Server First and our first Hard Mode kill:

The last few weeks have been filled with Ulduar raids, testing and killing the remainder of the Ulduar bosses and starting to work on the Hard modes. We have been thrilled with some of the encounters so far and some, while easy on pussy mode, promise to be exceptionally challenging on hard mode. The guild has responded well to the increased competition of wotlk and has surged forward in terms of ‘worthwhile’ achievements.

The four keepers guard the final two bosses and we progressed through them at a rapid speed, before returning in the last week to play with some of them on hard mode. Blizzard have made a commendable effort to keep these encounters different and they have a healthy mix of adds, single target, single tank and multi-tank fights. The first keeper (by virtue of the fact that if you go down the stairs from the Shattered Walkway and turn right you get to him first) is Hodir. Hodir is the closest Ulduar has to a resistance fight, and by this i mean your tank has to wear some - the amount being dictated by how slack your healers are. Continuing the tradition of NPCs with the intelligence of gnats the encounter allows you to free a number of ice-tombed idiots to aid you in your cause and they show their appreciation by making nice little cooking fires and the like - before promptly getting themselves ice-tombed again. The normal mode is the easiest of the Keeper fights while the hard mode (assuming you didn’t exploit to get it) represents a massive test of dps and healing. From looking at the loot table I am sure that people can squeeze out some more damage….

After Hodir comes Thorim whose room brings back memories of the arena in BRD and you’ll find the spectators about as friendly. While one group forges through the tunnel in order to goad the fat giant into getting into the thick of it, the rest brutally squish the dorfs (and others) who try to gatecrash. The hard mode sees a nice increase in his damage and the intervention of his ‘wife’ who runs around generally being annoying and casting frost nova on people. On normal mode this a is relatively entertaining, although not overly difficult, encounter which should present little challenge to those able to reach it. On hard mode we look forwards to a nice repair bill while we learn it.

Freya the Fluffy likes flowers and trees (and probably new age music and baking flapjacks). Thankfully the trash in the room has been reduced making it slightly less of a chore to clear through to her. This encounter is the Sartharion of Ulduar with 3 tree-friends you can either chop down on the way or allow to buff her. The main fights consist of handling several add phases, each of which requires a slightly different approach and then a second boring phase which consists of button mashing and avoiding exploding acorns. With 0 tree-friends up the fight is just a question of handling the add phases, which is to say ensuring your raid can a) engage their brains and avoid standing in the middle of the raid and flaying everyone with a lightning storm, b) Manage to kill 3 mobs within a short space of time and c) Avoid killing 10 exploding mobs at the same time and thus taking 1,000,000,000 damage each. Once she gets her guardians it becomes a LOT more fun. Each guardian adds a different buff and increases the difficulty of the fight considerably. This week our focus has been on dispatching her with one of her guardians up - a feat we achieved after some practice, making us the second guild (and first Horde) to reach this milestone. The next few weeks promise to add to the difficulty as we explore the other guardians.

Last, but by no means least in terms of difficulty and enjoyment, is Mimi the cute gnome. Well annoying really but he has been blessed with some excellent scripted lines - sadly mostly when he kills people so in order to maintain morale we sacrifice a few people each week so we can hear them. A dynamic encounter with lots of different phases this is an excellent boss which, judging by the number of kills worldwide, represents the greatest challenge on hard mode. A slight tendency to lag has crept into Ulduar these last few weeks and this is one of the fights where you do not need that to happen. We strongly object to the nerfing of his trash however which provided endless amusement as those incapable of moving died repeatedly.

General Tentacle (as well as being popular with one of the girls in guild) was a breath of fresh air, certainly as far as healers are concerned. Mana conservation is the priority and a combination of interrupting and movement keeps the other classes from being bored. Initially perplexing and annoying to be unable to get mana back in the normal manner this is nicely tuned little fight which we had great fun with.

And finally Yogg Saron, This is another fight which on normal (4 Keepers helping) is fairly straightforward and is more about eliminating stupid mistakes than actually doing anything clever. As the keepers diminish however it becomes massively more difficult. On 10 man we have happily poked him to death with 3 Keepers and are looking forward to being able to do this on 25 man also. Ulduar has given a huge amount of choice as the hard modes mean that you can focus on any one of half a dozen bosses as your progress raid and mop up the others as and when. Not only does this provide variety it also provides a large amount of content for raiders and is to be encouraged. With flashbacks of C’thun, still in our opinion the best encounter the game has produced, Pine Cone Mk 2 is most enjoyable and having tentacle toys is the pinnacle of any raider’s gear collection.

Alongside our progress on the Keepers and their hard modes the guild has had great fun with Flame Leviathan - a superb encounter which just gets better and better the more turrets your leave up. From the very first week the guild has tested itself against this encounter, choosing to kill it with one turret up from week one. Last week we took some time out to play with three turrets up, which turns the encounter from a zergable one into a fantastic control fight, with every player needing to perform their task and show awareness of their surroundings. ‘Nuked From Orbit’ gave us a great sense of achievement and continued our streak of server firsts on it and we look forward to trying 4 turrets at some point over the coming weeks.

