Ruby Sanctum / Halion (July 6, 2010)
After being hit hard with a string of absences that crippled us last week to the point that we couldn't fill a 25 man raid, we brought on some new members, wiped a few times on the trash and got Halion down in about 8 attempts. Fun fight, nice loots (trinkets!).
Crimson Hall (Heroic) Cleared (June 22, 2010)
We're tactfully choosing our hardmodes in ICC 25 and making pretty decent progress so far by cherry picking our kill order:
After our LK kill, we started with the obvious Marrowgar and Gunship fights. Heroic Marrowgar kicked our butts for 5-6 attempts until Deathanistic suggested a simple strat change that greatly simplified the encounter. It's almost easier than normal mode now. Next we tackled Heroic Gunship and… laughed.
On Rotface we had a few really, really close calls there before getting our kill. Our backup tanks did an awesome job, people avoided bad stuff pretty well and we collected some fat loots.
Festergut was about what we expected and took a night or two to kill. We had a new recruit whose name is now synonymous with pulling the boss while the raid is getting well fed that didn't help things much. We pulled in Phortieteaux in his Ulduar gear, hoped he remembered his keybinds/rotation and got the kill that way.
Blood Council is almost a fun encounter on heroic. Our kill awarded a few of us with the 'Orb Whisperer' achievement so we must have done something right.
Blood Queen awarded us one of our most dramatic failwipes of all time. Some report .05%, while other say .09% on our last attempt for the week. Sheesh. A couple of Uncontrollable Frenzies from unlikely sources were enough to rob us of victory. The King Wrynn's buff went up to 20% the following week and we got the kill with a few seconds to spare on the enrage timer. Hey, we'll take it.
The Fall of the Lich King (May 25th, 2010)
A nice way to welcome our newest members. It was really satisfying to finally beat this encounter after a few frustrating weeks riddled with real life issues/absences among our core.
This kill is dedicated to Idak (ret.) and the rest of those who have helped get us to this point in the game. You know who you are. Salute.
Sindragosa (April 1st, 2010)
We really expected to get Sindragosa earlier than this but, hey, 3rd phase frost tombs are hard, right? So is having Rimefang bug out and do us the honor of pulling the boss for us.
Conspiracy.
Blood Queen Lana'thel (March 18th, 2010)
"There's something psychologically wrong with us." -- Deathanistic
After wiping for 2 hours due to unusually sloppy play, bad luck, or whatever else we decided to give it one last attempt before heading back over to the Plague Wing to end our raid week. And that's after a 7% wipe on our first attempt of the night. No one wanted to do that but Blood Queen was winning.
So wouldn't you know it? We call out Last Attempt, shut the hell up in vent and get our progression kill. No deaths, no mind-controlled players, no dumb stuff at all.
Deathanistic is right. We have issues.
Professor Putricide (March 4th, 2010)
Really great team effort here and this is a really great encounter. Lots of frustrating things can happen but raid awareness got better and better as we worked on it. Phase 3 is no joke.
You might think I'm making this up but we got this kill after calling "Last Attempt" again, too, with about 5 minutes left on our raid time and after more than a couple sub 10% wipes.
Oh and behind Rivn's Ironforge banner thingy is a dead boss. Honest.
Valithria Dreamwalker (February 25th, 2010)
Such a fun fight. Thanks to Midniyt for coordinating the portal team healers and to Medrace for switching from ret to holy to fill in for Kahiko. Death and Corpse rocked the interrupts and the DPS and tanks were really coordinated. There's a vicious rumor that Tongues healed this in his Chef's Hat and was having mana issues. Not true. Not true at all.
Blood Princes (February 4th, 2010)
It's really not that chaotic as it might seem at first. We used a ret paladin (thanks Hynd!) instead of a warlock (sorry Andraton!) for the nucleus tank and got a kill on the second attempt with that method.
Great teamwork all around and our new players have been a great addition to the team. Welcome aboard to Midniyt, Cocoa, Hunter, Degrah and Pathetic.
Rotface (January 19th, 2010)
On our first night of working on this encounter we got him to .7% on our 6th attempt and didn't really get back to that level for the rest of the night which became a painful wipe fest. Our mean guild leader put ".7%" as the guild message of the day to remind us all about it for the next four non-raiding days...
