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Next on the agenda was Tichondrius mythic. We expected the fight to be a little bit more difficult than Krosus and Spellblade, but once we strated to get into it it seemed pretty straightforward. At least with Teldryn and Spaas blocking the Seeker swarms. At first we tried to clear off the Brands of Argus in good moments, but then we changed our minds and just let the people with brands keep them throughout the fight. That however complicated the night-phases somewhat, but once we realised that some people could evade dying with immunities things felt less panicy during the night. We spent some more time wiping to random mistakes, but on the last week of Nighthold, we finally had Tichondrius dead! Good job everyone! Tomb of Sargeras next!!

This week we had time to go to Emerald Nightmare. We had some struggles on Il’gynoth, who had become easier – but hadn’t become a free kill so everyone who was new to the fight had to somewhat learn the tactics. Once we passed him we had a few wipes on Xavius, before he bit the dust. Emerald Nightmare cleared and we gained over 90 ranks on wowprogress. Good job guys!!

Observe: Screenshotted by Ingekek who got lost in the darkness when taking the photo!

We decided to spend some leftover raidtime on going back to Trial of Valor and Emerald Nightmare, to kill some more mythic bosses. We realised that our wowprogress rank would hardly move if we killed Tichondrius, while it would jump very far up if we got some older bosses. It shouldn’t be that way really, but now that it is, it’s hard to find recruits if you don’t abide!

First night: Odyn and Guarm down. We spent quite some time getting the 3rd phase in order. He wasn’t a free kill. Guarm was though!

With Spellblade Aluriel finally dead we were back to Krosus. We quickly realised that the first and second Burning Pitches were the tricky ones and if we got beyond those with everyone alive we would be in good shape. We took our Aluriel experience of having a plan for every step of the way and we implemented it here as well, except now it was easier because things were less random. Everyone had exact assignments and everything was called. And it didn’t take us very long to get to the end of the fight, just one night. Krosus is dead! Tichondrius next!

Observe: The above screenshot is not taken as the boss dies, but rather at the beginning of the fight with Spaas showing us where the rogues have been assigned to stand!

After killing Trilliax we tested both Spellbender Aluriel and Krosus. We decided that while Krosus seemed to have an easier tactic, it still seemed hard to deal with all the adds, and the run back was brutal after every wipe. We decided that we had to learn the tactics for Aluriel eventually anyway, and we may as well do it straight away with a shorter run back. Then problems hit. Easter came round the corner and several raiders had planned vacations. At the same time some raiders took a break from raiding. We were already slightly low on numbers after having parted ways with two raiders a short period before Easter and now we were in big trouble. We resolved the troubles by pugging, but with just a few pulls of practice on Aluriel (and on Krosus) it was impossible to bring pugs there. Instead we had to settle for three farm bosses and then the raidweek was over. Meanwhile we were waiting for people to return from vacation that never returned. It was real bad.

It took us a month to recover the numbers and be back to Spellblade Aluriel. And then it took us quite a few weeks of progress to get anywhere in the fight. Even if we had set plans for every step of the fight, we were still not doing it right and Luria started calling the fight “The Mark of Frost game”, claiming that all she cared about was that we handled the Mark of Frosts correctly. But we still kept failing on the Mark of Frost game a while longer. Eventually we had just done every mistake there was about thirty times each and we started to finally do them less. And a light approached at the end of the tunnel. Finally we killed her! Good job everyone for struggling to the end.

Trilliax was next on the list. We made some assignments towards Scrubbers that we hadn’t had in heroic mode, and that was pretty much the only thing we did differently in the fight. The motto was: “Eating cake is more important than DPS”! We had a period when we struggled killing the first add on time, but that was soon sorted out, and for the rest we mainly wiped on Scrubber mistakes. In the end it didn’t take us very long to finally finish the encounter. Trilliax is dead! Aluriel or Krosus next?

We knew going in that Chronomatic Anomaly mythic would be an obstacle. Looking at other guilds most guilds were stuck at 1 or 3 mythic kills. Once we started working on it we soon managed to get through to an “oh shit”-moment where we continuously wiped. Looking at other kills it turned out they had the boss either dead at that point or close to dead. We were not even close. After that came a period of tweaking, trying to decide when to best use hero, how to move the boss best, how many people do assign to do what. In the end we had changed most things as compared to how we had tried the fight at the very beginning, and it was working much better. Most importantly we were getting more dps on the boss. In the end we were close to a kill every try and finally we got the last percent down. Good job everyone on killing Chronomatic Anomaly! Easy boss next?

Going into mythic we had an impression already that Skorpiron would be relatively easy. Once we started on the fight it turned out that the encounter was more complicated than we first expected. For a while we moved markers around and changed them a yard here and there to make sure the boss was always faced away from us, but the tank could still move away from Arcane Tethers. Once we had all that in order we had a period of wiping on the green phase damage, and then another period where we wiped from a specific shockwave that coincided with the boss destroying all but one pillars. But we sorted out all the kinks and in the end, it wasn’t that hard of a fight. Skorpiron is dead!

And finally it’s time for Gul’dan. We will finally fight the “back to the future” boss from the alternate timeline created by Garrosh, or whatever the lore for this douchebag is. It’s almost like Blizzard just winged the in game story so they could put Gul’dan in the Warcraft movie and then have new players meet him in the game. In any case, Gul’dan had put up the hardest fight on normal so we naturally assumed he would be hardest on heroic as well. We were right! It took us several resets to progress on this guy, even though most parts of the fight were the same as on normal. The main reason for that was that we had a hard time dealing with the higher numbers required. In the end we improved, both on not getting hit by things like Fel Efflux, and on doing more damage. Tonight it went better than the other nights and all of a sudden the alternative Gul’dan was dead! Good job everyone! Mythic next!

Question: Now that we’ve killed orcs for several expansions, and we finally killed Gul’dan as well. Who will be the next orc-boss? Perhaps it will also be someone who was already dead and who will timetravel to us to be a boss? Our bet’s on Mankrik’s wife!

Like Spellbender Aluriel, Elisande was an encounter where we hadn’t learned the tactics on normal. Because there were no tactics to learn. Since she was the second to last boss we had expectations of the fight being difficult. However once we started pulling her it was all much easier than we had thought. Once we realised that heroism was best at the pull things fell into place pretty quickly and we soon had a kill. Grand Magistrix Elisande down, only Gul’dan to go!

Of all the normal bosses, we thought High Botanist Tel’arn was the hardest – next to Gul’dan. For that reason we saved him to last of the optional bosses. In reality it turned out that since normal and heroic were exactly the same tactics, we didn’t really need to worry. He wasn’t easy. There were still aspects of the fight that just didn’t agree with us. But he wasn’t hard either. It didn’t take many pulls to have him dead! Just Elisande and Gul’dan left!

Next heroic encounter was Star Auger Etraeus, partly because he dropped tier, and partly because Botanist seemed like the hardest boss on normal. We spent a little time deciding how to deal with the Novas and how to position ourselves in the different phases. Once we had figured that out it was pretty smooth sailing. We had increasingly good tries until he fell over! 7/10 heroic down after the second week. Good job guys!