Unbreak My Heart: XT-002 Hard Mode

Tuesday night we got started late waiting for our Raid Team to assemble.

We had to 9 man Flame Levithan, then our Mage logged in and we had our full 10 man team. We decided to go for XT Hard Mode. We ran a matrix of one tank, 2 healers, and 7 DPS. Our Tank was a Protection Paladin. Our Healers were a Resto Druid and Disc Priest. With as much movement as fights in Ulduar require, I've found that to be a pretty solid healing combo. Plus, Penance looks cool, it just does.

In order to activate XT's Hard Mode, you have to kill the Heart when it drops down. DPS XT to 75% to initiate the first Heart Phase.

We actually didn't kill the Heart our first attempt. We stopped had our Healers stop Healing and decided to try again. It's amazing how effective that strategy is for wiping a raid.

Next attempt, we got him to 75%. I popped my Wings (that's Paladin talk for cast Avenging Wrath) and we all went to town. The Heart 'broke' just milliseconds before XT would take it back up.

XT then healed to full, and Hard Mode was engaged. and you basically start the fight over. Once he's in Hard Mode you can forget about the Heart, and the Adds. Well not entirely the Adds. I had been so focused on doing 'mad dps' on the Heart that I missed the Pummelers. Things got fairly messy at the point, and by the time we finally got everything back under control we had lost too much DPS time.

We tried yet again. This time I DPSed the Heart but kept a 'steady eye' out for the Adds. We got lucky this time and no Pummelers spawned. We didnt' worry about the Scrap Bots getting to XT, because he was going to heal to full anyway and our Healers handled the Bomb Bots blowing up quite nicely.

Now all we really had to worry about was the Tantrum, the Gravity Bombs, and the Light Bombs and the small issue of whether or not we had the DPS to beat the Enrage timer.

As the Tank, my job was to not threat cap any of our DPS and make sure I used my cooldowns effectively to lighten the load on the healers, especially during a Tantrum which hits harder on Hard Mode than it does on regular. Death Knights can work well Tanking this as well since they can Icebound Fortitude every Tantrum. Both IBF and Tanturm are on 1 minute timers.XT also hits for more damage in Hard Mode, but our Healers didn't seem to have any trouble.

When Gravity Bomb has finished ticking on one of your lucky raiders, it leaves a small void zone. We handled this by just having people run a little further away from raid than they normally do. When Light Bomb finishes, it spawns a Spark that Ranged DPS have to switch to and burn down. It really doesn't have much health, but it is a threat to your casters.

Range had little trouble dealing with the Sparks, and our team was smart in the placement of their void zones. Healing was tight only during Tantrums. DPS was not an issue.

One member of our team did some checking on GuildOx, which is a Guild Ranking site.

Heroes Inc is the 5th guild on Altar of Storms to get Heartbreaker, but the very first Alliance guild (according to this site). We never set out to get an Alliance or Server First, but that's pretty cool.
We continued our run and downed Auriya, Thorim, and Hodir. We'll need to get Freya, Mimiron, and General Thursday to give us another shot at Yoggy on Monday.