Author: Laura Highcove

Well it feels more like a dream than anything else. We first saw Lady Vashj on November 10th, the the day after we downed Leo. Since our strategy is grinding right through the trash to the progression boss, we still had the rest of the instance to clear after that Demon Hunter hottie was downed. That took us the entirely of a raid, so in our normal “Hey, let’s go wipe on the next boss cause it’s too late for a real attempt.” we went up to see Vashj.

It was a fairly productive first try. With half the raid hearthing out, and several members nekkid, we still got her to phase 2. (So hard, I kno, rite?) The next two weeks, due to matters out of our control (Tidewalker can rot in hell.) we only got one night each week to play with our beloved coilfang matron. (Seriously, look at this screenshot. Is that not the most beautiful model in the game?)

We were continuously getting to 2/4 generators down, before the striders (yeah…plural) would cause mass chaos in the raid, and we would wipe. So last night, we changed our strat a bit. We gave priority to damage on the striders instead of the naga as we had been doing. As a result, Koi was tanking three of those scythe wielding buggers at a time at a few points, but the Striders were dying with time to spare.

We choreographed perfectly through vent, getting the tainted elementals down, while calling out for help killing the elementals that fell to second priority when that poison spewing invalid would appear. The rest of the raid responded perfectly.

The generators fell, we ripped through the remaining elementals, the strider, and two nagas that had to be pulled off Koi. The hunters looked to the sky for the spore bats we had never seen before. I got dizzy trying to follow those little buggers through the air while avoiding the poison that was already seeping into the ground.

By the time I called hunter dps on Vashj, she was already down to nearly 25%. She went down fast. So much faster than I remember phase 1 ever going. The poison wasn’t that bad at first. Then around 10% we started running out of room. Koi was moving her to any clear spot he could find (down the stairs) and the healers and dps followed after him like good little puppies.

Then her body fell limp into the poison, and vent exploded.

Third night on Lady Vashj, second time making it to phase 3, and she was down.

I won’t be the first to say our guild is undergeared. We haven’t had the farming time the other guilds have had. We downed Magtheridon once. We downed Void Reaver once. The only time we “farmed” were the weeks we downed a new boss. If the progression boss didn’t go down, we didn’t touch the other bosses.

And yet Lady Vashj lays dead at our feet. It’s a good feeling. (So is having this elusive Vashj Vial. Hehe.)

So we played with Leo last week, as we are apt to do when we down a new boss we go wipe on the next one just to see the fight, (Generally people are lazy and haven’t read the strat yet.) for whatever time we have left in the raid.

The strat is pretty easy, all things considered, and after our continued success against Mr. Unstable, I figured most of the large bumps having to do with aggro sensitive fights were behind us. Turns out I was right. Our second pull of the night he was down to an agonizing 1% before he enraged and wiped out the remaining dps.

After that we had a few issues with people learning to tackle their inner demons correctly. Though in general our healers had less trouble than our dps. I don’t know what that says about our guild… And on our last attempt of the night (after many of our bedtimes. 😮 ) we brought down the poor, insane demon hunter with almost a minute left on his engrage timer.

Then he went and dropped double Champion and the tanking belt. /sigh

If you feel like being a jerk, go do it in some other guild.

Karathress had a really rocky start. We attempted him for much of a whole night with our shaman tank getting his butt handed to him. It was most frustrating, but we did quickly find that pulling Mr. Priest back far enough in the hall reset the fight, so that ended up saving us a lot of time on wipe recovery. Whoever didn’t program the totems and pet to despawn when their masters reset needs to be fired.

ANYWAY. We finally tracked down the elusive Cervande (Our main off-tank) who had been held captive by some nefarious overlord (his boss), and threw him at the shaman with a few mad dads, and a flask. That seemed to do the trick as after a few small positioning adjustments, we got the scaled jailor down to 3% before he wiped out the raid in about 10 seconds.

Came back the next night fresh, and with more healers, and took him down. There was no leet 2Her, but we picked up our third and fourth pieces of t5, and healing cloth shoes for the holy priest we don’t have in our guild.

With Karathress down, we headed back to the bosses we had bypassed in the name of progression. Morogrim was one shot by a raid of 23 our second week on him. And tomorrow we’ll clear out Hydross and Lurker before going to play with that hottie Leo. We have our strat all worked out.

I probably should’ve waited till tomorrow to do this, as tired as I am, but I managed to fraps the fight, and tomorrow shall be spent learning the inner workings of Windows Movie Maker.

Tidewalker. What is there to say about Tidewalker? He’s big…and purple…and farts green bubbles? This fight is easy. The strat is almost laughably simple. Execution; slightly harder. I don’t think anyone would disagree that this is a bit of a gear check.

