After a repeat of our heroic Alysrazor kill we had a resounding "fuck no" to going back to Lord Rhyolith. So we moved on to bigger and better things. That led us straight to Majordomo Staghelm a fight that really didn't change at all. Other then the fact that he had over 100 million hp. After one fulse start we got our positioning right and went to work on a long fight where surprisingly few errors could be made. Over the next hour we refined our raid cool down rotation and began to push every closer to a new kill. With time running out on our last raid of the week's cycle we put one more attempt on the table before moving on and killing Rag. And our course on our last attempt there it is was:

Majordomo folded and gave up his pretty purples. Thinking of it now, we've had so many first kills on last attempts of the night that we should just make every one of our attempts on new bosses that last one of the night. It seems to fit! And work for some reason. At any rate, after only a couple hours of working on him we really made it look like we knew what we were doing. Great job all!

And here is our little shiny:

Grats to our looters:

Tivron - Shoulders of the Fiery Protector

Braax - Fandral's Flamescythe

and

Holypablo - Jaws of Defeat

Moving on to this past monday we had cleared our normal and heroic farm content and again had our eyes on a new prize, this time in the form of that fiery behemoth of a gatekeeper Baleroc. It took us a little time to accustom ourselves to the passing of the Tormented debuff mechanic, which was not unlike the Burn debuff from way back in Sunwell with Brutallus. We fumbled for a bit with 70% and 50% attempts and then finally we put in an awesome 6% attempt at the enrage timer with one of our dps having been dead for nearly 40% of the fight!

Sadly though it was kick <Method> in the nuts day as shortly after our best attempt the gate to Baleroc shut on us and prevented us from continuing with our attempts and the rest of the instance until we forced a soft reset. Killing nearly a third of our time in Firelands we were unable to keep up with our attempts if we wanted a repeat of our heroic Staghelm kill and finish off Rag for the week. Sadly however the nut kicking didn't stop there as we were plagued by disconnects on Staghelm and with so little time remaining we were forced to clear on normal.

Fast forward to tuesday night and we stepped up to Baleroc again with some refined postioning thanks in no small part to Flushot. Many of us were not expecting a kill, but we knew we were close to one. But after an hour of attempts where we facepalmed and had too much spreading of the STD known as Tormented, we put in a heart pounding, adrenaline rushing, body shaking attempt with two deaths and a dps down at the enrage time!... Vent screaming galor... mostly by me, I think, my bad, lost my cool. We pulled it out and rejoiced in 4/7H goodness:

By far my favorite kill in a long, long time! After only a little more then two hours of work on this guy we again made it look like we can play this game with the best of em! Great job again and we'll be looking into Beth'tilac and reuniting with Lord Rhyolith in the next couple of weeks.

Of course, here is our litte something extra for the kill besides the purples:

Grats to our looters:

Flushot - Gauntlets of the Fiery Vanquisher

Holypablo - Casque of Flame

and

Seawolfx - Flickering Handguards of the Rockslab

As always, more to come!

To begin with this should have been posted a long, LONG time ago and the simple reason why it was not is because, well... I'm lazy and it feels a little wierd posting a screen shot of the same boss twice. But here we go!

We start weeks back with Shannox and his one annoying hell hound from, well hell. The mechanics are not very different, in fact its a little interesting how taking away a couple of mechanics to add a couple more made this fight so much harder then its normal version. After killing Rag we wanted a new challenge and we found it in this guy. With only two healers we marched in and thought it couldn't be so bad, but with all the shifting and moving of the raid and tanks bobbing when they should have weaved, it made it stressful and next to impossible for our healers to be everywhere they needed to be all at once. While we were getting close and our healers Holy and Thv were doing an awesome job, we just couldn't get him on the first night and ended up clearing and coming back the next week.

Now with one of our hunters (Zennis) switching toons to his shaman, we had our 3rd healer going into this one and along with a little better raid maneuver managment and some great Rageface kiting by our mages (Loafingmage and Norager), and of course yours truely turning off his floating combat text so he could see the fire traps and not be a fat cow wanting to be barbecued. We worked this one over and took a *cough* "screen shot" that may have possibly never been taken so we got this at the very least as proof :P

Fun fight even if after trying Beth, Ryolith and Alys he seems to be missing a mechanic or 2 to make him truely heroic, but he is still a nice step up in difficulty.

Grats to our looters:

Holypablo - Leggings of the Fiery Vanquisher

Holypablo - Bracers of the Dread Hunter

Tivron - Shatterskull Bonecrusher

and

Seawolfx - Crystallized Firestone

After Shannox we moved onto Lord Ryolith and it was a bitch. For weeks we worked on him and there was just nothing doing. We had the worst luck imaginable for active volcano placements and no matter what we tried nothing seemed to work out. Not to say we didn't come close, we had several sub 10% attempts in phase 2, but there was just nothing doing. It got so bad ppl started thinking of not logging on for this guy and every time we left without a kill many of us were left wanting to kick puppies and punch babies... not our own of course. He still lives, but we'll be back...

So we switched to Alysrazor hoping to have a little more success and to give our crew a little bit of a new feel to refresh us. And we got just what we were looking for. The new mechanics in phase 1 made this fight a whole new ball game and even though it feels like an excessively long fight it is very fun. We worked on the rythem for most of the night and while we only got through all of phase 1 and 2 a couple of times, we left Firelands that night feeling confident that this boss would die in short order and not in a homicidal rage like we had in the previous weeks.

