The path to the Frozen Throne was arduous indeed, and yet now that we can scale the icy summit in less than 3 hours, we face the greatest challenge of all. The battle against the Lich King is a hard one, certainly the toughest challenge since the days of 40-man raiding and the insanity that was C’thun. The fight mechanics create a setting in which one individual mistake can set off a chain reaction that ends almost inevitably in a wipe, since this is a battle where the classic RPG trinity of tank, healer and damage-dealer needs near perfect co-ordination. The Lich King heroic encounter pushes everyone into individual tasks that are, in their own way, vital to the success of the raid. Brilliant in design, brutal in execution.

So slowly but surely we have pushed on, perservering through wipe after wipe, steadily improving and realising that victory is within our sights. It felt good to get to Phase 3, didn’t it? I certainly felt a sense of approaching a finishing line as we battled that second round of Raging Spirits. It justified all those other wipes, the discouraging nights where no progress seemed to be made. Suddenly we were ‘here’, looking at the last hurdle with grim determination and a spring in our step.

Old enemies are seeming to pose no problem recently, one benefit of doing battle with the cold-hearted monarch of the damned and his minions. Yogg-Saron keeps rearing his ugly toad-face, and we keep stamping on it, providing several of the luckier members of the guild with shiny new flying mounts, tokens of their increasing prowess. Yet our greatest enemy remains alive, and in the coming weeks we must find the will and the determination to keep thrashing at Arthas, hounding him until we taste the victory that we will have earned.

Azeroth prevails.

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!

Ho ho ho, here it is, the second Hungering Blog movie. This time Stoke, Jinjiro and Argha talk about the new patch, our progress and many random things, paired with footage from one of our awesome nostalgia raids!

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.

So the Lich King is dead! Yes we have killed him and are now steadily progressing on Icecrown hardmodes.

To recap on what has happened between this update and the last we have a little video blog instead of loads of text!

This video features an intro sang by Vredens our Iceblocking mage, Argha as the interviewer, and me Stoke as the anoying talking guy.

Enjoy.

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!