We’ve been too busy killing stuff in-game to actually come here and write about it, but it’s time to give a little update after a very productive week so far. On the first raid day of the reset we did nothing less than save the world! (of Warcraft) as we transformed into 25 flies in Algalon‘s ointment and got our first kill of the big-boy version. Well, I guess you can’t call it a kill, we simply fought him with such tenacity as to make him  go all introverted and reflect on his actions and hand us a reply-code to call off the Volgons coming to make a highway through our planet.

After that was done we cleared normal Coliseum in 45 minutes or so and then proceeded to one-shot the first three bosses on heroic difficulty, leaving 50 brand-spankin’ shiny tries for the Twin Valkyrs on the following raid day.

Fast forward to that day and we quickly went through some of those 50 available attempts as we had to fend off a series of problems, from tanks being on shitty connections or not being there at all in order to celebrate dodgy holidays, to people playing Pacman (poorly) and gobbling up orbs when they shouldn’t be. Fortunately I was able to contain my mounting rage by punching local wildlife and once we busted out Eye of the Tiger on vent, we got immediate results in the form of a 3.3% try followed by a kill.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well, and now it’s time to go mess around with big brain bugs. Stay tuned.

[Edit] Here’s a high-def YouTube video of our Algalon kill courtesy of that How To Paladin guy our death knight Stoke. Enjoy!

We haven’t really posted anything on the blog about our Crusaders’ Coliseum progress so it’s probably high time to remedy this. We’ve gotten three out of the five encounters completed on Heroic this week, twoshotting Northern Beasts and then spending a bit of time on Lord Jaraxxus and the Faction Champions.

Lord Jaraxxus isn’t anything special really. The only modifications we did to our normal strat was to have people stand closer to the center, tank Mistresses on top of Jaraxxus and be alert with moving out with Legion Flames. Our DPS managed to take down Portals and Volcanos without much trouble before a second Mistress or too many Infernals popped out.

We messed up Faction Champions a bit, taking a few more tries than we needed to while trying to find a working strat. Eventually we settled on killing two healers first, then controlling the third one while we kill the melee DPS and then ranged DPS one by one. This gave us a bit more control during the more delicate stages of the fight where before we were losing people to random gibs.

We’ve been practicing our strat for Twin Val’kyr today (Tuesday) and we’re pretty confident in it, having gotten them down to 36%. With good execution and high focus we should be able to get this done next week and have time to start learning Anub’arak. :)

We don’t usually care too much about 10-mans progression in THC, but seeing as Algalon is a limited time per week encounter I thought I’d gather some peops to go have a serious go at him yesterday evening, more for the practice than anything else. With only a few hours notice we had some nice turn out and got a raid going. He died on the sixth try, so it isn’t really as much of a challenge as his 25-man version, and admittedly, at our gear level it would have been a bit embarrassing if we hadn’t killed him.

On a negative note though, this kill continued our string of bugs and technical problems. On Tuesday half of our 25-man raid night got wasted because people couldn’t get past the login servers, followed by our instance server crashing for half an hour close to raid end. Later on that same evening we went to do Heroic Anub’arak on 10-man only to not be able to get to him due to bugged floor. This time around we merrily took a kill screenshot only to find out we can’t loot Algalon’s chest.

Blizzard, please use my subscription dollars to pay for some more of this and perhaps some faster that. Thanks!

While we still have two hardmode encounters to complete in Ulduar, namely Algalon and Yogg+0, we managed to complete the 25-man metaachievement and get our drakes before heroics unlocked for the new raid instance. This was a goal we set for ourselves when we found out it’d take 5 weeks for hardmodes to unlock for the Trial of the Crusader, and thanks to great focus from our raiders we managed to do it.

Blizzard seems to have their patches timed well, since after our last progression blitz on Ulduar hardmodes quite a few of us have gotten somewhat tired of the place.

The normal modes for Trial of the Crusader don’t seem to be tuned around organized raiding guilds, with most guilds getting Anub’arak down very easily. It’ll be interesting to see how guilds like us fare on the Heroic mode though. So far we’ve only had a chance to fool around with Northern Beasts and it seems quite doable for us if we execute well. Hope to have some good news soon!