Another Crazy Night

It all started out innocently enough. I picked up my fishing and cooking daily quests in Dalaran and headed up to Icecrown for the Argent Tournament Dailies. They were quickly completed and I went back to Dalaran to fish in the sewers for some Corroded Jewelry. It wasn't fun as there's usually 10 to 20 other people fishing down there so you can't just listen for your own bobber. So after about 10 casts I was getting antsy and annoyed with the whole process when finally I fished up the jewelry. But what came along with the jewelry?? A Giant Sewer Rat! Finally. After spending countless hours fishing by myself down there in the sewers without any luck whatsoever, I get the rat after spending just a few minutes while looking for Jewelry! Old Ironjaw, I'm coming for you next!!

So that left me with just a cooking daily to do. I sent some cooked rhino dogs over from my banker, only to find out they were Mighty Rhino Dogs. But time had run out. It was time for Ulduar. Luckily, on the way up to the Ulduar entrance, there's quite a few rhinos out there so I quickly picked up my four rhino meat and got ready to start a new ten man raiding week.

The plan for the night was to attempt Flame Leviathan and XT-002 on hard modes. So we got assembled, got into our vehicles, and headed out. We left just one tower up and proceeded to one-shot the Flame Leviathan earning us some nice Emblems of Conquest along with some nice loot, including Firesoul for my nice new main hand weapon.

After the Flame Leviathan, it was time to start working on XT-002 in hard mode. We were able to break his heart each time when trying, but his resulting "Heartbroken" mode is quite taxing. First you have adds to finish off before you can focus on XT, then you also have to worry about void zones left by gravity bombs and light sparks left by light bombs. On top of this, his tantrum hits for more damage and he also has a short enrage timer. After a lot of attempts (probably 8-10), we were really getting the fight down - knowing when to use cooldowns, where to drop void zones, if we should kill the light sparks or not (I think you have to, but focusing DPS on them makes it tougher to get the XT-002 down before his hard enrage timer). Eventually, we abandoned the hard mode. We might not have the gear at the current time to do it or we just need a lot more practice healing through all of his various attacks. We did learn one important thing though. And welcome to Tiddly's first boss fight explanation with drawing...


So here we have XT-002's room. You enter from the south where it says "Entrance" and have four scrap piles around the room. He usually stays near the stairs at the north side of the room. What we found is that if you pull him over and tank him between two scrap piles on the side of the room, he will only spawn adds from the two scrap piles furthest away from him (denoted by the incoming red arrows). During our multiple attempts, he spawned various levels of trash. During one attempt, he spawned one group of small bots (easily killed with one Blizzard). During another attempt, all he spawned was one bomb bot. But then during one of our last attempts, he spawned 2 sets of small bots, one bomb bot, and one pummeler. So your spawns will vary from fight to fight, but he will only spawn them from the two scrap piles with arrows. Never from the two piles right next to him.

So with this information in hand, and knowing we could take the heart down to almost killing it, we set out to see if we could get Must Deconstruct Faster. And the short answer is, yes, yes you can. We killed him in 173 seconds, well under the 205 required by the achievement. With adds spawning from only two scrap piles, I was easily able to take them down on each pass with our offtank picking up the pummelers and since we were able to do so much damage to the heart, we basically chained heart spawns. If you manage to do enough damage to his heart, it will immediately take him from 75% to 50% and spawn the heart again. You can then take him from 50% to 25% and so on. So yeah, 173 seconds. Not too shabby. But unfortunately, not hard mode.

We continued on, one shot Kologarn, headed to the Iron Council and two-shot them and then went over to Auriaya where we quickly one shot her. We had about 30 minutes left so we decided against going for Mimiron's trash and went back to take on Razorscale and try and get A Quick Shave. So yeah, one shot that. Not a problem there. We got him down to 67% on his first landing and easily got him under 50% on the second landing and destroyed him after he landed. So that didn't take the 30 minutes we had left. So let's go over to Ignis.

