Glory of the Ulduar Raider - part I

Those who read my blog more often will know that I raid Ulduar 10 every week. We were set on a drake this time around, and the news that the drakes would be taken out with the next patch sort of hit like a bomb.

It's slightly depressing, but hey, I realized that the only chance we still have is to shake it off, and put our shoulders under it. So I started researching into what we would still have to do to get the pretty flapper. And instead of keeping my research to myself I figured I would share it.

So far our 10man has done all of the fights in Ulduar 10 on normal mode, except for Yoggy. We are on the verge of finishing off several hard modes, and have done some. I have no idea if we can do it, but I do know that we will fight for it.

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Orbit-uary
Defeat Flame Leviathan with all 4 Orbital Defense Systems active on Normal Difficulty.

So far we have done Flame Leviathan with 1 tower up, and last week we tried with 2 towers up. It turned out that we simply didn't have the gear level yet to do this, or the practice.

Towers
The Leviathan gains +25% Base HP, +15% damage and one of the following abilities for each of the towers left up.

• Tower of Storms (yellow): Thorim's Hammer - Physical damage. Extra damage at point of impact.
• Tower of Flames (red): Mimiron's Inferno - Fire damage and an AoE damage zone.
• Tower of Frost (blue): Hodir's Fury - Frost damage and entombs vehicles near the impact point in ice. Entombed vehicles are stunned for 1 minute, taking damage over time. The tomb can be destroyed with flames. Possible fire damage sources in this encounter are the Leviathan's Flame Vents, the demolisher's Hurl Pyrite Barrel and the Chopper's ignited Tar.
• Tower of Nature (green): Freya's Ward - Nature damage and summons Guardian of Nature adds.

Basic tactics are the same as on normal mode, just takes a lot more practice, and knowing what to do when.

The trick to doing hard mode on Flame Leviathan, as with any hard mode, is perfect execution. You want to keep the pyrite stacks on him as high as possible, and cause overload as soon as possible. The person at the top should also communicate when he is about to overload so that others can get ready to unload dps on him.

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Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare
Defeat 25 Dark Rune Guardian Dwarves with Razorscale's Flame Breath on Normal Difficulty.

There are 3 type of adds on Razorscale, you want to pick up the bigger type of dwarves, dps them down quite a bit, and then when Razorscale lands fry them in her breath. Generally you try to have 1 tank focus on frying the dwarves while the other tank keeps Razorscale busy.

This achievement has one huge advantage; you don't have to kill the 25 dwarves in one raid lockout. So far our team has killed 16 of 25, and we're hopefully able to finish the upcoming weekend.

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I Choose You, Steelbreaker
Defeat the Assembly of Iron with Steelbreaker as the last member alive on Normal Difficulty.

There are 3 ways to kill the Iron Council, and every way has its own achievement. Saving Steelbreaker until last is considered one of the hardest achievements in the instance.

Killing any boss of the Iron Council Supercharges the remaining bosses, healing them to full, increasing their damage and giving them new abilities.

• Steelbreaker starts off with the High Voltage and Fusion Punch abilities.
• When 1 other boss is killed, he can cast Static Disruption, an AoE and nature vulnerability spell.
• When both other bosses are killed, he can debuff a player with Overwhelming Power, increasing that players damage by 200% but causing a Meltdown after 1 minute, killing that player.
• Once both other bosses are killed, Steelbreaker also gains a stacking +25% damage buff for each player he killed (including Meltdown casualties).

Only his target (the main tank) gets the Overwhelming Power debuff, and his target will always have it, meaning if the tank dies too early or if he is taunted off before the Meltdown, he will immediately apply it to his target again.

Steelbreaker also heals for about ~15% hp for every target killed (again, including Meltdown casualties)

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Doing Iron Council on hard mode drops the quest item to start the quest line to fight Algalon the Observer. It requires you to collect quest items from Hodir, Freya, Thorim & Mimiron killed on their hard modes.

With good healers you can heal through 1 player dying from Meltdown, so you have 2 minutes to kill Steelbreaker.

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Crazy Cat Lady
Defeat Auriaya without destroying her Sanctum Sentries on Normal Difficulty.

Auriaya starts with two Sanctum Sentries on normal difficulty, those Sentries have 3 important Abilities:

• An Aura that increases the damage of all nearby Sanctum Sentries by 50%, this stacks multiplicative, not additive, so 2 buffs equal +125% damage, 3 buffs +212.5% etc. On normal difficulty this is fixed at 50% as only one Sanctum Sentry can be nearby.
• A Jump ability that deals a large amount of damage, only used on the main target and only if it is out of melee range and within line of sight.
• A stacking Bleed Dot.

The Dot is the most important part about this achievement, as you will have to switch tanks in order to reset it. In addition you will have to deal with a much higher amount of damage as the Sanctum Sentries do hit quite hard.

What you also need to know is that the Feral Defender never comes before the first fear. So the more you can get her down before the first fear the easier.

The other thing is that you probably want to switch tanks right after the fear so you can get rid of the stacking debuff.

Our 10 man will be trying this one this weekend, so I'll report back my findings after that.

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Lose Your Illusion
Defeat Thorim while Sif is present on Normal Difficulty.

We have already worked on this one, and have almost gotten it down. You activate hard mode by getting through the hallway before Sif disappears. This means you have to engage Thorim within 3 minutes after you have opened the gate to the hallway.

We bring one tank, one healer, a rogue, and a slow hitter or ranged into the hallway. We leave 2 healers, a tank, and 3 dps in the arena.

The main thing that happens extra in this fight is that Sif joins in and shoots lots of frost damage around.

• She frost novas people on the place where she stands, this has to be dispelled.
• She casts blizzard on the outer ring, ranged has to get out of that.
• Ranged has to stay spread out because of the chain lightning.
• Everybody has to get out of the lightning draw. The best way to see this is to keep an eye on the floor, if you see lightning there, move to the other side of the room.

This fight comes down to understanding what is happening and reacting accordingly. Situational awareness is really, really important in this fight as getting out of all the damage makes that a lot less healing is needed.

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I will be dividing this up into three different posts so keep an eye out for part II and III.

Oh...one fish cake for Mandii who managed to guess where I was in one go yesterday :)