And...we're back! (aka 2 down, 1 to go)

The Gold Team is back. Two weeks ago, after taking two months off due to various scheduling issues, vacations, and general malaise, we reformed and continued on our quest to complete Glory of the Icecrown Raider. Many people had various smaller achievements they needed, but the main reason for raiding was to get down the two last heroic bosses - Sindragosa and Putricide.

After we all re-learned everything we had forgotten over the past two months, we finally took Sindragosa down in heroic mode (we had been working on her for a couple weeks prior to our vacation). The next week Putricide was our target - plus we needed some of the achievements from Rotface and Festergut for some raiders who were absent when we did them the first time. We got to him and gave him a good four attempts before we had to call it a night, ready to reconvene the next week (yesterday).

So we were ready. We all downloaded the Plagued addon which announces via /yell that you have the plague the Professor throws out and how many seconds are left before someone needs to come and get it. This was a huge help to us since that was pretty much the only part of the fight we were having issues with in our earlier attempts. We quickly took him down on our third attempt and made our way over to Valithria Dreamwalker to get the Portal Jockey achievement. It was almost too easy to get this achievement and heal Dreamwalker on easy mode, so we then pushed on to once again face Sindragosa and try and earn All You Can Eat.

For this achievement, it really takes a lot of raid coordination, and we had no problems getting to the second phase (or third phase depending on how you look at it) for the achievement. However, we kept having some poor luck with ice cube positioning and healers getting blocked, but we worked around it, figured out a strategy, and eventually we completed the achievement.

So that left us with just Been Waiting a Long Time For This for our meta achievement. After reading up on a few strategies and figuring out positioning, on our last attempt of the night, we finally got the stack over 30, however, the tank went down at the last second due to the Lich King's stacking buff, and in the scramble to get him up, we lost another player and the chaos was just too much to recover from. Luckily, we'll have all the time in the world next week to work on it and I am certain we can get this fight down. What's tough about this achievement is that the achievement is done right at the start of the fight, so even if you manage to get the stacks to the required amount, you still have to defeat the Lich King (which our group has done only once). So it should be a good challenge for us next week.

While it's nice to be back and amongst friends, I'm still only logging in on our sole raid night. There's just nothing else to be done in the game and I am waiting patiently for Cataclysm to come along. Until then, I'll be content to raid one night a week with my friends and play other games while I wait.