Mostly a healer check. Can you keep up the raid when they all take damage (earthquake), when half (or more) of the healers are suddenly mia for a good 10-20 seconds (watery grave), when two tanks have to grab crazy aggro on two gaggles of murlocs that everyone else has to aoe down (gogo pally tanks), and when the tank is taking OMG SPIKE DAMAGE! Of course it’s also a tank check to survive that OMG SPIKE DAMAGE. As well as a raid health check, to have enough health to make it through the watery grave.

Our healers rose beautifully to the challenge, with only minimal complaints. And things went much better once our second pally tank actually went and specced protection. (ie, he didn’t die if I got graved.)

Like Maggi-poo, it was our first time to the last phase, but everything went off without a hitch. Those of us not dpsing the boss (and thus not seeing that he hit 25%) were correctly informed of the shift into the hallway. All of the nefarious bubbles despawned a good distance away from us, and never gave us a problem.

Of course to add to the excitement, our MT succumbed to the OMG SPIKE DAMAGE at 1%, and the gaggles finished us off after we finished Tidewalker off. Yay DI and SS.

After that we went to play with Karathress a bit. Talks of the leet 2Her abounded as our raid leader stumbled through the strat. Luckily some of us had actually read it beforehand in anticipation of Tidewalker’s imminent demise. We pulled! And I died in 16 seconds. (Tanking the lolshaman with lolwindfury and lolspitfire.) It was impressive. I wish I had a screenshot. I’ll apparently be tanking the priest from now on. 🙂

(Okay fine, not really Onyxia…) Magtheridon, or Maggi-poo as I tend to call him, is more than a bit of a pain. Since we no longer need to impress our guardian snowflake in order to get into The Eye, the general consensus was, “Why bother?”.

Rich lore (and progression) aside, he’s a jerk of a fight, especially since we only have two regular warlocks. Our problem was not so much downing the adds (four down before Mags came out with 10 sec to go, on our kill) but keeping the add’s adds from having their way with our healers while we were doing so. So we turned to the veritable army that is our guild’s hunters for trapping goodness.

Once we actually got to the cube part without people dead, I found it a lot easier than I was expecting. After all the qq on the forums about clicker lag and such, I was expecting another few hours to lrn2cube. As everyone will probably agree, I called out *way* to many “get to your cube” warnings, but the clickers handled it like he was on farm. Even with the great fun that is earthquake just seconds before clicking time.

Plus since it was our first time below 30%, we had a few random deaths due to rocks. (I swear, I was up until 3%.) If not for those cave-ins, this fight would’ve been the easiest tank and spank in the world. Almost feels like the cave-ins should start closer to 50% so the healers have something to heal other than just Koi. But I digress.

After some confusion about Maggi-poo’s head, and Rosa getting leet gloves for 31 dkp, we were more than ready to be done for the night. Not a bad way to start off the weekend.

After two weeks of disappointments and wipes, we headed to SSC with new resolution. Or perhaps it was just the alcohol dulling our senses. With flying jackalopes running invisibly around our feet, we wiped away the trash and posed for a picture in front of Hydross.

Look look! There he is in the background! 🙂 Koi went through his amazing two hour strat in a mere fifteen minutes, (We still got to role play.) and charged in.

And

Hydross

went

down.

There’s nothing more to it than that. We moved flawlessly through phase changes, and besides a few people pulling aggro on the adds, we had them down with a good mark and a half to focus fire on Hydross before the next phase change. At 13% we burned through him, leaving an easy 30 seconds on his enrage timer.

With a one shot of a new boss under our belts, we headed for Lurker. And we found a new challenge. After finally mastering “The Elevator”(TM) we found a new environmental nemesis. The hole. That’s right, we lost no less than 7 people to watery deaths while attempting to get around/over a deviously designed break between walkway and platform. We hope to cut the number of deaths in half by next week, but that might be a little ambitious of us. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those who lost durability during these trying times.

But there was light at the end of the tunnel! Our paladin squad now has a full set of matching purple boots! They are now snazzy enough that looking directly at all of them at once may cause blindness. (It’s good practice for tier 5.)

And did I mention three nether vortexes (vorticies?) dropped? We finally have our first piece of pve crafted gear. Gratz Suthee. I want to wring your neck for that little joke.

btw, this is what happens when I actually have time to write an entry as opposed to throwing up a kill picture while we’re clearing trash to the next boss. 🙂

Two nights of serious attempts, and a two shot tonight. Once people learned to channel their inner fish this boss went down really really fast.

Our raiders are improving by leaps and bounds, and it won’t be long before the next few kill pics go up. For now. Flouder is served.

Practice makes perfect.

Took us way too long, mostly due to attendance issues, but he’s down, and OOB has teir 5 shoulders. Maggi-poo is next in our sights.

Go away for a weekend and see what happens? Anyway, I’d say we’ve officially stepped into 25-man content as of last Friday.

It’s currently 5am, and I can’t sleep.