So the last time we spoke you were battling ghouls,
In a darkened dungeon, next to plagued pools,
And now after the lich, bit the dust like a bitch,
You’re fighting an Old God, you fools.

Part 1 – Dancing Amongst Clouds and… Squid Things.

Who the hell is Sara, and what’s she doing here?
You were certain after all the trials, an Old God would appear,
You beat some giant robots, and some Iron Dwarven twats,
A giant angry dragon, and a lady with some cats.
You’d think for all your work, this god would show his face,
But it seems this cunning Yogg-Saron is gone without a trace.

Yet something ominous seems near,
The hint of darkness lingers here,
What it is, it isn’t clear,
But something fills your group with fear.

You tiptoe slowly forward, unsure and apprehensive,
Everyone alert, your stances all defensive,
Entering the room, Sara hovers in the air,
Quiet, still and smiling as you come into the lair.
Then you hear a deafening thud, the door behind you slamming shut,
Sara gives an evil glare, the tricky little slut!

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…and it sort of was. It’s not every day you get two 25-man hard-modes done for the first time in the same raid. Yesterday we did. After getting to within 27k of a Steelbreaker kill on Thursday and then having to abandon further tries after we lost a healer to a French thunder storm, we came back on Sunday and got it done. Then we went on to face Hodir and decided to give the hard-mode our first serious attempts and got it done within a couple of hours.

For Heroic: I Choose You, Steelbreaker we killed Runemaster Molgeim first and Stormcaller Brundir second. For the final burn on Steelbreaker we had everyone clumped up in melee range except hunters who were at range to (be able to dps and) soak Static Disruptions.

For Heroic: I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare our tactic’s key points were: 1) Keep melee on Hodir at all times, 2) have ranged break out the mage NPCs after flash freezes and then letting those mage NPCs break out the other NPCs, and 3) have a couple of survival hunters chasing Toasty Fires to keep stacking the Singed debuff on Hodir. I’ve uploaded a video of our kill to Filefront, go check it out in HD quality (my latency jumped up to 600 for this try so you’ll notice a couple of lag spikes, sorry about that).

Going back to the title of this post; I’d like to commend everyone in the raid and say that it wasn’t a rare raid from the perspective of performance, attitude and focus. I’m proud to say that we’ve become accustomed to everyone performing well and always being up for wiping again and again on a hard-mode until we get it done. You’re all awesome.

I’ll end this post by mentioning that some of us have also been fooling around in 10-man Ulduar. We’ve gotten the Glory of the Ulduar Raider meta-achievement done to secure some drakes and unlocking Algalon. If you’d like a closer look, here’s a couple of videos to sink your teeth into:

Yogg-Saron +1: One Light in the Darkness
PoV: Tagor, boomkin playing resto spec [ YouTube HD ]

Assembly of Iron hard-mode: I Choose You, Steelbreaker, solo-tanked
PoV: Jomotei, survival hunter [ YouTube HD ]

Meow.

The interlopers that we are, we dared to interfere with his sport. And he paid the price.

That’s right, we got Thorim hard-mode done recently. It was an exciting kill, both tanks died before Thorim was freed of Yogg-Saron’s influence and the last couple of percent of health were taken off while he was chasing dpsers around.

We followed that up by one-shotting Three Lights in the Darkness, which despite not being that much harder than a regular Yogg kill appears to be a realm first. Maybe other guilds are skipping it in favour of practicing one or two lights. Whatever the reason, it bumped us up to realm #2 on wowprogress.com for the time being, which is a nice little acknowledgement of everyone’s effort and good work and the fact that we’re able to keep progressing despite the usual summer dip in activity.

Looking forward, we’re currently trying to make a dent in Steelbreaker. We had a few attempts this week and got him to around 30% a couple of times. Our dps seemed sufficient to burn him down in time provided we can avoid non-tank deaths so hopefully we can get it done soon.

Meep meep.