Well, we managed our typical two 25-person raid nights this week and I'd certainly define them as an overall success.
The goal for the first night was to kill Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, and XT-002... with the hope that we might be able to get up to Kologarn as well.
We did exactly that. Killed all four of them... with the only real hiccup being XT-002. We were continually hitting the enrage timer because we just weren't getting enough dps on the heart. I think as people become more comfortable with that fight and understand what it takes to get those scrapbots dead, the enrage timer woes will fade away.

On the second night of 25-person raiding we wanted to kill the Iron Assembly and Auriaya at a minimum... with additional hope of perhaps killing Hodir as well. Again, that's exactly what happened. We ran into numerous snags... but I think everyone was pretty pleased with our progression.

In light of this progression, I'll probably post up some simplified boss strats for some of the fights that we've found to be effective. Feel free to chime in and let us know if your guild is doing something different that works well too... or just any suggestions in general. =)

Well, we've spent a couple nights in Ulduar-10... leading to 8 dead bosses, and one night in Ulduar-25 leading to 4 dead bosses.
There have certainly been a few memorable moments along the way... and the trash provides some good humor when you see a few people die on the pull, or one of your tanks explodes right off the bat.

Sadly, this novelty will wear thin soon enough. I've liked a couple of the boss encounters... Auraya in particular is pretty interesting. The hardest thing we've gotten a taste of is Mimiron, who we didn't get to spend a whole lot of time on.

Anyway, looking forward to getting back in there tonight on 25-man and hopefully killing two or three more bosses.

The best screenshot I could post involves a whole heap of people sitting at the instance door.
We got inside, cleared the trash/towers to Flame Leviathan... and then the instance servers crashed. We waited around for a while, but just ended up calling off the raid eventually.

It's unfortunate, but if you've been playing the game for a while, you come to expect this sort of thing. I'm not saying it's good mind you... or even acceptable. But yes, our expectations should lead us directly to this result.

Well, some of us headed into Ulduar-10 last night... will be going in on 25 this evening.

First impressions? Somewhat interesting so far.
As stated previously, none of us did any testing on the PTR. A few of us read through some info about the fights and/or watched a couple videos... but that was the extent of preparation.

I think Flame Leviathan took 3 or 4 attempts. The first one we were completely baffled... the second one was started to nail down how things were going to happen... the third was good, but we lost a vehicle very early in the fight (wiped at like 9% or something)... and the 4th attempt was a winner.
Again, it was an interesting encounter -- more enjoyable than P3 Maly, in my opinion.
Oh.. and we were completely baffled by the trash setup at the start, so the first time we engaged FL, he had all 4 tower buffs. We're smart.

We all had a chuckle seeing the 2 Molten Giants on the path to Ignis. The chuckles turned to confusion when we almost wiped to them. Then of course we ended up with a debuff that needs to be cleansed in the waters at the bottom of the ramp.... so we headed down and grabbed 2 elemental mobs, which subsequently wiped us because we were all standing right next to each other.
We ran back and cleared the rest of the way to Ignis. I think it took about 4 attempts before we were really on point with how the fight needed to play out, but we were having issues with the constructs. The server rolled back and we were standing in front of Ignis' trash again, so we moved on to XT-002 to check that fight out.

We noted the trash mobs on the left and right of the room... I pulled one side and the other came too -- wipe. (as it turns out, these mobs are buggy as well)
We attempted to fight the boss by avoiding the trash... but the boss calls for adds to come out, and the adds go through the trash pulls, and therefore you get all of it together -- wipe.
All in all... the encounter looks fairly simplistic.

Being that Ignis and XT-002 were bugged, we headed over to Razorscale. We were a little confused at first, but after 2 or 3 wipes we understood it and promptly killed her.
The path to go deeper into Ulduar is behind XT-002, so that was it for our trip in there. We did the new VoA boss for the heck of it as well. I think that took 3 attempts. It would seem your dps needs to be paying attention decently well to get through the fight, so this may make it very PUG unfriendly.

