______________________________________________________________________________________________

After having a few pulls on the heroic mode of Warlord Zon’Ozz a previous week we learned the dark phase seemed messy. Not just due to tentacles spawning everywhere but mostly because everyone had different opinions and we spent most of the time discussing who should run where and how and when they should do it. Now that the 15% nerf was implemented we decided to have a second go, and after a few tries of doing the exact same tactic every time we started improving. Once we swapped places on Luria and Worthie we started surviving longer (although we’re still not sure exactly why that swap changed anything) and after having a sub 10% wipe, we got it together and killed not only the tentacles but Zon’Ozz as well! Five heroic modes down and Warmaster Blackhorn will be next.

The art department would like to point out that the new type of font on the screenshot is not a misprint, but possibly a permanent change of font for the webpage.

One of the first heroic modes we ever pulled in Dragon Soul was Hagara the Stormbinder’s. That first time we did only two pulls and then we decided that Yor’Sahj would be the boss to try to kill next. Once we had killed Yor’Sahj and Ultraxion it was however time to return to Hagara and try to improve on those first two tries. Progress started slow, once we thought we had one part down and could work on the next we would be wrong, and have to go back and work on the first again. However eventually it once again proved to be true that practise makes perfect, because we started making less mistakes and surviving for longer. Once we started getting it right it didn’t take long before we finally got Hagara down!

Great job everyone who was part of the progresswipes, this one was certainly a team effort! Also great job Worthie for doing all the feign deaths, and Wilkas for tanking so well on the kill!

So after having killed Yor’Sahj last reset we went and looked at the Ultraxion heroic mode and concluded the execution was very similar to normal mode, and the only tricky part would be to do enough dps and healing. After having cleared the first four bosses on the Thursday raid we started the Sunday on Ultraxion, to possibly have a wipenight. We had him close to dead a few times during the night, but managed to wipe on the very last percentages. Then towards the end of the night, on the eighteenth try, we did everything right and Ultraxion hit the ground with the whole raid alive! Much credit to Zerina and Lumines for keeping us alive, even though both were in their offspecs. Third heroic mode down and five to go!

So after killing Morchok the plan was to aim for Hagara, but due to popular demand we changed our aim to Yor’Sahj the Unsleeping instead. At first we thought the fight wouldn’t be very hard and with some practise we could get it done. However as it would turn out we needed a lot of practise. When starting today’s raid we had spent four resets and over 70 pulls and only been close to kill him twice! Even though we had made small alterations to the tactics during this time, it was pretty much just the execution we were failing. Then on the third pull of the night we stayed alive long enough to have our third ever chance to kill him. And like they say, the third time is the charm! Yor’Sahj dead on the last second before berserk! Yayface! Two heroics down, Yor’Sahj is clearly on farm, and we think we are aiming for Ultraxion next!

So rumour had it that Morchok was the heroic mode to try first, and after the holidays were over we were ready to try. Unfortunately it seemed that the easiest Morchok setup would include having 4 healers, something we can’t easily cough up on a regular raidday. The first testrun we didn’t have much progress, unless you count Cëleb virtually wanting to delete his healgear as progress that is! The second night we managed to get 3 healers and Zerina to heal, and we did better from the start, not only due to healers but mainly because we put the hopeless feral offspec tank on Kochrom instead of Morchok. As soon as we started to get the hang of it it felt like a manageble fight, and after a few wipes we had both Morchok and Kochrom dead. First heroic mode encounter down. Hagara or Yor’Sahj next!

A Happy New Year to and from all in Lazy Peon Tavern. May 2012 bring only good things:
fast bosskills, low repairbills, and only the loot we want!
And peace on earth and all that stuff too.

Happy holidays to and from everyone in Lazy Peon Tavern!

