As we plunge down through the cracked floor to the hidden reaches beneath us, the victory rush from defeating the lord of the Twilight’s Hammer pales in comparison to the fact we’re mere minutes away from standing infront of Sinestra. Congratulations to everyone that attended the progress raids and ultimately led us to killing Cho’gall!

Also good work ninjapulling Sinestra and getting her down by 1%. Okay, not really. I blame Ksav.

Cataclysm is certainly offering a completely different level of challenge on its first tier of raiding than what its prior bastard cousin, Wrath of the Lich king, had in store. After renewing the roster with a sleuth of promising recruits and scoring a long-due kill of Nefarian on heroic mode, progression once again kicks up properly when we turn our eyes to the next obstacle in our conquest of Tier11 heroics – Cho’gall. The man, the ogre, the legend. The guy that did questionable things with the dead husk of a God. Yeah, that guy. We all love him.

At first glance, reading a rough summary of our favorite doomsday prophet’s heroic mode it appears to have very little actual differences in terms of boss mechanics – boiling down to three things:
1) Two Adherent adds instead one
2) The ability to damage elementals that show up to buff Cho’gall
3) An extra type of tentacle in last phase. Schoolgirls unite.

Things are not as simple as they seem, of course. The requirements of the raid for just about all of the mechanics are a massive step up from what the fight asked of a raid on normal mode. After attempting multiple different ways of defeating the encounter for a couple of raid days, it now falls down to the coming serious nights of progression for us to judge if we got what it takes to unlock Sinestra.