Highs and lows
April 21, 2009 at 11:38 am 7 comments
Work is kicking my tail this week (/whimper), so as much as I would love to make an appropriately epic “First Impressions of Ulduar”-style post, all I really have time for are a few quick thoughts about Week One.
For me, it was all about highs and lows …
Highs
Over the course of three days, my 10-man raid cleared Ulduar through Mimiron, leaving only General Vezax and Yogg-Saron undefeated. I had so. much. fun! Especially with Mimiron, a wonderfully chaotic fight that reminds me a little bit of the Lady Vashj encounter in SSC. I also really enjoyed solo-healing Thorim’s gauntlet — a challenge for a resto shaman, because while versatile we are, mobile we are not.
By the way, Supremus has nothing on Freya when it comes to trash. I will never look at flowers in quite the same way again! There is definitely some sort of phototropic effect going on, too, because those menacing little cutlings are absolutely drawn to Chain Heal.
Also, Mimiron’s trash is actually named Trash, which totally awesome (not just awesome, but totally awesome!) in my book.
Speaking of books, check out our Mimiron-10 killshot:
Yes, that’s right! While the rest of the server was frantically grinding Books of Glyph Mastery, I was farming for — and then crafting — Rituals of the New Moon for my entire 10-man raid.
Can you pick out the real shamans in this picture? (Hint: I’m the cute one.)
Lows
My 25-man raid was crit by an unlucky combination of server downtime, Naxx-induced laziness and Real Life®, and only managed to down two new bosses: Flame Leviathan was a two-shot, and Razorscale took a bit more effort but ultimately went down (and dropped a very nice healing mace in the process).
Saturday’s Deconstructor attempts were thoroughly disappointing. XT-002’s very simple, Solarian-type mechanic got the better of us — over and over and over again. To be fair, we were missing several of our core raiders (nerf finals!), and running a 24-man group that included a handful of undergeared fill-ins from our Friends & Family rank. We ended up calling the raid when our fury warrior’s game card ran in the middle of wipe recovery (sigh) and our healadin’s finance came home, armed with wedding plans (double sigh).
Oh, well. I’m willing to write Saturday off as a practice round (spring training, as it were). We’re heading back into Ulduar-25 tonight with our core raid intact, and I’m hoping to see some significant progress. If not, I’ll have to look at making some changes to bring my 25-man raid up to the admittedly higher standard set by my 10-man team — but that’s something to worry about another time.
Work is summoning me, and I don’t dare decline. ;.;
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Fel Fire 
1.
Karthis | April 21, 2009 at 12:02 pm
It is worth noting that Ulduar-10 is easysauce compared to Ulduar-25… and not just because herding 25 raiders is a more difficult logistical challenge.
Blizz didn’t make the same mistake that they made with T7 where Naxx-10 and Naxx-25 were pretty much the same difficulty.
Good times!
2.
Fear.Win | April 21, 2009 at 12:55 pm
It took us 4 hours to get 002 down last night >.>
It seems that the fight is about 80% luck depending on how many random waves of robot spawns you get during the heart phase.. sometimes we would get 2 and zerg the heart and other times we’d get up to 6. I’m still very impressed with the boss mechanics so far and didn’t mind spending 4 hours on one boss for once.
Grats to your 10 man team on getting so far already =)
3.
Karthis | April 22, 2009 at 7:36 am
@Fear:
The waves are fairly predictable from what I recall…. the fight felt anything but luck-based to me. It’s a hard DPS check for Naxx-gear raiders. (And pparently a healing check too)
4.
Elleiras | April 22, 2009 at 10:00 am
@Karthis – I’m looking forward to it! A 25-man raid should be harder than its 10-man counterpart, if only to justify the superior rewards.
The difference between my 10- and 25- man raids isn’t the difficulty of the content, unfortunately. It’s one part skill, and two parts focus. My 25-man has always carried a few underskilled raiders — social members who can’t quite perform up to the progression par, but are nonetheless fun to play with. Our willingness to compromise success for inclusion is a large part of the reason I describe us as a “casual” raiding guild rather than simply a raiding guild.
This is the first time in our guild’s history that it’s been an issue — but it’s also the first time we’ve been on the edge of progression rather than “months behind,” after content nerfs and the prevalence of badge and crafted gear trivialized whatever tier we happen to be in at the time.
We’re determined to serious up, and it seems to be working. We got Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002 (with 24, no less!) and Ignis last night, all in about two and a half hours. Ignis was a two-shot. 🙂
I’m especially proud of the fact that we wiped only once on Deconstructor trash. Having never seen it before, we pulled, observed, wiped and then formulated a successful plan — all on our own. No guides, no script! I actually had friends in other guilds whispering me to find out how we did it, lol.
I’m crossing my fingers that we can keep it up, but I’m sure the highs and lows will persist as we transition from a social guild that raids into a raiding guild that raids.
5. The Daily Quest: Go cheetah, get banana | zacsgames.com | April 23, 2009 at 3:44 am
[…] Fire has cleared through Mimiron on Ulduar10, but Ulduar25 hasn’t been quite as smooth. Click here to submit a link to […]
6.
Punx | April 23, 2009 at 4:08 am
@ Elleiras – My guild has the same background, always chilling a good step behind the progressen, and a good combination of raiders and friends and family. When the core is missing raiders, a lot of them stand up and join us in our adventures. And for the most part, that seems to work.
We made a choice back when we were working on TK and SSC, and that was to kill Kael and Vashj before setting a foot inside BT or MH. Just because we were taking it slow and at our own pace, we didn’t want the shortcut that were available after that patch (can’t remember the name of it, where they removed the progression requirements). We took on Kael first, and it took us a few weeks (with two raiding nights a week), then we killed Vashj on the first night of trying her. After that we moved up as the third ranking horde guild on the server, and realized that we had potential. A bunch of newly developed raiders, and so we continued clearing MH and most of BT. When Wrath hit, we took it easy, we got into Heroic Naxx way late in January, but ended up having Sarth3D on farm soon after. When Ulduar hit us, it was the first time that we had a real core group of raiders and first time that we were up there on the edge of progression.
It has been a real blast so far, and Ulduar is giving us all we hoped for. On the first week we got past Kologarn and Iron Council, but the pull at the Crazy Cat Lady held us back a bit on the last night. Last night was the first raid day after the reset, and we killed Iron Council and Kologarn on the first night. XT still proves to be a challenge (and a lot of fun), and we had the same experience with the trash and our own “see and learn and plan” strategy. Awesome stuff!
The point is, that we still have a few among our raiding members who are there for the fun, and with them along we have a bast on those Wednesdays and Sundays. Right now – to our surprise – we are the second ranking horde guild. Horde side is weak, and a few of the other guilds have been hit by finals and vacations on the release week, so it might change very soon. But my God I’m proud of my guild and how well we do. This is why I still play =D
7.
Fear.Win | April 23, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Checked Bosskillers and apparently XT spawns 50 scrapbots on normal 10-man mode and they can come from any number of piles.. I guess my group got lucky getting most from 2 piles and unlucky getting 50 different scrap bots from 4 different corners lol.