After having reached Deathwing (after killing Deathwing) on the very first reset of Dragon Soul we went back for the second reset thinking we would be clearing everything superfast and then progress on Deathwing. That did however not turn out to be the case. Instead we spent most of the second reset killing Deathwing. The third reset started with the first seven bosses, up until Deathwing, being dead at the end of the Thursday raid, leaving two raiddays to progress on Deathwing. Turns out Deathwing wasn’t at all as chaotic as the previous addfights in Dragon Soul, like for example Deathwing. We had some mistakes and misfortune on the third and forth platform, but as soon as we got to his head Deathwing was dead!

So all normal modes in Dragon Soul down within three resets, and it could probably all have been done the first week had we had an extra raid that reset. It feels a bit anticlimactic that it was this easy and was over so fast. Hopefully the heroic modes will last longer! As for the final encounter, it certainly wasn’t the trickiest fight in Dragon Soul. Other fights are surely harder than Deathwing, for example Deathwing.

So for the last raid we had two encounters left, to have cleared the whole instance in the first reset. And to really point out who was the bad guy of this expansion both encounters would be the same boss: Deathwing. Spine of Deathwing appeared to be a chaotic fight at first and we did a lot of mistakes while learning the encounter. It took some wipes to gradually get better, and some arguing over how many corruptions we wanted up, one or one. We ended up going with one due to popular demand. Towards the end of the night things started working a lot better and suddenly we had a try where we just killed him! Or not really killed since he’s alive for the next encounter, but at least we got loot! We had some attempts on Madness of Deathwing as well and it didn’t seem like a very hard fight, it will however have to wait until another reset. Yay us, Deathwing almost dead!

So after having some tries on Ultraxion in the previous raid we went back with a new group on the Sunday. Having had him on 8% in the previous raid we were pretty certain that we could kill him without much hassle; and if you disregard the first two pulls when the raidleader died from the first Hour of Twilight, it did actually go quite smooth. A few wipes and then the big bad drake was dead, without us even having been into the hurtful last minute.

With wind in the sails we approached the lootship and Warmaster Blackhorn, only to realise it wasn’t as much a lootship as we had expected. We did our best to stand in voidzones on the ground while killing everything, while not letting the ship die. Yet every single time we ended up overwhelmed by adds with the ship acting out some scene from Titanic. Towards the end of the night we decided we would try with two healers to see if that would work better now than in the first few pulls when we were running like aimless chickens, and lo and behold it did. The last two pulls of the night we got into the second phase for the first times; first time we died fast and second time we killed the boss! With some perspective it seems like an easy fight, and it was once we did it right. We were just a little overwhelmed while learning the encounter.

Finally time for Deathwing’s raid, Dragon Soul! A few of us had already sneakpeaked at the raid on the PTR and knew a little about the fights while others were seeing everything for the first time. The excitement turned to surprise when the first boss got oneshotted, and we had only one wipe per encounter on the next three bosses. Everything felt really easy, especially considering this is the last raid of the expansion! At the end of the night we had a few wipes on Ultraxion. Not because it was a hard fight, but rather because the tanks were Luria and Wilkas!

Observe: The effort put in to kill the first four bosses matches the effort the art department put into the screenshot from Yor’sahj the Unsleeping.

So after killing Majordomo the only heroic mode left in Firelands, for us to unlock Ragnaros heroic, was Beth’tilac. We had waited with even pulling this fight in heroic mode because the rumours were that it would be the hardest of the first six bosses. After spending some time wiping it was clear the rumours were true. It was absolute chaos with no signs of progress. Then we slowly started getting better at handling the spiderlings and kamikaze spiders and it started to look like we could maybe pull off the encounter, or at least pull off the first minutes! It took a few resets to start seeing phase two with any regularity and we had a few wipes on very low percentages, where it would have been a kill with just a bit of luck. Then finally we had a night where everything just worked, and finally the big bad spider was dead!

It’s certainly been the fight we spent the most effort on progressing though the heroic mode on. Worthie even got a special Beth’tilac spec! And we didn’t even have to pay her 80 gold to do it!