Ulduar Impressions Part 1

It's Tuesday April 14Th and I'm sitting at work. Before I had head off I had downloaded and installed the patch and was ready to go. Patch days are always rough and as I checked the web there were frequent delays of getting the patch up and running. It didn't bother me because I knew it was always like this whenever a new patch hit. Plus my guild doesn't start raiding until midnight and that is when most people are giving up for the night. It's about 11 o'clock and I am heading home salivating at the new content that I am about to embark on.

I arrive home and I quickly log in. All my talents have been reset and I go ahead and run to my trainer to purchase dual spec. It's been a long time coming but I'm glad that I finally don't have to pick if I'm gonna grind as prot or go ret to have some fun in PVP. I jump on vent and the guild is all excited with the idea of stepping foot into Ulduar. 32 people online. A lot more then we usually have on a given night. All of them are anxious and ready to raid, even a few that haven't been online in a few weeks. We already know that they aren't gonna get invited unless we are desperate. We send out the invites, start the summoning, and zone in. Its times to take on Flame Leviathan.

Flame Leviathan

As a guild we like the idea of just jumping into things and figuring out how to do it on our own. Often times after seeing what the boss is about we settle on a strategy that works well for us. The first run of trash we just tell everyone to pick a vehicle, jump in and have at it. We ram through the Iron army and make our way to the boss. We engage him because we didn't know any better and are aimlessly riding around using whatever abilities we have. After the first wipe our guild leader lays down a game plan for us to use.

We assign different groups for different tasks. We get an interrupt order in place. We have a time to call for people to jump on him and destroy the turrets. Our second attempt goes a lot better and we ended up downing him that attempt. The fight was a lot easier then we had anticipated. We were surprised that we were able to bring him down quickly but we weren't gonna complain and we took our loot and moved onto the next boss.

Razorscale

We moved onto our next target which was Razorscale. Even though most of us are trying to go in blind and learn the encounter as we go, most of us have been looking at the information that was available online already. We set up tank locations to pick up the adds, designate someone to fire the harpoons and split up our dps. It didn't go pretty our first couple of pulls. We ended up wiping a lot as we learned what the abilities of the adds were. What to do when he landed and how to not stand in the fire. After a couple attempts and berserk timers, we ended up bringing him down to 50%. None of our tanks were ready so he just headed to whoever had aggro. Our druid ended up picking him up first but he went down quick enough. After that one of our pali tanks got him and he went down after a couple of seconds, then I stepped up and grabbed him and started up and realized he was throwing fire patches in front of him. By the time I realized I should be kiting him around I had went down. We had 1 last tank left and he was able to hold the boss until dps was able to kill him. It was a sloppy first kill but a kill is a kill so we were happy and took our loot.

Ignis

It was time for some trash. We knew that blizzard had wanted trash to matter more and you could defiantly see it here. As we made our way down to the boss the trash took many of our lives. We learned what each add did and what we had to do to survive even if people didn't learn from their mistakes. We finally made it down to the boss and I was designated to be the Main Tank. It was time to step up to the challenge. I usually sit around 42k health buffed in my Best in Slot tanking gear so I was pretty confident going in. We pull him and I go down instantly. Boy did he hit like a truck. I look at my combat log and I got hit for around 35k. We aren't discouraged but I'm shaken a little bit. We get the pull down right and I proceed to kite him around the room whenever he puts scorches down.

Then the chaos starts. Getting the adds molten was a big pain, people getting randomly meelee'd, people dieing in the slag pots, main tank deaths due to to many adds. There were a lot of issues with this boss. We keep trying different strategies, using different classes to do different things. In the end we ended up over complicated the process but the boss was bugged to begin with. It was past the end of raid time so we decided to pack it up and try again the next day

We come back the next day and its time for invites and we're sitting with 22 core raiders logged in. We have some non-raiders logged in so we ask them if they want to go with us. We knew we weren't gonna get much out of them but we all wanted to get into Ulduar and get some shots into the bosses. We go back to Ignis and continue using different strategies since there were a bunch of hot fixes on the boss. I notice that I'm not getting hit as hard. Normal physical attack are doing around 27k. I was worried that as a paladin I wasn't gonna be able to handle Ulduar but then they nerfed druids and Dk's a bit so I was hoping we would all be on equal footing. There were still some major bugs with Ignis as he continued to meelee our healers as he ran to put someone in the slag pot so we decided to move onto a different boss instead.

XT-002 Deconstructor

Due to a bug there was no trash on our way to XT so we get there and start buffing up. Like before we didn't look at any strategy so I rush in and ended up getting stomped. The healers weren't ready and the boss hits somewhat hard but an off tank ended up picking her up. All I have to say is OMG that voice is so unexpected and funny. I was taken back when this huge robot sounded like a 10 year old girl.

I ended up telling one of our other tanks to go ahead and tank the boss. I know my fellow tanks love what they do and I don't believe in the concept of Mt's so I told them to go ahead and give this a shot. Also I wanted to try out my dual spec Ret spec. We proceed to give her a few more shots and iron out any issues we have. We designate people to different areas and safe zones to run to if they get a bomb. We get our strategy down but people kept dcing or leaving without a word. We were already taking non-raiders to begin with and we ended up having only 23 people in raid and not enough dps. Every attempt people ended up dead and we kept hitting the enrage timer. We knew it was a wash so we decided to stop early and split off into 10 mans.

The second night was really saddening for the guild since we spent 4 hours wiping with nothing to show for it. I think I wrote enough for now so I'll save the problems of 10 mans and the remaining 25 man bosses for another post.