Anyway... it was nice to get throttled a few times by mobs. The difficulty level isn't staggering by any means from what I've seen in those initial 4 bosses... but they may be a nice segue to greater challenges.
25-person Ulduar tonight - looking forward to it.

Obviously there has been a long absence from blog posts here. I'll chalk it up to a number of different things that aren't terribly interesting, so let's move beyond that.

Ulduar is here.
I'd like to say, "ULDUAR IS FINALLY HERE!!," but in all reality, the current content has only been out for 6 months. It just seems like we've been waiting for a long time due to the relatively easy raiding many people have been trying to stomach for the past couple months.

Regardless, I am happy that this patch is coming out, though I may not sound it. I'm not nearly as excited as I was about any content patch that has ever been released in the game mind you. I truly hope this patch brings with it a lot of fun and a lot of challenges.

As for our guild, we've stayed steady on the Wed/Sat raids as planned. Our raid team of 27 (briefly 28) is back down to 25 people. It'd be nice to pick up 3 new players to cover some potential gaps... but we'll just see what happens. Despite our 2 raid-night weeks, this week we're going to toss an extra raid in the mix just to try to get a little more comfortable with our surroundings in Ulduar (as none of us have entered the instance on the PTR)... so I'm not sure what day the extra will be this week... either Friday or Sunday -- we'll see.

Good luck to everyone in Ulduar this week.
I hope it's all we've been waiting for. Let's also hope that the new content reminds us of the spark of fun that it used to bring... and brings it again.

So it's Friday night... the blogosphere and twitter are alive with Ulduar talks.
Meanwhile however, I was getting ready to log into L4D for a bit until the evening took a turn for the "weird."

An individual who is the GM of another Horde guild on our server sent me a whisper (let's call him Chuck). Chuck used to be in our guild for about a year and a half between Vanilla WoW and TBC. When our guild took a break in TBC, people split off into many directions. One of the guys eventually made a new guild that was meant to be a "bus stop" for lack of a better term. If people wanted a place to hang out while they figured out what they would do next, this was a good place to do it.

The guild stayed around for quite some time, until Vanquish was pieced back together shortly before Wrath. By this time however, the previous guild had a lot of folks go in and out the door. One of the people who went out the door stole a fair bit of things from the guild bank... and subsequently deleted the toons he did it with so no one could pin it on him--though everyone pretty much knew.

When Vanquish reformed, many individuals that did not come into our guild, formed up their own guild with the intent of raiding--headed by Chuck... with one additional right-hand man. ~fast forward to now.

Chuck disbanded his guild tonight for various reasons. He whispered me to tell me that he knew who stole the guild bank contents from the interim guild.. and he wanted to give the things back to us, so he asked for a ginvite to put a bunch of stuff into our bank, knowing that the bulk of players from that "bus stop" guild (including the GM of it) are in Vanquish now. I didn't think much of it, simply because it was all lv70 stuff.

So I tossed Chuck an invite... standing next to him in Dalaran, I watched him drop a portable mailbox.
--- For those of you unaware, in the event a GM disbands a guild, all guild bank contents are mailed to the GM.
He emptied his ENTIRE guild bank into ours... including 12k gold...not the measly lvl70 items that were previously taken.
Chuck then proceeds to gquit and wishes us well with raiding and mentions that he'll be around if we are ever short a dps.

This presents a peculiar situation.

As the title suggests... we killed Sartharion with 3 Drakes tonight -- our first evening of trying, and on just the 8th attempt the night... and with 24 people. Very impressive all around.

We had a few "lol" moments throughout the fight, but one in particular should be recognized.

Jsun (holy pally) Says: "Some of the healers should start dps'ing... we got this"
***MT Dies***


In the end just 13 people were alive, so it wasn't a smooth-as-butter kill, but a kill none the less. Congratulations to all!
ps. Sorry Zonya, Mote, and Val that you couldn't be there. =(