Steelbroken

We put our two raid teams together again Tuesday night and went after Ulduar.

Flame Leviathan

It seemed quite a few people were interested in driving Siege Vehicles, so I grabbed a Motorcycle for this fight. One of the other motorcycle drivers was Donk from our 10 man. He loves riding the motorcycle and has done the role many times. I basically just shadowed him and tried to do what he did.

We never launched anyone up and Flame Leviathan was dead in less than two minutes. I didn’t loot the body. This robot has not been kind to me on either 10 or 25 man. I was going to save myself the disappointment. I had not reacted well the night before when Hodir Hard didn't drop either Shiver or Boreal Guard. I wasn't going to repeat that by complaining about Flame Leviathan's loot.
Then over vent someone said “ooo, Titanguard”. I figured they were just playing with me. But Ellevis linked it and the other totally inconsequential things that dropped.

We had a couple of guests from Heroes Inc again. I won’t call them PuGs. Not all that long ago we all wore the same guild tag, it’s not like they were strangers. Most of us are still friends. Because of the guests, the same loot rules from last week were in effect. One main spec ‘win’.
I had no problem with using my one epic of the night on Titanguard.

Razorscale

Next up was Razorscale, and I had a little miscommunication with my Raid Leader. I was to take the left side, so I went to where I normally do in our 10 mans. The problem is that the ‘left’ in 10 man is really the ‘center’ in 25 mans. Despite my error, we got the pulls under control.

In Monday night’s 10 man run I had made the mistake of turning Razorscale towards the raid. So instead of kiting him in a circle, we kited him backwards. This worked well but I ended up making two mistakes. I held him too long which put my stacks too high, and kited out of range of my healers. Clean up on Aisle 7, dead Paladin!
Perplexity taunted him and they finished him off.

Ignis
This was not a banner night for my tanking skills. On Ignis trash something really weird happened with my UI. My mob was marked with a Star but when I targeted him, the mob showed a Moon as it’s symbol. I thought I had targeted the wrong mob and started looking in vain for Star. Well Star is our first kill target, so while I’m frantically trying to find the mob I just had targeted, DPS pulls him off and it gets messy. Ellevis came to the rescue and taunted Star. We lost some people that pull but didn’t wipe the raid. Ellevis tanked the next couple of pulls while I did a /reloadui which seemed to fix the issue.

We used the same setup for Ignis we had last week with Perplexity on Ignis and Ellevis and myself on Adds. I had a really tough time keeping my Add in the fire long enough to ‘cook’ him. The only tool I have is Hammer of Justice. It doesn’t last long enough to get them fully cooked. My only option was to tank them in the fire. Now that I think about I should Hammer of Justice them, and then just as it’s wearing off, fire off an Avenger’s Shield for the Daze. That might keep them in the fire long enough to get Molten.

Ellevis, being a Death Knight had Chains of Ice. If I was on my Warrior, I would have had Hamstring, Concussion Blow and Charge. I don’t know how Druids handle it, maybe shift and root?

I did pick up on a little trick that really helped me find the new add that Ignis would activate. Before he activates his next add, he will yell: “Arise! Soldiers of the Iron Crucible!” Right after he yells, he fires a yellow bolt into the air. If you follow that bolt, it will land directly on the new add he is going to spawn.

It took a couple of tries, but we killed him. I felt like I got better at Add management each attempt.

He dropped some Tanking boots which Ellevis won. That made me feel better about winning the Orbs for Spiked Death Dealers over him. Those still sound like they should be DPS boots.

XT-002

I was tagged to tank XT again. We downed him pretty easily and even got the Heroic: Nerf Engineering achievement. I never felt the least bit in danger while tanking him. We had multiple Paladins with Divine Sacrifice/Divine Guardian which really helped out on the Tantrums.

One of my guildies from the other Raid Team ran into a case of ‘wrong alt’. He was on his Paladin instead of his Hunter, and XT dropped a ‘Hunter’ staff. This would help explain what happened on Kologarn.

Kologarn

Perplexity and I traded off Kologarn when either of us got about 2 stacks. Ellevis handled the rubble. There’s plenty of damage from Kologarns Shockwave attack to keep your mana going, even if you aren’t the one tanking at that moment. He’s tauntable so tank switches were pretty simple. Ellevis directed the DPS from the Arm to the Body and then when we got close to the other Arm.