The first time we killed Ignis we zerged him. It's not a quick zerg, but you can do it - ignore the adds and just focus fire Ignis down. This time though, we thought it'd be a good idea to kill him the correct way. And...one shot. So that pretty much ended a great Wednesday "pre-clear" night. Our Wednesday night group is new and the sole purpose is to clear out the early bosses in Ulduar so our Thursday night Gold Team run can work on new content. For example, we have everything down right now up to the Tier 8 bosses. So tonight we'll probably work on Freya and then Mimiron with Thorim or Hodir coming next week. But even though we were done in Ulduar, we weren't done for the night. Not with the Alliance controlling Wintergrasp.

Let's go get some Tier 8! So we headed over, lost one player, picked up a pug mage (drats! competition on Tier 8), and quickly one shot Emalon. Tier 8 dropped for our healy druid, Dylana and he becomes the first in the team with any pieces of Tier 8. We then played around with Archavon who is a joke these days, got an offspec piece of Tier 7 for our pug mage, and I got a PvP cloak (because you know how much I PvP...).

And thus ended our fun night of raiding. In the end, I got a few great achievements, including Three Car Garage on our Flame Leviathan Hard Mode take down and I'm sitting at 6,420 points. Tonight, Freya and Mimiron are on notice and tomorrow the 25 man Gold Team makes our first foray into Ulduar. And then Saturday, Crusader Tiddlywinks. A fun few days coming up.

What a Night!

So there we were, the Gold Team had gathered and we were just sitting around the campfire with nothing to do. The Argent Tournament quests were complete, the severed arm had been returned to Olissara, and Glowergold's cheese was safely in his hands again. So...what to do? Let's go to Ulduar!

We quickly formed up and decided that since we defeated the Flame Leviathan just after causing an overload last time, that this time we would NOT catapult our druid and shaman on top of him and just DPS him down. And so it would come to pass that the Gold Team would take down the Flame Leviathan in one attempt and earn the Shutout achievement. What next we wondered? Would we go and attempt Ignis and his flaming naughty bits or Razorscale and his breath of doom?

Since we had the most practice with Razorscale we decided she would be first. The first time through, we decided that we'd try and hold off on the harpoons until all of the watchmen and sentinels were down. However, they just kept spawning and eventually ate us up. We regrouped and adjusted our strategy to just make sure no sentinels were up when we used the harpoons and we easily took her out even though Dylana, our awesome healy tree went down really early. Eleazarjr and Jizo did an amazing job keeping us all up. And what should she drop for me? The Eye of the Broodmother! It's the second best trinket with only the Scale of Fates being better at this current time.


After Razorscale we once again assessed our surroundings. Flaming naughty bits or a spoiled robot? XT-002 it was. We quickly grouped up as Aravic had to return to Dalaran and took him on for the first time. We almost had him killed when some random enemies joined the fight and made quick work of us. We regrouped and then realized that we had not cleared the trash before engaging XT-002. We quickly cleared them, engaged XT-002 again and easily took him down. Utilizing a heroism on the first heart exposure enabled us to quickly get him down as when his heart was no longer exposed, he was already at half health and his heart was exposed again. When all was said and done, he rewarded us with two achievements - Nerf Gravity Bombs and Nerf Engineering! A pleasant surprise after taking him down in (almost) one shot (darn trash).


All in all, an amazing run. Tomorrow we shall gather for four more hours of fun. The Antechamber of Ulduar awaits us.

A Busy Week

Last week was pretty busy. It of course all started on Tuesday with the Argent Tournament, continued Thursday with 10 man Ulduar, progressed Friday with 25 man full clear Naxx and 2 attempts at Flame Leviathan, extended to Sunday with a Sunwell clear, and finished yesterday with more advancement in the Argent Tournament.

Back to Friday, we quickly gathered up and discussed what our next move would be. Would we concentrate on 25 man Ulduar, or continue for a few weeks in Naxxramas, continuing to gear up players and, maybe more importantly, get gear for secondary specs. It was decided we would stay in Naxxramas for 2-3 weeks and gear people up as the week before was our first time downing Kel'Thuzad (progress bars on the right updated). So we pressed forward and cleared Naxxramas in record time. The week prior, we had taken time on Thursday to clear the Spider wing, whereas on Friday, we cleared the whole place in under 3.5 hours - a very good time for us. We had two wings down in under 1 hour. So with our record time, we decided to head over to Ulduar to see what was going on there.