Elsewhere we picked up some other entertaining achievements as well, ‘Nine Lives’ and ‘With Open Arms’ providing a twist on otherwise vanilla fights. With the guild up to its full raid quota once again recruitment is open in a few classes, notably a mage, a resto druid and a tanking deathknight. As ever we will accept exceptional candidates in other classes and look forward to offering them the chance to join the team and play at our high level.

Bunny madness overtook us, along with a distinct high from eating too much chocolate. Some people had some harmless fun making a potential dream of Dr Evil’s come true! Bunnies with frikking laser beams.

Others saw different opportunities…..

And while we look for dedication from our raiders, people show it in varying amounts!

Ulduar has burst onto the scene and continues Blizzard’s new plan of ‘easy mode/hardmode’ fights. Almost all of the fights can be done multiple ways - some like Sarth with ‘adds’ which can be left alive and some like the Bug Trio where the order you kill them increases the complexity of the fight.

The first week has been a flurry of activity with new bosses coming out of the woodwork and the guild progressing through them. Of course the temptation is to burn through on easy modes but we have taken some efforts to ensure that we lay the groundwork for the more challenging achievements. While killing things in their “basic” level is nothing to be mocked Blizzard have clearly designed these fights to allow raid guilds the option of challenging themselves and not settling for a basic or zerg kill. Over the coming weeks and months you will see us tackle and defeat these obstacles.

Flame Leviathan is a very nice opening boss, the Sarth of Ulduar. Utterly puggable and totally zergable without any towers up the encounter promises more with the added defenses still working and should in time provide a worthy encounter for those looking to test themselves. Vehicle encounters seem to be one way the game will be kept alive in the future and this fight shows that it can work and also provides a nice break from having X tanks and X healers. Still drunk from the the heady combination of zooming round on bikes and incinerating dwarfs in patches of burning oil we ran headlong into a (towerless) Flame Leviathan and, well, squashed him. We are sure next week with when we allow him to keep some of his defenses he’ll be a bigger challenge.

As we progressed deeper in we turned left (possibly for nostalgia reasons and the sight of Molten Giants or possibly because I wanted to come up against an encounter which would challenge us). Ignis had retained an annoying bug from his testing leading to him occasionally meleeing people while charging (with terminal effects) and some teething problems with his overall damage and stacks meant this encounter was a massive challenge after poor little Flamey. The temptation to hope he was nerfed in order to kill him was present but instead we decided to perservere and see where that got us. After getting battered about a bit and watching the tanks take consequtive 40k hits we retired for the night determined to return the following day and see what we could do about that. With some planning and raid rejigging we arrived refreshed and set about dispatching him. It was refreshing to come up against a hard boss, and one which requires a little tuning to make it accessible for others. I understand hotfixes took place over the weekend so next week we are hoping he is a little friendlier.

Along the way we picked up our first serious achievement of the new instance. EU 9th!

The decision was made to make a pull of Razorscale to see how the fight went and hone our tactics before killing him, unfortunately he accidently died in the process. Blizzard seem to have given a number of entertaining options for this fight in order to keep it interesting so we will see how that works out in the future. Again an innovative design for the fight keeps things interesting but he could certainly do with a tighter enrage or some more tricks. Of course the amusement of having the melee whirlwinded to death keeps things fresh.

Happy Robot was next and provided the first example of a movement fight which was clearly a wake up call for us. Excelling at these fights as we always do we spent a few tries sucking people with light bomb into the raid to give the healers a good workout as the people with lightbomb ran 3 yards and the people with gravity bomb didn’t move at all. Given the entertainment given by his voice a few wipes were not altogether demoralizing and despite our ability to allow him to heal with his scrapbots he collapsed into a heap of junk. Again a deliberate hard mode has been made available ensuring the fight remains challenging for some time to come.

One thing which is immediately noticeable about the trash in Ulduar is that it is thankfully sparse but that they seem to have made attempts to remove unavoidable deaths. The trash is a little tough and on the first pulls almost certainly causes a few wipes here and there but once learnt it is easy to pull and dispatch. The trash to Ignis is fast becoming a favourite due to the ability to pull the flame cones over afk/slacking people. After Happy Robot another choice awaited us (after the few trash pulls) and we again headed left towards the Council. These type of fights are my favourite, while never the hardest I have always enjoyed the multiple mob encounters - working out the pull the placement and the kill order. Over the years a few have been made starting with Sully in MC and peaking with the Bug Trio in AQ40. While Maulgar and Fathom Lord also had multiple mobs they never reached the level of interest the bugs had due to the potentially different difficulties and kill orders. The council continues this trend - giving a multitude of choices within the same fight. A throughly enjoyable encounter we enjoyed the growth of their abilities and look forward to defeating the harder combinations. Sadly the encounter was marred by nothing exciting happening when you click on the control panel - most people were secretly hoping lazer beams would spawn above the mages and char grill them.