Come monday we got our shot and took it. Many of us were not feeling well. I; myself not having slept in nearly 3 days, was unable to make accurate calls and almost everytime (rather then once so often) called out the wrong person's name when trying to warn them to move or assigned some ppl to multiple positions or the wrong ones all together. While it was funny, it didn't help very much, we buckled down and put forth what was looking like a near flawless kill. If you know us however, we never do things like the pros! After the second ground phase that left Alysrazor at 9% a curtain someone called out to keep going, but ignore the meteors... yeah, guess how well that went? Everyone was either confused about the call or just went along and then the first Fire Storm came and well... that wiped out pretty much everyone, excluding myself a healer, our solo air team and one or two others made it. Shortly after all that was left was Loaf flying around trying everything and anything to stay alive and just before he died, POW!!! Pryo crit to the face and Alysrazor falls from the heavens with phat loots and 10 dead Methodoens spread before her.

Epic fail kill, but a kill nonetheless:

One for the ages ladies and gents! A wipe at 0.00%, a wipe so close that it was a kill!

And here is that other little thing to go along with it:

Grats to our looters:

Tippiee - Chest of the Fiery Protector

Valborg - Greathelm of the Voracious Maw

and

Norager - Wings of Flame

Coming up next we got Majordomo Staghelm!

So last week we spent the whole time trying fervently to get Rag down before the nerf bat fell on him. Sadly work got in the way at the worst time... we were close, so close... only a couple of percent away from a kill. Last night we went into Firelands after the nerfs had taken affect. I have to say, Blizzard didn't use a nerf bat, they used a sledge hammer. Firelands is a joke... I know we only raid a couple of nights a week, for a couple hours a night, but it would have been nice to kill Rag and get into the heroics before the hammer fell and Firelands didn't need a nerf this bad. It would be nice for Blizzard to make 3 difficulties, easy, normal and heroic. Have easy and normal be acessible right from the get go and need a normal clear for heroics. Have them all drop different ilvl's of loot and then ppl can decide for themselves where to go to see the content, instead of blizzard nerfing a Raid Instance into oblivion like they did for this one.

Bitching aside it was nice to finally get this boss down, even though we're only a scant 4% away from a kill last wednesday. People should really have no problems with this boss from now on. We walked in after one shotting every other boss in firelands, laughing and crying a little bit at just how incredibly easy fights like Staghelm and Alysrazor were, and we one shot this shadow of Rag. Sounds great right? It made it even more so (and more sad) as after the second transition nothing went right. We lost Thv (one of our two healers) leading to two dps deaths. So we did phase three while killing the Scions with two tanks, 1 healer and 4 dps... that's sad.

But again nice to having him down and we are looking forward to killing some tier 11 heroic bosses in our free time and looking forward to some challenges in the tier 12 heroics.

Grats to our looters:

Tippiee - Helm of the Fiery Protector

Holypablo - Ko'gun, Hammer of the Firelord

and

Zennis - Choker of the Vanquished Lord

Getting a really good look at this boss on monday gave us a leg up last night as we once again found ourselves in Firelands looking into the eyes of another fiery boss. Staghelm's fire orb phase put us through the ringer monday, but after a repeat of our Alysrazor kill we were ready for a long night. Many attempts didn't go very well, but we started to hone in on him as the night went on. More then a couple near misses were the result of him jumping INTO the melee before transforming back into a scorpion. We assumed this was brought about by us hiding one of our healers in there so that was changed and with the dying seconds of our raid ticking away on our last attempt we nailed it!

Another thrilling kill that left me with my heart pumping strong even in the middle of our kill, somehow knowing that this was going to be it. Staghelms simple mechanics, but crappy rng stifled us for a short time, but after giving him some hard work we crossed him off our list. Great job everyone!

Afterwards (even though it was past our raid time) we couldn't help but go take a look at our good old friend Rag, who some of us still remember killing for the first time more then 6 years ago! Giving it the old college try without explaining any of the mechanics we pulled and made it a good one, however you're probably not supposed to let a dps and tank die early and have the other tanks stacks of Burning Wound get so high that it starts hitting for 75,000 fire dmg every 2 seconds. Looking forward to another fun kill on monday, or soon after :)

Grats to our looters:

Flushot - Mantle of the Fiery Vanquisher

Tivron - Flowform Choker

and

Braax - Fandral's Flamescythe

Charbroiled turkey and it isn't even thanks giving yet! After working on this fiery bird from hell a couple of weeks ago and not getting a chance to tackle him last week, we decided to go for a progression night first, rather then farm up our normal 4/7. Of course it paid off! Making a slight change to the air team and having less interupts on the ground then we would have liked, we put together a string of really bad attempts... heh. Afterwards we put together a number of well executed ones that culminated into one spectacular adrenaline rush of a kill.

All the light bulbs clicked on and people dodged flaming tornados of death like pros. Though this was not a perfect kill with everything nice and clean, it was awesome! With less then 20% to go, one of our resident fail feral druids (Braax) took a face plant after getting his ass handed to him by a baby bird. I quickly heroic leaped over in order to prevent the baby from locking onto anyone else and had to proceed in rotating all my defensive cd's while running to the worms and clearing enrages. I managed to kill one and take the other below 40% before the tornado phase with the help of some freed up dps. Got to love dodging tornados with a homicidal flaming baby bird trying to eat your face while its enraged. But it all just added to the fun as I frantically called out for a battle rezzed Braax to pick up the boss, but was not needed as our healers and dps gave Alysrazor a dirt nap!

Very fun and difficult fight with some fresh mechanics of chaos, got to love how a tank (me) can top the meters with over 115k dps :) and letting tanks be top dogs on 2/7 fights in Firelands.

Sadly again it wasn't all sunshine and kittens, as an old friend had to stop by... thanks a whole lot again Blizz for a screwed up loot system in 10 man raids... no shaman... so shaman loot drops yet again on another first kill...

But Staghelm and Rag await!

Grats to our looters:

Flushot - Alysra's Razor

and

Guildbank - Maelstrom Crystal via Craterflame Spaulders