We quickly formed up, explained the first fight and promptly...wiped on trash. We just got too spread out, so on our next attempt, we stayed together and easily made it to the Flame Leviathan. Unfortunately, some people had issues with their vehicles and we also had problems picking people up after they had jumped on the Flame Leviathan. So we didn't get him down on the two attempts we had before we had to call it for the night. I'm looking forward to having more time in there - we should be able to easily take out the Flame Leviathan, but I can see issues with XT-002 already (it's a healer check) and I'm hoping Razorscale is a little bit easier on 25 man than it is on 10 man.

Then on Sunday, I see someone advertising a Sunwell run in trade chat. Bleh, I've been before and even at 80, unless your team has good coordination, you're not going to get past Felmyst or some other later bosses (which you can zerg as well). But then Aenador messaged me from the group and wanted to see if I wanted to go. With her and others from Familiaris Incursio in the group, I felt a little safer and decided to give it a shot. And I'm glad I did. It was quite fun and I got to finally see M'uru, the Twins, and Kil'Jaeden. I also won a piece of Tier 6 which makes me happy and earned another achievement. I just have the Black Temple left now. Here's some pictures from the run:

(2, 3, 4, and 5)

Which leads us to Monday. After quickly completing the daily cooking quest in my search for a Chef's Hat (I'm now over half way there), I headed up to the Argent Tournament ready to become a Champion! I quickly completed the dailies, bested a Champion in a joust, and earned my title. Tiddlywinks of Gnomeregan.


With the Champion title achieved, it was time to work for another faction. Ironforge just happened to be standing right there, so I went to work for them. He only had one quest for me on the day, so I headed over to the main tent to see what else I could do. Ah yes, the Black Knight!

I accepted the challenge, went outside and picked a steed and awaited the Black Knight. And what happened next? I demolished him. Pretty disappointing. I feel like this was a real opportunity wasted - so did my other guildmates who bested him yesterday. But hey, it's 10 more achievement points, upping my total to 5,860.

After that, it was time to work on getting some more Champion's Seals. The quests are getting a bit tougher this time around. The jousting opponents are much tougher and trying to work your way through the boneguards near the Citadel is a bit tougher. But all the quests were completed, even the group quest with the help of the wonderful Vetarra and I got my 5 seals, bringing me to 15. Just a few more days and I'll be able to get my Mechanopeep!

In to Ulduar...

Last night, the gold team formed up and headed into Ulduar for the first time. We weren't quite sure what to expect from the instance when it came to difficulty and so after getting into our vehicles, we were ready to tackle the gauntlet and the Flame Leviathan.


We quickly tackled the gauntlet and repaired our engines before engaging the Leviathan, and, he was EASY. Maybe a little too easy to start off Ulduar we were thinking. But we took our loot (I received a Lifespark Visage) and we continued on - or at least tried to.


We ran into an issue where we couldn't get out of combat, no matter what we tried, so in the end, we had to run all the way back to the start and out of Ulduar. Upon returning, we were able to take the teleporter to the Forge and we decided to see what Razorscale had for us. Unfortunately, not good news.

After multiple failed attempts, trying multiple different strategies, we gave up on Razorscale (his fireballs do a little too much damage for us apparently). We then went over to see how Ignis was doing and..umm..wiped a bunch on his trash. So yeah, that was a humbling experience right there. After finally getting those two molten colossuses (colossi?) down, we proceeded to then figure out how to get the rest of his trash down. We tried avoiding cyclones, but they kept going after the healers it seemed, so with healers down, we wiped a few more times. We finally got to Ignis, but it was getting late. Nonetheless, we got about 5 or 6 attempts in on him before having to call it for the night.

For those out there complaining that Ulduar is too easy because a couple guilds have downed Yogg-Saron, you're just wrong. Simple as that. Ulduar is fun, challenging, and exciting. I look forward to progressing further in the coming weeks.