Posting this very late as I've had a fairly hectic work schedule (long story but essentially I had to find a new role within the company I work for). In addition to this I no longer have access to any Blogger or Wordpress sites from work, so please if you find me commenting less on your own blogs please understand that I still check my favourites even if I don't always have the time to post.
Monday the 6th of April I had a reminder of why I still raid.
We had 23people 10mins after raid start and in /o we were having premonitions this raid being like our last 2 raids on thursday and sunday which were cancelled due to lack of people that could do the Hardmodes. One of our pally healers logs on, and the last of the bulgarians logs on. We has raid.
Immediately start on Saurfang HM. We've been just about managing to hang in there sub 30% when the Marks really start hurting but we've been losing people at 5% and wiping (one memorable wipe last week my beast died and I distracting shotted the boss). People are staying positive and assigning marks and then 4th time we managed the kill. Very impressive stuff from our healing squad.
Then onto Rotface HM where we oneshotted and then Festergut HM where after a small wipe due to DPS dying (I swear I was in range of the goddamn spore!) and other DPS being stupid with Malleable Goo we took him next try with a pally bubbling on enrage and the dots taking him down for our second new HM kill of the night.
From there we moved to the Princes HM which I swear is a test of "can you stay awake while shooting balls" and BQL HM where we managed another enrage pally bubble kill second try after our bite order severely messed up.
So then we cleared up putricide on normal and headed back into the frostwing lair where after a minor altercation with one of our healers and the subsequent ragequit on the pull (who does that?, I mean really) we adjusted the raid and bounced back to take down Valithria on HM second try. It was getting very late by this point and by the time we'd killed sindragosa on normal we had 1minute to raid time. So we said to the raid:
"Look we realise it's raid time. Stay with us and we'll have one shot on the Lich King then we'll call time"
We zone in on the spire and hurriedly assign tanks and dispellers. We've got a couple of us who haven't downed him on 25man and in my case I've never seen the penultimate phase. Halfway through P1 we realise we haven't assigned Valkyr dps
"Fuck, just go fucking nuts on them"
we haven't assigned TotTs or MDs for raging spirits
"Glue them to the fucking tanks"
Healers are running low so our boomkin is calling the innervates for the lowest. We're on the valkyrs now and people are playing out of their skins to get the CC in. I'm kill shotting Valkyrs right at the edge. Slightly badly placed Defile caused by me, but we're all out of it in seconds.
We hit the second remorseless winter in fine form and then P4 and vile spirits are dying quickly and the tanks are kiting.
All of a sudden its over and everyone is joking about kicking one of our rogues so he doesn't get the kill.
Lich King one shotted. Hello Kingslayer Echo. Hello the reason why I raid. It's not so much the stuff we accomplished last night although thats always gravy. It's more that this is a group of people who for the last year I've spent upwards of 16hours a week with in 25mans and countless hours here and there in alts runs, 10mans and nostalgia runs. I've actually really missed them since I had to stop raiding so much midweek. I know most of them pretty well and this last push from them after the loleaster holidays trouble of the past few days has been epic. A lot of people have been musing that we don't kill LK enough since we downed him. This may be true but focusing on hardmodes is an obvious choice we've had to make as an officer team. The fact that nobody was screaming at anyone when things didn't go perfectly or already working out who to blame for the wipe while everybody was alive was really refreshing. This showed when we bounced back from everything the big bad of the expansion threw at us and downing the bastard to top off an already awesome raid night.
/echo out
PS: Its nothing to do with the 10% buff fuck you :D
Since this happened we've also taken down all other hardmodes we were working on and are now 10/12. Putricide HM went tonight and we're working on Sindragosa HM. The night described above is what I see as the turning point.
Sunday, 18 April 2010
Thursday, 1 April 2010
Ulduar Achievement Happy Fun Time
Blegh, having a chance to raid this week means the weekends recap is slightly late. Still, another HM down on 25 and we spent this wednesday working on saurfang. But back to the business at hand:
Following last week's rather random Algalon kill a group of us decided we'd venture once more into Ulduar to earn ourselves some more nerd points. After some reasonable levels of interest on the post I'd left in the guild forums detailing the "shopping list" we were going to use I was hopeful it would be a breeze forming. Unfortunately one of our tanks decided he'd rather arena than come along so I struggled a bit there. Once I'd finally managed to get 2 reasonably geared tanks online it was merely a case of arbritating between the raid members which achievement to do. I also had to do a lot of warning that we weren't here to do drake achievements which unsurprisingly caused a load of people who hadn't read the forums to ask to come then immediately ditch. I made sure to mention this because I've helped out on enough Ulduar 10s and to be honest the reason I have done none of the achievements I'm after is because there was always at least one person who was getting the drake. A couple people did tag along and were happy to pick up what they could.
I cannot stress how much of a good time we had. Obviously a lot of us overgeared the place to shit so that made some achievements rather trivial (Yogg in 7mins done with 1min30s to spare :D ). Another great thing is that as a raiding guild nobody really wants to go back and do this shit except the people who weren't with us the first time around. So hearing some people's reactions on vent when kologarn pops up, or yogg emerges, when you engage Algalon or even the train to mimiron (Which was hijacked! Also being levitated when the train is turning causes deaths, thank you Ami) was really nice and reminded me of how I used to view the place before it became too familiar.
We had reasonable speed throughout, and apart from a couple hiccoughs managed to get people credit for their Champion of Ulduar metas on most bosses as well as most of the hardmodes when we didn't need anything specific.
Here's what I managed to tick off (Link spam):
Nerf Scrapbots - Slightly RNG dependant, we waited till we had 4 pile spawns then went mental on the bombs
I Choose You, Runemaster Molgeim - Relatively easy, we were trying for Can't do that while stunned too but unfortunately someone missed an interupt.
