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.

Heroic Lich King 25 is the hardest fight in this expansion. It’s not even close. I’m not going to try to compare its difficulty to the level 60 and 70 endgame, but suffice to say that the people who are peering over their rose-tinted glasses and complaining that the game is too easy these days should probably give this encounter a whirl. There are still challenges to be found, and hard ones at that.

If your only experience with the fight is watching kill movies then it probably looks simple enough. It’s just stabbing the Lich King for a bit, occasionally stabbing something else or running away from some black stuff on the ground, and finally watching an RP cutscene after whittling him down to the “kill” at 10%. Right? Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s close to 20 minutes of near-perfect execution by 25 people, execution that is built brick-by-brick as you master one mechanic only to get whipped by the next.

Arthas hits like a truck so the first step is dealing with his tank damage. Then your whole raid has to learn how to dodge shadow traps and getting the plague to the shambling horror. Your disc priests need to figure out how to shield the entire raid for every infest and your hunters have to find a way to dispel every shambling horror enrage.

In the transition phases the damage dealers have to find the balance between dps’ing aggressively enough to take down the raging spirits quickly but not enough to snatch aggro and get gibbed. You also have to make sure you kill all the ice spheres before they reach the raid and bounce people off the platform.

Then there’s phase 2 and this is the real cock-block of the encounter. Here you have to figure out a way to handle both major mechanics; the val’kyrs, which forces everyone to stack on top of each other, and the defiles, for which you would much rather be spread out. The stacking is necessary to make the valkyrs follow the same path so that you can hit them all with cleave and AoE damage and then you have to have a specific 3-stun rotation on every valkyr in order to slow them down long enough to get them to 50% health and make them drop their target on the platform rather than off it. This sounds easier than it is given that stuns are on strict diminishing returns and a single random stun can mess things up, and the fact that you can easily find yourselves in trouble if the val’kyr targets happen to be your infest-shielding priests or your designated stunners.

Then there’s defile. Oh, defile. How thine cruel nature dost vex me. Bearing a passing resemblance to a BP oil spill, it’s a black blob of ick that spawns under a random raid member and then keeps expanding in diameter if anyone is standing in it. On heroic mode it is very unforgiving and you can’t really overcome one dropped on top of the raid.

Once you actually start to master phase 2 and its defiles, though, the battle is won for all intents and purposes. You still have to learn how to dodge explosions in the Frostmourne room after the Lich King attempts to harvest your souls, how to soak the vile spirits, and let’s not forget that you still have to deal with defiles although they are easier to manage without the val’kyr spawns. But as long as your raid dps is good enough to beat Lich King’s enrage timer, the last phase is a formality compared to the preceding phase.

Now, having said all that, here is our first successful attempt at making all this look easy, lovingly captured and presented by Jinjiro.

THC LK 25 heroic first kill HD stream [ PoV: Jinjiro, rogue ]

(If you’re wondering why it ends so abruptly and doesn’t show the RP stuff and 10% victory lap nuke, it’s because Jin ran out of hard drive space while frapsing which made his computer crash right at the start of the RP bit. ^^)

This kill was not cheaply gained. The cost was great and the currency was blood, sweat, tears and time. Lots of time. Summer isn’t a great time for raid progress as holidays and other activites take priority and this fact combined with some core raiders taking breaks slowed our march to victory. But it could not stop it.

*wipes away proud guild leader tear*

Well done and congratulations, THC. You deserved it.

Blood, sweat, tears and a well-deserved Lich King 25 heroic kill at 23:57 on the last attempt of the night. Game over, man, game over!

Kill movie will be up once Jinjiro gets around to editing it.

I’d write more but it will have to wait because right now I’m going to rest on my laurels. I’ll let Ricky Gervais elaborate:

It’s been a while since the front page was updated, so its time to get up to speed on what’s been going on!

Through awesome dedication, blood and sweat and tears, we have pushed our way through the hard modes in Icecrown Citadel. The raiding team has done an amazing job adjusting to all the new fights, and most hard mode encounters have been going down the same week we decided to go for them. Some was easy; Festergut, Rotface and Dreamwalker gave us little problems, while others such as Sindragosa, Putricide and Deathwhisper made us want to bash our keyboards to pieces.

We eventually managed to get all 11 bosses down, and looked upon the buffed up Arthas Menethil a few weeks ago. The theory think tank has been working hard ever since to come up with ways to counter this and that, and we have put serious pressure on the quantity of gold in the guild banks coffers – as it turns out, it costs a lot of gold to wipe that much.

Slowly, steadily, we push through the encounter, and as we conquer one phase, we run smack into a wall on the next. The more times we try the fight, the less panicky and more structured it becomes, until we weed out the silly mistakes and notice the critical points in the fight that wipes us. “Hard mode is hard” has never been more true, but with the dedication of our raiders and our leaders, we are making our way towards the kill.

