Ulduar and more

First of all, a random statement. This game, and the whole world, need more random acts of kindness.



Now, to Ulduar. We, in HE, seem to love doing things in a unique way called "ass-backwards". Now, now, everyone in guild don't start telling Stout to kick me. Everyone out of guild, don't start pointing and laughing. I mean that in the best way possible.

Due to epic timing fail, our group didn't get to see Ulduar until Sunday. We DID finally get in, and we downed Flame Leviathan in no time.

Well...I wiped us on our first attempt. See, when people said something about shooting passengers so they could do stuff to towers or whatnot, I was thinking TOWERS. Like, towering over people. Like, I had to aim high and get my passenger up at the top where all those flying things were. There was no concept for me to, I don't know, throw my passenger on top of the boss to shut down something-or-other that was actually on it. And when I asked where I was supposed to throw my raid leader, he said just hit the button...

Yeah. Our wipe? Totally my fault. Because I just didn't get it. I do, now. I only make the really dumb mistakes once, unless it's on Thaddius. But, we won't talk about Thaddius.

So. First easysauce boss down. And, what do we decide to do?

We say hello to Ignus.

Ignus trash sucks. It took us a bit, but we figured it out. We were all so complacent from running Naxx that we forgot how "fun" trash could actually get. Remember TK, back in the day, when CC was necessary and you had to kill certain mobs in a certain way or things could go very badly? Ignus is like that. Only, the trash mobs come two at a time, so you'd think it's easysauce, right?

The big guys at the front door in my screen shot are interesting. They hit pretty hard, and they do an AOE silence. Even with hots, it's easy for a tank to go down in that silence. But, the silence can be LOSed. It only took us a couple of wipes to figure that out. /facepalm And then a couple more to get the positioning right.

That's when the real fun begins.

First, you get a traveling debuff when those two die. It deals a nice amount of damage and then hops to the next person at random. The only way to get rid of it is to die or go down to the water in the boss's room to put it out. There are two golem packs and four or five revnant packs wandering around the room. The golems are easy. They hit hard, do fire damage in a cone in front of them. Face them away from the raid, tank them together, no problem. They go down pretty easily. The revnants wiped the floor with us, however. They cast flaming cyclones of doom that like to toss the melee into the air and throw them to the ground at 10% health or less. If you're lucky, they throw you out of their path. Otherwise, you die. Poor little Wee died. A lot. I finally had to err on the side of cowardice. I never saw a casting bar on those things, but other people did, so I'm playing with my mods before next attempt...but they seem to get brighter about two or three seconds before they cast the cyclones of fiery doom. Or, maybe I was just chicken. Either way, on the last pull I ran away when I suspected they even might be casting it, and that was the only time I survived. If you're ranged you can just run away and all is good. They follow one person at random. So, if it's not after you, sidestep it and keep casting.

And then we made four or five attempts on the boss himself. Having a DK to chain the adds into the scorches is awesome. Our problem was that we were taking too much damage and dying before we could even hope to get one molten and then brittle and then shattered. I think part of it was the add tank taking a lot of damage when kiting them into the scorches. Once the add tank went down, it was over.

It got late, we called it, and Thursday the real attempts begin. We'll start with Razorscale this time, instead of Ignus. You know...the right way? I'm hoping we'll have our A game. We'd had to bring a few "warm bodies" because our regular raiders weren't all on. Even still, it went well, we learned, and we had fun.

This was my first time attempting new raid content the same week it came out. Always before, I've been trying to catch up. Catch up on leveling, catch up on gear... I repaired as I went most of the time, so I didn't pay attention to how much it all cost. 150g or so? On trash. And it was totally worth it. I feel like I'm finally where I wanted to be in the game.