Northrend Beasts Tamed

On Wednesday, our ten man group formed up and headed off to the new Coliseum, ready for some fun. We were ready for whatever fearsome opponent would face us on the coliseum floor. After quickly dispatching Gormok and his snobolds, we ran into quite a bit of resistance with the twin Jormungers, Acidmaw and Dreadscale. The first issue was deciding which tank would handle each worm and how they would switch each time the worms. It was decided that Jr, our pally tank would always be on the worm that was grounded, while Aravic, our warrior, would be on the worm that was moving (and being kited the whole time).

After sorting that out, the biggest issue that remains is how to cleanse the poison with the fires. After thinking that maybe we could spin the grounded worm around to always be facing the tank and melee, we decided against it as ranged would be caught in the middle and the worms don't always pop up in the same place, complicating positioning. What finally worked is we had Magnidur and/or Santorum, our DPS DKs stand with Aravic infront of the the worm, gathering up the fire debuff and they would then go out and burn the poison off the ranged if they got hit by the grounded worm. On our one good attempt, we had some issues, and we even needed Aravic to go cleanse at one point, but we got them down. Also, of note is the fact that when one worm dies, the other enrages. However, the enrage is only 50% more damage to whomever is tanking the worm. So it wasn't that hard to heal through. The issue remains that there is no downtime between the three stages of the beasts, so very little regen time, but with proper conservation, our healers did a great job.

The final Northrend Beast is Icehowl, and he's pretty much a joke. Once you get past the worms, you shouldn't have any issues. In fact, we lost two players during the worms and Icehowl was just a pushover. He does some AOE raid damage that the healers must deal with, but nothing too huge and as long as people know that when he knocks you back, he'll pick someone to charge, and you just need to move out of the way, you won't have issues. So even down a healer and a DPS (we run 3 healers on new content usually - and even some late Ulduar content), we easily beat Icehowl.

So down they went. And we'll have to wait until next week to fight the next boss. We got two DPS DK items that both went to Santorum, and that was it for the night. I unfortunately missed last night's Ulduar run, but another Super Simian Sphere dropped and went to Dylana. So now Aravic, myself, and Dy can be the monkey ball trio!

Yogg Down

With the team expecting the patch this Tuesday, we knew Sunday would be our only shot at getting Yogg'Saron down without having to do another full clear of Ulduar when we'd rather be in the Coliseum, so we gathered up at 5pm, found our trusty PUG who had helped us on Thursday, and quickly went after Yogg. On our first attempt, our tank had a fatal error, on our second, we had some issues with clouds, on the third, I think we had problems with people getting into the portals on time due to constrictors, but on the fourth...it was perfection. We had the minimum number of Guardians spawn during Phase 1, we we able to get almost every tentacle down during Phase 2 (one corruptor tentacle remained for Phase 3) and our DPS split perfectly during Phase 3 with myself, Grenchlok (our trusty mage PUG), and Comador on the Immortal Guardians and all of our melee DPS on Yogg - Vetarra, Magnidur, Weser. Our healers, Dylana, Xenoxa and Jizo performed perfectly, and the amazing tank, Aravic skillfully held the immortal guardians, DPSed Yogg'Saron, and managed to keep his sanity about him throughout the whole fight. In fact, everyone stayed sane, enabling us to not only down Yogg and clear Ulduar, but also to receive Drive me Crazy (not pictured)

Afterwards, we went over to try doing Sartharion with 3 drakes via the zerg method. We had one near perfect attempt, but all the other attempts fell just a bit short as we would have someone die in one way or another from not paying attention or not knowing positioning. But on that one near perfect attempt, we had him down to about 160k health, so I think with just a little bit of increased DPS, we'll get OS3D down. But until then, we'll have the wonderful Yogg'Saron victory to revel in.