Any Hunters out there may have already guessed what happened next. Kologarn drops the Gun. The Hunter playing his Paladin promptly jumps off the Ledge.

We only had one Hunter in the Raid, Taxiderm, and he had already burned his ‘one epic’ on the staff. Apparently, this Gun is the best thing going for Hunter weapons right now. Taxi had to let it go to free roll, but none of the DPS Warriors, and Rogues rolled against him. I was quite impressed with our group after that.

Iron Council
After Kologarn, we doubled back to Iron Council. If you remember from last week, Iron Council had been our road block.

The thing I like best about Iron Council is it’s a 3 tank fight. We put Ellevis on Steelbreaker, myself on Runemaster and Perplexity and a Rogue on Stormcaller. Thou shalt be interrupted, Brundhir!

Our problem last week was that we simply couldn’t keep a tank up under Fusion Punch. Not me, nor Perp, nor Ellevis. It was quite a relief when Ellevis made it through the first, then second, then third Fusion Punch.

Then just before Steelbreaker died, I went down to Runemaster. It was just a normal 32k melee swing. Recount’s Death Meter showed that I was just under that. This was yet another case of an Ardent Defender leapfrog!

3.2! 3.2! Where for art thou, 3.2!

Perp was able to taunt Runemaster while Ellevis and the Raid finished the last couple of percent off Steelbreaker. For the first time, our group had gotten Steelbreaker down.

But we weren’t out of the woods yet. Ellevis came over and taunted Runemaster, but we lost our Rogue interrupter. People moved out of Runes of Death, but healing was really intense.

We got Runemaster down. Now it was just Brundhir. His first Lightning Whirl nearly took us out prompting Ellevis to say something to the effect of “yeah, that’s what needs to be interrupted” over vent.

I was raised as a Ghoul for the first time in Wrath. It took a moment to familiarize myself with the controls and soon I was banging away at Brundhir.

Somehow Iron Council went from road block to one shot. I don’t know what the healing team did to figure out how to get Ellevis through Fusion Punch, I’m just glad they did.

Cat Woman

We had a very little time left, so we decide to try Auryia. I was assigned one of the cats, and got ready to taunt once they were aggroed and coming up the stairs.

First pull went something like Pull, Dead Tank, Wipe, all in about a half a second. The next pull went about as well. We ended up just putting Guardian Spirit on Perplexity right before we pulled. That got us through the initial pull, but we were wiped out by the first Sonic Boom she does.

At that point it was getting late, so we called the raid. I wish I had done a better job with my tanking, but it had been a really good night, and we had a new Boss kill under our belts.
If we keep killing bosses in Ulduar 25, we are going to lose our 10 Man Strict Ranking, simply because we won't qualify as a 10 man Strict guild anymore. If we are killing 25 man Bosses, I guess we really aren't a 10 man Only Guild.
That doesn't really both me. Sure, it's nice to look at GuildOx and see Realm #1 for 10 man Strict. That's cool and all, but it's ultimately not that important. I don't care if we were the first or fortieth guild on our server to kill to Iron Council. It was a fun night.

Comments

Grimadin said…
I laughed so much when I finally got the call to throw on my tanking gear and play with a kitty on Auryia. Attempt 1 was mass MT explosion and attempt 2 I grabbed my cat and backed into my corner, expecting to be there a while. Well I recieved a bit of a surprise on that one. Kitty was clawing away at me, and I was steadily watching my health drop and not come back. I frantically started clicking anything I could come up with to try and stay alive. My health continually dropped towards that scary 0 mark, and I was left trying to figure out if I was still wearing some of my Ret gear, or if something was broken, or what silly mistake I had made in my quick change from Ret back to my favored Prot. Shortly after that I promptly got to take my second dirt nap in as many minutes. Great showing on my part I thought and burst out laughing. I found out afterwards that the healer assigned to me still had that little dwarf of yours pulled out on his UI and was frantically trying to change things as he watched me die. This once again caused me to burst out laughing, this time in relief as I hadn't equipt something wrong or done something silly to wipe the raid.
Unknown said…
Have to say Honors i am really enjoying these 25's as well, the last two are probably the best 25 man raids I've done to date everyone in the raid is skilled, geared and focused on the task at hand but not to the point where it is no longer fun, they still joke around and have fun.
Nick L said…
seal of justice at ignis adds, remember we're batman tanks ;-)

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