A Night to Celebrate

In the midst of a much needed week off from school, this finally happened.

I can't even begin to say how excited that made me. Tears came to my eyes at about 20%. So close, but two of our dps were down. 15% and another dps died. We had used both our battle rezzes earlier in phase three. It was so close. There was panic in the air, and over vent someone called out, "We just need to get that last three percent." What? We were at 13% already?

12%

11% and I knew we were going to make it.

10% and the rest of us died in a single careless blast from Arthas.

It was epic.

This fight took all we had and then some. We 0nly raid two nights a week, as I've mentioned before. A total of eight hours a week, not counting afk's and people trickling on as much as half an hour late. We're a casual raiding guild, after all. Just 10-mans, and we don't min-max or anything. Okay, we do take it pretty seriously in that we don't want to let each other down, but one of our highest dps doesn't even flask on a regular basis (you know who you are).

For a few weeks now our MO has been to clear ICC on Tuesday and spend all Wednesday on Lich King. The first couple of weeks we hit our heads against the brick wall of phase one over and over. The disease is tricky to manage and took a while to master. Aggro is touchy in phase one, too. A couple of our wipes those first few weeks happened from over-eager dps grabbing aggro at the wrong time. Mostly though? The fault was in us healers who just couldn't keep up.

Our priest went from disc to holy, and that made a HUGE difference. We've seen a lot of guides that encourage disc priests to bubble everyone before infest, but that was time consuming and didn't work well since only two of our healers can cleanse the disease. We had a few bumps on the transition phase, and then phase two kicked our collective asses.

Phase two you have infest, defile, and a val'kyr carrying a random raid member off the edge.

Phase three you trade the val'kyr for being drawn inside Frostmourne...and lemme tell you, that was fun. My first time in there I wiped us because I was trying to remember what a strat video had said about going in there as a tree. Something about interrupting something-or-other. Forget that. Just heal. Trust me, unless you're undergeared that's safer. And if you're undergeared you probably would have died in the process anyway.

The fight is badass. There are a million and one things going on at once, and anything can go wrong. It's about the most fun I've had playing WoW since my first trip into Kara. I'm a little sad that it's behind us now...it makes me want to go back to Ulduar and defeat Algalon. Pretty sure we could, and I want one more shiny title to add to all the rest.