The Northrend Beasts

Everyone was excited as we put the raid together to go check out Trial of the Crusader. We had the normal 'new instance' logistics to figure out, like where the portals were, and which of the three portals was the right one for us to take.

That sorted out, Ellevis (DK) explained to us what he knew about the fights which was pretty much just the abilities of the mobs that had been posted on MMO. I had the added benefit of having read the World of Matticus healing guide, so I knew just a little bit more. Other than that, we were flying blind.
We buffed up, ate our Fish Feast, and got ready. Ellevis went and talked to the NPC. He said his little speech and soon Gormok was headed into the ring with us.

I don't think of Northrend Beasts as 3 separate encounters. Instead, I think of them as 3 phases of the same fight. Gormok is Phase 1 in this line of thinking.

Gormok is a Magnatur, and will periodically throw a Snobold at one of your raid members. This is sort of like Iron Roots from one of the Freya Elders. Your DPS has to target the Snobold and burn him down. Ranged DPS seems to have an easier time of this than melee.

Meanwhile your tanks are getting a stacking bleed put on them. We were two healing his fight and decided to do a taunt switch at 3 stacks. Your healers need to keep in mind that previous tank will still be bleeding while the new tank is under attack from Gormok. It looked like the stack could fall off, but good luck going 30 seconds and not taking a melee hit. Even blocked hits will proc it.

Ellevis and I traded him back and forth and we got through Phase 1 on the first pull. Gormok is just sort of a warm up. the Now we would have to deal with not one, BUT TWO Jormunger Worms! You get a very brief break while the announcer introduces your next opponents, so mana based classes can try to get a couple of ticks of their favorite drink. Tanks pretty much start moving into position immediately. The Worm's names are Dreadscale and Acidmaw, but you'll likely know them as Fire Worm and Acid Worm.

I had Fire Worm, while Ellevis tanked Acid Worm. Both worms have a spray attack in their frontal cone, so you'll want them pointed away from the raid. Neither hits really hard, but when you start adding up all the little damage they do, it's every bit as dangerous as the one big swing.
Each worm throws out a debuff. Dreadscale's is a fire DoT while Acidmaw uses a nature DoT. The nature DoT will being to slow the movement, cast and swing speed of its victim. It can stack to the point that you just can't do anything. The person who gets the nature DoT needs to find the person with the Fire DoT. When the Fire DoT ticks it does a small AoE like a Lightbomb. That AoE needs to hit the person with the Nature DoT. That's there get out of jail free card.
We wiped a couple of times to these guys. When you wipe, you have to repeat the entire encounter. So it was back to Gormok.

We dispatched him again and started back in on the worms. This time we managed to get Acidmaw down, and made an interesting discovery. These two worms must have a 'thing' going because Dreadscale enraged when Acidmaw died. He still didn't hit really hard, but it was a combination of melee hits, plus the Fire DoT if I had it, plus his fire breath. The death of a thousand cuts.

We finally get Dreadscale down, and Icehowl came running in. Here's your heavy hitter. He smacked us around good. After a couple of tries, we got a handle on what he was doing. He'll jump up in the air and come crashing down. Everyone in the raid gets thrown the wall and stunned. Icehowl will pick one person and go all toro toro on them. You better olle or you'll be one shot. If you manage to olle him, he'll go crashing into the wall and stun himself. While stunned, he takes double damage. Make good use of this time.

We managed to evade him the first time. Then when he got back to me, he went all Big Red Yeti on me. I would spend the rest of the encounter doing a quality inspection of the tile job on the coliseum floor. Ellevis picked him up, and the team executed another successful dodge and burned him down.

The Northrend Beast encounter had been defeated!
We still had a little time left on the evening, but there were no more Bosses in the Coliseum for us to battle. So we headed back to Ulduar and took care of some unfinished business!