Harder than we had hoped for

Yay, I finally managed to get the poll up. I had tried several times over the weekend, but the poll service of Blogger seemed to be down or something since I got an error every time I tried. But it's here, and we'll see how many replies there will be.

This past weekend has been a very busy raiding weekend, and I've been in game just enjoying the momentum instead of out of game blogging about it. This does mean however that I have some catching up to do of course ^_^

Lets see....

Ulduar Proto Drakes out with Patch 3.2.
Friday evening late, I read on wowinsider that the Ulduar proto drakes are taken out with the introduction of patch 3.2. I hate this patch already.

Our 10 man has been working so hard to get progress, but in the end it seems Blizzard really just wants only the top guilds to have these drakes. Well...next raid instance, just hand them out to the same people again Blizz, because if you don't give others slightly more time there is just no way that we can manage to get this done.

The other thing that really bugs me with this is that it's just not possible to get these achievements in the set time with only 10 man gear. Blizz says it's tuned for that, but it just isn't. If you want to get the drake, get your 25 man gear, and do the 10man with the 25 man gear.

What this message does to me is create a mass feeling of disappointment. It doesn't matter how hard you work on it, if you actually have a life next to WoW, meaning that you cannot raid every day, there is no way you can get that drake.

Flame Leviathan + two towers = ouchie
Saturday morning we did Ulduar 10. The message of the proto drakes weighing heavily on us, but we decided to not give up and go for some hard modes. It's disheartening to know that there's almost no chance that we can actually make it, but we should at least try.

So we started out with a couple of tries on Flame Leviathan with 2 towers, but after a few tries it became clear that we just weren't ready for that yet. So we did him with one tower to at least get our badges. He went down so fast with only one tower, which really shows that hard modes are exactly that, hard.

His health just goes up so far that our execution was no where near flawless enough to be thinking of more towers just yet. Of course this too will get easier once we manage to score a few higher item level gear items, which will give all the machines just that little bit more health.

XT002 - hard/heart mode beaten!
Next up was XT002, and since the dps in our group has increased pretty dramatically lately we decided to pick up our pride from not managing FL+2 towers, and try this on hard mode as well.

First try the heart did go down, but we were nowhere near prepared for the amount of damage being put out on the tank once he does switch to hard mode. So the tank just exploded under our eyes.

The adds do stay away after you kill the heart so there's at least that, but then you have all those silly void zones to manage. So we made sure that we were all standing on one side, and anybody with a gravity bomb had to run to the other side to drop the void zone there.

We got him on the 5th try or so. The feeling of jubilation that comes with a hard mode kill is still pretty overwhelming. Next to the normal loot he dropped a tanking ring, and emblems of conquest.

Kologorn held on to his right arm 4 seconds too long
We went on to do Kologarn, and the plan was to do the Disarmed achievement here as well, but I think the dps was so much in full kaboom mode that the left arm died too early. I think we were 4 or 5 seconds off for the achievement.

The problem being of course that once he's dead your chance to do the achievement for that week is sort of gone. Better next week I guess.

Other than this we finished Auriaya, practised getting better at the stacking debuff on Hodir, got a few more dwarves fried on Razorscale, and killed Ignis.

Back on Sunday
Sunday morning we went back to finish up the instance. We started with Mimiron, and while it took us a couple of weeks to get all the different phases down, we now only needed 2 tries to finish him off! Mimiron is on farm, woohooo!

After Mimiron we made quick work of Freya and her trees, and since nobody died we added her to our Champion of Ulduar achievement. And then on to Thorim.

Sif's a Bitch
Ahead of time I had already anounced that we would be trying Thorim on hard mode. So we divided our groups into a hallway group, and an arena group, and went for it. We had all ready about the lightning ability, but apparently none of us had ever fully understood it.

We got through the hallway on time, jumped in, and Sif started casting. It went well for about 10 seconds when....KABOOM, lighting rails and half the raid blew up. Having no idea what had happened we went through some tactics again, and a sigh of 'oh! that's what went wrong' went through the group.

Before doing hard mode we had just never bothered with getting out of the lightning, and just healed our way through it. Turns out that this just really isn't possible on hard mode. So we sort of had to learn the fight all over again, but now having to deal with dispelling novas, getting out of the lightning thing, while staying spread out for chain lightning.

I have to say, it's quite a bit to deal with all at once. After several tries we got him down to about 20%, looked at the time, and decided that he would just have to die hard mode next week. So we did him on normal while practicing the lightning. Amazing how much easier that gets without Sif freezing you stuck in place.

Vezax no green stuff
We went do kill Vezax, and since we had someone there who had never done it before we took a couple of tries, but we got him down fairly easily. As a healer I got to know the incoming damage better, and managed to do the fight without needing to use the green puddles.

I guess it will take a couple of weeks still, but we should be able to get his hard mode down soonish as well.

We decided to save Iron Council for last, and gave Yoggy a couple of tries, and I can tell you...it's really, really hard somehow to get out of moving green clouds. Every time we had extra adds spawn, and that just makes the fight impossible.

After a couple of tries on Yog we went back to Iron Council. We did them on normal, but did add it to our Champion of Ulduar achievement.

Sarth 3D
Sunday evening we agreed to go try Sarth 3D zerg for the first time. I was healing, and boy I have to say that a lot of healing is needed in a very short time x_X

We went for 2 hours, got him to 9% or so once, but didn't manage to kill him. Either way, he will go down next week as well, and we will all get that dragon at least. If Blizz doesn't come up with a silly...hey it's become too easy with the next level of gear as well, lets take it out.

FL25 easier than FL10
To close off the weekend a couple of my guild went with a pug group into Ulduar 25, and I was amazed at how ridiculously easy FL25 is compared to FL10. He went down like a charm, and people were just screwing around it seemed.

The pug did way better than I had expected, We got FL, XT002, Razor, and Kologarn down, and that gives me good hope for our guild run in Ulduar 25 next week to get the watchers all down. Mimi is probably going to be the stopping point.

So quite a few emblems of conquest richer, and a full weekend of raiding later...does explain why there weren't any posts, right? ;)

Final thought of this weekend
What the hell were the Ferarro's thinking?