The problem with having Twitter updates for your guild is that it’s very easy to slack by posting a hundred-something characters Tweet instead of sitting down and writing a full blog post about stuff. :3

We had our last major progression kill back in late October when we first killed Anub’arak Heroic. A few weeks later we achieved our first Tribute to Insanity, missing the server first by two hours. We’ve been raiding on cruise control since then, and this didn’t become any different when the first Icecrown Citadel bosses were released.

A welcome change was when the Plague and Blood wings opened. The fights had interesting strategy and execution elements to them, and as a result the past few weeks of raiding have been very entertaining.

But next week starts a whole new chapter.

With the final wing unlocking in Icecrown Citadel, we’ll be aiming for a kill of the Lich King so we can begin our progression on Heroic modes as early as possible. With as many bosses as there are in the ICC raid instance, this is going to be a real test of our ability to achieve competitive progress on a tight 3-days schedule. I hope to have some good news on the front soon!

If we ignore progression for a moment and look at this from a different perspective, this is a really big occasion for the Warcraft franchise and people who’ve been following it. Most WoW players played Warcraft 3 in the past. Some of us (*cough*) even played the original game back when it came out. In that sense the Lich King is more than just another boss encounter to beat. We’ve killed some major lore figures in the past, but this time around I think this will bring about a feeling of closure to a lot of players, like reading through the final pages of a really good and long book.

I’m sure Blizzard isn’t going to disappoint and will make the fight extremely epic. I for one just can’t wait to see it already!

Now that the celebrations for Anub’arak’s demise have calmed down a bit I thought I’d congratulate one of our members on achieving a very respectable milestone. After getting Resilience Will Fix It on our first try during the Thursday farm raid Molgon passed 10,000 achievement points and became the first member of our guild to do so.

World of Warcraft has been around for quite some time now; 5 years isn’t something to scoff at considering the life expectancy of your average video game. The game’s mechanics sometimes move very violently from side to side, and nobody stays on top for very long. It’s nice to see that some people stay loyal to the same bobbing head that runs from place to place in the middle of their screen for so long.

So to Molgon as well as all the other several-years-old characters in our guild and the players playing them: /salute

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!

Actually I’m not sure that’s a good description of him. According to some lore he might even be one of these guys.

Regardless, in his present form General Vezax didn’t pose much of a challenge to beat on hardmode. It took two hours or so to clear his trash and let our ranged DPS have some quality time with Shadow Crashes and for our Rogues to go through a fast Focus Kick Macros And You 101 course. First try with no fails and he was dead.

With hard modes opening up for the new raid instance soon we’re hopeful we can complete the metaachievement and unlock Algalon before that. Hope to have some more good news soon :)

Well, neither did we! But still Flame Leviathan with four towers up is hell of a lot of fun. After some practice we got this working with a five Demolishers / three Sieges tactic, with Raneda leading our efforts on this particular hard mode.

We haven’t had time to try the 25-men version of this prenerf, which is a bit of a shame. Hopefully we’ll be able to beat the next hard modes before they get nerfed. And hopefully, the next time we kill FL+4 it’ll drop stuff that doesn’t go to offspecs.

So we started working on the Heroic: Heartbreaker achievement earlier on in the week. We spent most of our first raid day perfecting our strat on the hard mode itself since we were taking the heart out on time to start it every try. So after two and half hours or so we were satisfied we got things right and felt we could get it done in the following raid day, and went on to kill Razorscale followed by Ignis in three and a half minutes and called it a night.

Not two hours pass and we see news about an XT nerf coming to the live servers via a hotfix. Sure enough, the following raid day we got it down even before the last raid member showed up – yes, 24 men progress again! It was nice to get our first hard mode done and especially to have it be a realm first.

Well played all! Heartbreaker, your time has come!

[ Anubedit ] : Jomotei has cooked up a nice movie of our second kill. You can download it in HD quality on FileFront.

He’s dead, and not a moment too soon!

Excellent play by everyone tonight, not a single sanity/cloud/tentacle fail. We’ve gotten Yogg-Saron dead with almost 2 minutes to spare on the enrage timer as well as the [Heroic: Drive Me Crazy] achievement as an added bonus. We should of course be sure to mention the great work everyone have put into progressing through this encounter over the past two weeks, with many of these people not having the chance to be in the raid today.

While it was clearly not easy progress it definitely felt like we were making small but sure steps towards getting this done. Anyway, grats to those who got brand new shoulders and loots, and see you in the hard modes.

[ Jomedit ] : A video’s been uploaded of the third phase of the kill, from the PoV of our resto shaman Argha. Check it out here (175MB). The first two phases weren’t frapsed, sadly.

[ Anubedit ] : Our dear Boomkin Tagor made a very nice kill video of our second Yogg-Saron kill. It shows all three phases of the fight as well as alternating between footage taken inside and outside of the portals during the second phase. You can view it in high quality on youtube or download the full HD video from filefront.

So some of you might have been wondering what the secret ingredient is that makes THC have such awesome (kek) PvE progress. Well, I think it’s time to give a small, behind-the-scenes glimpse of how we prepare for raids.

Just click on the image on the right to get a look at our tactics overview for the Yogg-Saron encounter, courtesy of Braggha, our zealous Warrior tank.