Tuesday came along and we very quickly and efficiently cleared the first wing and proceeded straight to Rotface and got a nice one shot.
Ventrilo was calm and almost eerily quiet when Kahiko announces "8%".
6%... 3%... 1%...
Plenty of Time Left... (January 7th, 2010)
When this guy enrages... it isn't pretty. But then nothing about him really is. We'd seen plenty of sub 10% wipes on this guy until we got our first kill with 2 seconds left.
Plenty Of Time!
This fight is all about positioning, minimizing movement and maximizing DPS. We used 5 healers, 2 tanks and 18 DPS. Great job Bushido. Rotface, you're next.
We've Gone and Made a Mess (December 17th, 2009)
Saurfang is down and we got the achievement for killing him before he casts 5 Mark of the Fallen. Nice work! We used eight attempts and had a few dramatic 3% and 4% wipes.
We're getting a progression kill every night for 2 weeks now in a total of 11 hours. This is some fun raiding.
Gunship Battle (December 15th, 2009)
Two attempts? Three? We like our boss fights to be tougher than this but, despite the gimicky nature of this fight, it is just so much damn fun. Our only complaints are the jet packs are not permanent and the kill shot doesn't have a giant boss corpse for us to gloat over.
Nice job, everyone.
Lady Deathwhisper (December 10th, 2009)
Short-handed again, but we managed the kill despite some less than awesome decursing and having but 5 healers. Props to the tanks and melee for adapting to the fight as we went along and making excellent callouts in vent. Phase 1 was tough but once we got the pattern down we reached phase 2 with no deaths and got our well earned kill.
No screenshot of this, it would have looked dumb anyway since there wasn't really a boss corpse to look all victorious and triumphant over. We'll have to make due with Tongue's incredibly lifelike rendition instead:
Lord Marrowgar (December 8th, 2009)
We were short handed, but not impeded by lag and server instability as we expected, but we managed to defeat Leotheras, I mean, Lord Marrowgar without too much difficulty.
Icecrown Citadel looks awesome and feels like an actual raid unlike the farce that was ToC. We even used CC on the trash. Because we're OG.
Use Your Illusion (November, 5th, 2009)
Once again we got this on our "Last Attempt" and there were more suggestions that this should in fact be our guild name.
It was 10:23 and the raid was to end in 7 minutes so Sensa and Rivn can get their beauty sleep when Deadcold announced: "Last Attempt".
We all knew our assignments, we all knew what to avoid and I'm sure no one wanted to think about losing to this fight for 4 days until our next raid. After roughly 11 attempts of consistently getting Thorim to ~30%, then 15%, then 10% on the last one, we all knew we had a solid chance.
We were right.
You Could Say This Screenshot is Rare (October 28, 2009)
Crap. No screenshot last night of our Hodir hardmode kill. You'll just have to take our word for it. After 11 attempts of varying quality we found that it was 10:27pm and our official raid end time is 10:30. But we decided that we really needed just one more shot.
Raid Warning announced: "Last Attempt".
This has a curiously awesome effect on us as a group and it's not uncommon for it to lead to a solid progression kill. Tonight was no different. We still had some deaths but overall we managed to keep everything controlled and a got a kill just *barely* before he smashed his cache. Dramatic! And we're one step closer to Algalon.
Next up: Thorim and Sif
We Choose You, Steelbreaker
This took us about 5 hours to work it all out over the span of a couple of weeks. The hardest thing about this encounter for us was getting the tank switches perfect and managing fusion punch dispeling/cleansing during those transitions. Once that aspect of the fight was dialed in we got a really clean and satisfying kill.
Next up: Keeper hard modes to unlock Algalon. We're coming for you...
The Descent into Madness
Yogg Saron proved to be the tough and challenging fight we expected but slowly and steadily we made our progress until it all came together and the kill almost felt easy. Way to go guys.
Sartharion 3 Drake
Our first major milestone in WotLK progression. We had to work pretty hard to get it, but we did it. Many of us were still in a mix of blues when we got the kill. Check out Catria's 'sweet blue drake mount. She earned it.
