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!

Taking the road less traveled is often held up as something positive. It’s not. It’s annoying, is what it is. Who do those people think they are? They think they know better than the rest of us? Get back in line, damnit! Conform! Conform!

We have one of those idiots in our guild. Apteryx. He’s a warlock but instead of studying spreadsheets trying to min-max 1 more dps more from his spell rotation, he hangs out in the tank channel. He doesn’t have a tank alt. He has no tank experience. He’s just there, constantly weighing in on tank strategies during raids or volunteering to tank every raid encounter known to man. A typical exchange:

Raid leader: Hmm, we lack a tank for the adds.
Apteryx: I can tank them, no problem!

Raid leader: So who’s tanking this boss?
Apteryx: I can tank him, no problem!

Raid leader: Roses are red.
Apteryx: I’ll tank them, no problem.

Anyway, last Thursday we cleared TotC 25-man heroic and then started somnambulating our way through the normal version when Apteryx volunteered to tank. Again. Our resolve beaten to a pulp by the drudgery of farm content, we thought…fuck it, let’s just let him tank. So we let him maintank Lord Jaraxxus, one of the Twin Valkyrs and Anub’arak. Sadly – from a conformist perspective – the road less traveled turned out to be covered in fragrant rose petals, paved from pure gold and home to the world’s largest collection of chocolate bunnies. We had no wipes, no tank deaths, no nothing. It was as smooth as honey dipped in butter.

Damn it. Now there’ll be no shutting him up.

P.S. Obviously, all of us had a lot of fun, not just Apteryx. :) Check out the Anub’arak movie from the PoV of Apteryx, warlock tank, at WarcraftMovies, FileFront and YouTube. Enjoy!

P.P.S. I had a look at the raid log and during the Anub’arak fight, Apteryx took  12846 damage per second and received 14329 healing per second. For comparison’s sake, our “real” tank took 8348 damage per second during the heroic version of Anub’arak the same reset. Who said normal was easymode?

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

Phase 3 of Anub’arak is one of those fights where if things go bad, they go bad quickly. You lose a tank, you lose a healer, you miss an interrupt; it all leads to a wipe and fast. Couple that with mechanics dictating that everyone in the raid must be kept at low health combined with damage spikes on random raid members, and you have a recipe for a situation that’s not sustainable indefinitely.

Getting to phase 3 can be done smoothly every time, but once you push past that 30% barrier, it’s a race against inevitable doom.

So there we are last night, confident we can finally conquer Anub’arak 25 heroic if everyone executes correctly, a confidence borne from the previous raid night where a late change in tactics had yielded improved results and a 4% wipe. However, we only have 20 attempts remaining on the reset and we squander some early ones due to some mistakes in positioning.

There’s 15 attempts remaining when we hit phase 3 with a purpose and things remain stable as Anub’arak hits 20%, 15%, 10%… and then things start falling apart. For a few heartpounding moments it looks like things are going to end badly, but then…but then there is Vredens.

The ballad of Vredens, immortal hero of the horde

Ahh, Vredens. There’s something you should know about Vredens. He has a reputation for dying rather easily. If I was to create a Vredens joke it would go something like this:

“A priest, a rabbi and a troll mage walk into a bar. One of the bar patrons coughs and the troll mage drops dead from swine flu.”

The superstitious among us have taken to saying that we won’t be able to kill a progress boss until a troll sacrifice has been made. Then there’s the singular event that cemented Vredens’ position as a guild punch line; the time he “ruined” a Naxxramas 10 undying run by dying to a Sapphiron breath with Ice Block off cooldown. Ever since that happened, he’s had to suffer his share of good-natured jabs and pokes.

Now that you know the background, fast forward to where we left off against Anub’arak. The raid is dying quickly, people are dropping left and right. The bug’s health is dropping too, but slowly. Agonizingly slowly. Memories of our previous 4% wipe flash before our collective eyes. Oh no. We’re gonna wipe on two percent. We’re gonna wipe on one percent?! The sinking feeling in our stomachs builds and builds, but Anub’arak is still there. Please don’t despawn, please don’t despawn! He is not despawning. Someone is still alive? And there is Vredens. Pulling off the pro move to end all pro moves, ensconced in his block of ice, denying Anub’arak’s life leech with steely resolve and watching as the raid dots finish the bug off. They should’ve sent a poet.

After that there is only the sweet release of the achievement banner popping up and nerdscreams. Lots of nerdscreams.

The Hungering Cold. World #366 Anub’arak kill. Fuck yeah!

Here are some nice videos of the kill put together by some of our members. Warning: contains nerds on vent.

Stoke, DPS death knight PoV [ YouTube HD stream ]
Caedrel, DPS death knight PoV [ YouTube HD stream | Megaupload download ]
Braggha, Captain Blockman PoV [ FileFront download ]

I remember it like yesterday. That one defining moment. My death. The plague had ravaged the lands. There were almost none left alive. It was not a quick death. It was not a painless death. It was a truly horrible death. The sickness came slowly. It was in my lungs, my liver, my heart. It infected my very soul. Pain like a thousand needles all over my body. Rotting flesh. Then death.

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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!

After killing Freya on hardmode and even an Old-God and his halfsharkhalfalligatorman bodyguard there was only one thing standing between us and eternal fa… errr our Ironbound Proto-Drakes.

Unaware to us however was that pushing the red button causes mass hysteria in nearby gnomes, enraging them and causing them to hasten up their testing. Unaware to said gnome, high-pitched voices cause an enrage in Tauren Bulls as well and leads to an increased desire for gnome-punting.

It took a bit of time (18 pulls to be exact) but once we learned to avoid Shock Blasts/Mines/Laser Barrages/Frostbombs/Rockets without standing in fire this fight really wasn’t all that hard.

All in all, Firefighter must be one of the best fights I’ve done personally done in any raid instance. To quote a certain comic: “Fire is still hot and raiding is still serious business.”

After all this was over we decided to celebrate in style by roasting some Dwarves to finish the meta achievement for most of us. Now they can bask in glory whilst others wait until we have some kitties watching their mistress gets killed (Yes Quynh, you may sit that fight out).

You can download one kill movie from here (thanks Argha!) or watch another one in the embed below (thanks Jomo!):