with Unbound plague, and we were doing okay with the adds management but I really didn't want to spend the entire night learning that fight so we decided to get the achievement and we did graet with no slows and killed him just fine, but I don't know why we didn't get the achievement - Recount didn't show me casting the slow at any point (though honestly I never looked to see if it DID record it in the past so Idunno if I'd see it anyway, but there it is.) Menh, we'll get it soon enough, as we proved we were capable of killing adds without the slow just fine.

The hard mode, though, that will take time.

We ran up to Sindragosa and I'm still a little wobbly on this fight and we've gotten stuck on her before, but, the string of one-shots continued and she went down (on normal mode, naturally) with only one person down. Very, very smooth, textbook kill.

It was running pretty late but we ran up to Lich King to see if we could quickly grab a title for one guildy who didn't have it but our first attempt got flubbed in phase 2 so we run back in and took him all the way into phase 3 without any problems. Even the transition was smooth but I hate doing hard fights in a hurry, and a couple of us kind of stumbled coming out of a perfect phase 2 transition and we wound up calling the raid there.

But to do 2 pulls on LK and have them both go THAT smoothly was amazing.

I want to spend next week getting Heroic Princes and maybe, if we get lucky and work out a good strat, we can get Putricide down. That'll put us in a great position to earn our drakes in a few weeks and start working on Heroic Lich King.

What a week. Maybe I'll even relent and work on Helion. :-P

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to eat a burger trapped in a bun of two grilled cheese. Because it's just that kind of day.