It’s not over yet, Arthas! IT’S NOT OVER YET!

Another Heroic boss bites the dust. This time it was Lady Deathwhisper. Even though it’s the second boss in the dungeon this fight seems to be one of the harder ones on heroic mode.

Phase one remains the same as on normal mode, except that the adds spawn faster, have a lot more health and do a lot more damage. The same goes for the boss. Thank god her shield stayed the same, the hard thing for some people seems to be not falling asleep during phase 1, it can become quite boring after a couple of tries.

Once the shield is down on good timing to get rid of adds quickly as she breaks the real fun starts. Adds keep spawning in phase two, luckily it’s only 3 at a time instead of 7. The best thing to do is bring the caster adds close to the boss so they die quickly and have a warrior tank with piercing howl kite the melee adds, a la Razorgore.

The real problem seemed to be ghosts however. She spawns her little ghosts as always, except now if they touch you they explode in your and everyone else in a 20 yard radius’ face for 25k!

To deal with the ghosts simply run away from them, they exist for only 5 seconds, then they despawn. But people seemed to have problems seeing them at first, luckily after some tries we figured out how to spot and avoid the ghosts, finally resulting in a kill!

What is this?! Where am I?.. Oh wait, I mean, join me father!! Rabble rabble rabble!

Yes poor Saurfang, his days of acting sour are over. We killed him on 25-man Heroic mode, now he can finally have a proper ceremony in Nagrand next to the pyres of his mother and ancestors… until the instance resets.

He went down on the second try! And that was quite a smooth kill sans the overagrro at the start. Poor Tya had to respec for just two tries while expecting at least two hours – Sorry Tya next time we will wipe some more to get you some time for your money.

Melees taunting adds and slowing them works great, the ranged will be able to take them down before they reach anyone, if you don’t do that there will be too many Mark of the Fallen Champions anyway. Bloodlust at 30% and zerging him down with some talented Divine Sacrifices helping to counter the last couple of marks and he went down quite fast.

And what is this? Conqueror’s Mark of Sanctification, really? Holy shiiit that’s a first! An actual Conqueror token, what is this world coming to?

Good job on the kill! You can see the movie of it right here.

Once again The Hungering Cold has saved the ass of Valithria Dreamwalker, but this time in Heroic mode!

It took us a couple of tries to get this down. Valithria takes a lot of damage so she needs to be healed even more than on normal mode, and the adds spawn faster and do more damage.

At first we tried to keep all the adds in the middle. This tactic didn’t really work as the Blazing Skeletons with their awesome AoE powers would just stand at the sides blowing up everything in the room, so instead we split into two groups which proved to work better. Quick dispels on the tanks are needed as the Abominations spew out some nasty stuff from their guts, the little zombies need to be kited so they don’t blow up into the tanks’ faces and the Archmages need interrupting as their Frostbolt Volleys drain mana.

It was a close call in the end, we barely made it. It all came down to the healers in the end as everyone had died and they quickly healed up the last 3% of the big green lazyass, then she wiped out the rest of the adds. Once again it wasn’t a very clean kill, but hey! It’s our first kill, and a kill is a kill.

More progress on 25-man heroic! On the first 25-man raid day of the week we managed to do the first wing including our on-farm-heroics in only 45 minutes, leaving us a lot of time to practice for our new goals, Heroic Blood Prince Council and Heroic Blood-Queen Lana’thel.

We had some nice tries on the princes but at some point some little mistakes would take us out. On the kill we did very good until a bunch of melee still running back from Prince Keleseth got smashed with an Empowered Shock Vortex. We decided to keep going as they were on pretty low health already and managed to take them down with only a couple of people alive.

Same goes for the queen, a lot of nice tries for practicing, a couple of bad tries as well. Little mistakes here and there until we got it perfect. If it weren’t for some deaths on the kill try she wouldn’t have enraged. Luckily we had our trusty iceblocking mage Vredens there to let the dots finish the job!

As we are progressing on 25-man content we can’t forget about the 10-man groups we have running as well.

Every Wednesday we start the fresh lockout of the week with two or three 10-man groups to warm up for the 25-mans, and so far our 10-mans have been making some nice progress! While one group is now focusing on heroics only, we had the last group take out the Lich King on 10-man today unlocking heroics for all of our raiders on 10-man as well. No more annoying zone in bug for our raiders!

So far our 10-man heroic groups have managed to take out the entire first wing of together with the Crimson Halls, while in the Plague wing only Professor Putricide remains. The Frostwing Halls have so far not been touched, but that will change soon enough.

Let’s keep up our nice progress and we will have a full 10-man clear quite soon.