With Open Arms - Pretty easy with our nuke dps
Nine Lives - Cleared a big space and kited the boss around, cue much hilarity when the tank decides to face the boss away and dies. Feral druid bears up and we nuke it down.
Lumberjacked - Interesting achievement for the healers, easy when we nuked each one we pulled down to 10% before pulling the next. Then once 2 of them were low I MD'd the last one (Brightleaf - the one that heals) to the tank and we nuked it down then killed the other 2.
They're coming out of the walls - Easy, spawn a load of adds from the clouds and nuke them down. In the end it was myself and a mage AOEing. We got the achievement then wiped
He's not getting any older - Wierdly its phase 1 thats often the biggest problem here - with our gear and the watcher buffs its too easy for dps to overnuke the adds. The power of having 4 of us in ICC25 gear go mental on the brain meaning 1 portal phase drastically shortened the fight. It was then a relatively easy third phase where we spent the majority explaining to those new to the fight how the insanity worked and what the best way to preserve it was. It led to a druid guildie who'd never seen much of ulduar before getting about 4 achievements (yogg + general, full clear, nobody insane, 7min).
Supermassive - Narrowly missed out of He Feeds On Your Tears then wiped three times due to people failing at portals.
Champion of Ulduar - Although we intitially tried to get this for a couple of people it was only me and another two guys who picked it up. My two missing fights we properly pulled it off (Vezax and Freya)
Over 9000 - Not Ulduar related but after all the of the nerd point farming it popped up for me as it did for our pally healer when he got Champion of Ulduar.
10 Achievements left in Ulduar10! Although considering some of them are very tricky or RNG based it should be interesting - eg Alone in the Darkness and Herald of the Titans .
So, I've set out this weeks list and we're going for the as many as we can again. More people are making enquiries and we're expanding this to the entire WotLK 10man instance achievement list and hitting everything we can.
Anyone else been achievement farming?
Following last week's rather random Algalon kill a group of us decided we'd venture once more into Ulduar to earn ourselves some more nerd points. After some reasonable levels of interest on the post I'd left in the guild forums detailing the "shopping list" we were going to use I was hopeful it would be a breeze forming. Unfortunately one of our tanks decided he'd rather arena than come along so I struggled a bit there. Once I'd finally managed to get 2 reasonably geared tanks online it was merely a case of arbritating between the raid members which achievement to do. I also had to do a lot of warning that we weren't here to do drake achievements which unsurprisingly caused a load of people who hadn't read the forums to ask to come then immediately ditch. I made sure to mention this because I've helped out on enough Ulduar 10s and to be honest the reason I have done none of the achievements I'm after is because there was always at least one person who was getting the drake. A couple people did tag along and were happy to pick up what they could.
I cannot stress how much of a good time we had. Obviously a lot of us overgeared the place to shit so that made some achievements rather trivial (Yogg in 7mins done with 1min30s to spare :D ). Another great thing is that as a raiding guild nobody really wants to go back and do this shit except the people who weren't with us the first time around. So hearing some people's reactions on vent when kologarn pops up, or yogg emerges, when you engage Algalon or even the train to mimiron (Which was hijacked! Also being levitated when the train is turning causes deaths, thank you Ami) was really nice and reminded me of how I used to view the place before it became too familiar.
We had reasonable speed throughout, and apart from a couple hiccoughs managed to get people credit for their Champion of Ulduar metas on most bosses as well as most of the hardmodes when we didn't need anything specific.
Here's what I managed to tick off (Link spam):
Nerf Scrapbots - Slightly RNG dependant, we waited till we had 4 pile spawns then went mental on the bombs
I Choose You, Runemaster Molgeim - Relatively easy, we were trying for Can't do that while stunned too but unfortunately someone missed an interupt.
With Open Arms - Pretty easy with our nuke dps
Nine Lives - Cleared a big space and kited the boss around, cue much hilarity when the tank decides to face the boss away and dies. Feral druid bears up and we nuke it down.
Lumberjacked - Interesting achievement for the healers, easy when we nuked each one we pulled down to 10% before pulling the next. Then once 2 of them were low I MD'd the last one (Brightleaf - the one that heals) to the tank and we nuked it down then killed the other 2.
They're coming out of the walls - Easy, spawn a load of adds from the clouds and nuke them down. In the end it was myself and a mage AOEing. We got the achievement then wiped
He's not getting any older - Wierdly its phase 1 thats often the biggest problem here - with our gear and the watcher buffs its too easy for dps to overnuke the adds. The power of having 4 of us in ICC25 gear go mental on the brain meaning 1 portal phase drastically shortened the fight. It was then a relatively easy third phase where we spent the majority explaining to those new to the fight how the insanity worked and what the best way to preserve it was. It led to a druid guildie who'd never seen much of ulduar before getting about 4 achievements (yogg + general, full clear, nobody insane, 7min).
Supermassive - Narrowly missed out of He Feeds On Your Tears then wiped three times due to people failing at portals.
Champion of Ulduar - Although we intitially tried to get this for a couple of people it was only me and another two guys who picked it up. My two missing fights we properly pulled it off (Vezax and Freya)
Over 9000 - Not Ulduar related but after all the of the nerd point farming it popped up for me as it did for our pally healer when he got Champion of Ulduar.
10 Achievements left in Ulduar10! Although considering some of them are very tricky or RNG based it should be interesting - eg Alone in the Darkness and Herald of the Titans .
So, I've set out this weeks list and we're going for the as many as we can again. More people are making enquiries and we're expanding this to the entire WotLK 10man instance achievement list and hitting everything we can.
Anyone else been achievement farming?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