Onwards and upwards we went towards ‘Arm Dude’. After a brief debate about which was the right arm and which was the left arm (our class channels are so full of win) it was time to progress beyond him. The Stone Grip presented some issues but all in all the fight simply relied on people being awake and learning not to kill others with the eye beams. Owner of one of the best kill phrases about, it took only a few moments for people to find (and overuse) the audio file. His corpse broke apart to make the bridge our ret paladins (I have been told calling them retardins is unfair) decided that they wanted to see what was at the bottom if the chasm and one promptly left into mid air triggering bubble as he went his death was met with much mirth but not nearly as much as the second one who launched himself off the second the first one died and followed him down into the depths (am i allowed to refer to them as retardins now?). A few trash mobs and then Crazy Cat Lady stood before us.

This fight was an excellent example of having to learn how to cope with the first 10 seconds of the fight. After some ideas we tried some more, some less sane and some more sane. We died a few times and then a few more, each time learning a bit more about the encounter and how to optimise our chances of success. While to some a few hours of dying on this might seem bad it was actually very enjoyable, watching people come up with suggestions, investigating their classes abilities and potential and then carrying some of them through to fruition. While we were credited with the achievement for this kill it was a bug and not something we deserved.

A four night adventure into Ulduar has left a good feeling, a feeling that with their hard modes these encounters will provide a decent challenge and that player skill will once again matter. A raid instance is not something you should be able to walk into in a pug with a character that dinged 80 a few hours ago and have a vague inkling of how to play. Unfortunately Naxx is that place and 3 wings have almost no gear or skill requirement. While Flamey may be easily puggable it is doubtful that any more than the first 3 are killable without people having gear and a brain. Once the raiding guilds start to work on the hard modes we will see how challenging they are - but at the moment it is alooking hopeful.

While some people are achiving goals through raiding it is important to note that others are looking for validation in other ways and aiming to fulfil other goals.

Now Ulduar has come out the once proud AQ40 will once again be left in peace after being 5 manned, Skeram providing the largest challenge in the instance, although the twins made an effort to be tricky as well. It was also an excellent place to  make a giant bug train………..

A shocking secret was discovered on the last day in March about our so called main tank. Seems like someone was slacking……….

And finally after a night out the ultimate prize was achieved by one lucky guild member….

Recruitment remains open primarily for a dps deathknight, a hunter and a healer (resto druid/paladin preferred). Please see the recruitment forums for other opportunties. You must be ready to intergrate into a raiding guild which will raid 5 days a week until the hard mode bosses have been vanquished. You will be expected to know your class and it’s ablities when asked about them and have a good understanding of good raiding practice. Your application is partially based on your talents, gear and achievements so please ensure you give a link to your character in the relevant spec/gear.

Since our first group vanquished Sartharion and his little minions we have searched for ways to keep the fight interesting. At a time when all the 25 man raid instances fail to fill a night the chances to explore some entertaining 10 man combinations have come about. One of the ideas was to take very stacked groups to Sartharion to see how the two sets of classes compared. Consequently to mirror an earlier caster group a melee group was selected (blackmailed/coerced) to see how they would get along.

We envisaged the melee group might find it harder than most groups due to the crowding around the mobs and the additional damage from the lava striking numerous people at the same time. To add to the fun we maintained our tactic of only taking two healers (being a healer in this guild is simply fantastic!). As with all fights relearning and tweaking tactics inevitably leads to a few wipes and despite their shiny blue colour a few fishy issues.

Wipe

Wipe

noes ……

At first it seemed like the only happy person would be the little goblin (who is distinctly cheekier than his predecessor the bot).

One of the great things to see is that when something hard comes up the people having the issues perservere and instead of taking an easy route or giving up they pull together and work through the problems. Tactics changed and were altered to adapt to the unique nature of the group. Some aspects of the fight became easier while other it became apparent would be trickier (whelp ae - hmmm). Preparations were made for more tries - although some people too the motto of “Be Prepared” a little too seriously. Ever the optimist our rogue prepared for the worst the following day.

Although the effect of 100 wipes on our fluffy tank would have been amusing to see I am glad to say that barely an hour was needed last night for the group to get it right and dance about happily on his corpse. There was a tearful moment as our little bear realised that she would not get to tank anymore for the rest of the week.

A special thanks to our very patient fluffy bear who loved this fight and mourned its death.

In other news we’d like to welcome our new trials many of whom have crossed the void to join us (also known as risking Blizzard server transferring). This has left us almost at capacity with only two slots now available - a turkey and a rug (Boomkin and enhancement shammie) and while we will consider a good dps deathknight our raiding roster looks set for Ulduar. If you are interested in joining us and play another class feel free to come over for a chat but be aware that only exceptional candidates would be considered.

So until Ulduar we will entertain ourselves with more bizzare group setups in order to keep our skills honed and see how few healers we can get away with on fights (current record 3 on Malygos and 4 on Sarth 25). The temptation to try all melee KT is also growing, I am sure a pretty 22man ice tomb chain would make a great screenshot……..

As you can see, our new website is now live.

We hope you like the new design and can bear with us while we move the news archive over to the new system.

Many thanks to our fantastic all-girl design team of Kayti, Kizax and Squish, as well as to the other officers and classleaders for their feedback (both positive and negative!).