Ulduar Impressions part 2

Alright so now the guild is getting into a groove in learning new encounters, getting new loot and seeing where our strengths and weaknesses are. We have a couple hours left in raid so we break off into our separate 10 man teams. We try to make them as equal as we can. Considering how easy flame leviathan was on 25 man we decide to give hard mode a try to see how it works. We start by keeping all 4 towers up to see what happens. Once we pull FL all chaos breaks loose. Lashers are coming from everywhere, there are orbital bombardments, fire all over the place and debuffs on us that we have no idea what they do. We proceed to get our ass handed to us so we decide to do him with only 1 tower up.

Since we had 2 teams going we could see on the other side of the fence the other team had already cleared him and were already getting achievements. Both teams had friendly competition going so we felt we had to pick up the pace. We kept up the frost tower and learned how the encounter works with that tower up. An important aspect of that fight is being able to overload FL's circuit so that he doesn't have a huge ammount of gathering speed debuffs. We kept switching strategies and putting diferent people p to destroy his circuits and we got pretty close with a 5% wipe. The thing about FL is that every battle is going to feel close because it all determined by how much health you have considering there is no way to heal yourself. You will live a certain ammount of time but its one of those fights where "Bring his health down to zero before you go down to zero". After 2 hours of wiping and having my durability at all red we decide to just kill him wiht no towers up. Even though we quickly killed him it felt like a loss considering we "gave up".

I was talking to a few of my guildmates and all of us are excited about the new content but we also realize that hard modes will give us better loot. There is a line that ussually gets drawn as to whether we should try the hard modes or just move on because there is loot on those other bosses that we need in just normal mode. Our guild leader is very ambitious and I think that is a great quality about him. Coming from a guild in pre-wotlk where we were number 1 on the server and were constantly getting server first I had less faith in the guild I came into in the beginning. Zealous really did suprise me. Even though Naxx was "easy mode" we were constantly outdoing ourselves. When thinking about encounters such as Sarth+Drakes and 6 minute maly I was very skeptical about us being able to handle the encoutner or even if we had enough quality raiders to meet the requirements. But time and time again we pull it together and get the encoutner down.

I don't think the hard modes are beyond us. My guild can definatley defeat these encounters but its like every other boss where we need to learn how the encoutner works and our own responsibilties and find the little spaces where we can pull out something amazing. With that being said we raid 4 hours a night for 4 nights in a week. That gives us about 16 hours a week of attempts which we ussually stretch to 20 because we wanna give it a couple more attempts or quickly bring down another boss. We are at the point now where we have 5/14 on 25 man and 9/14 on 10 man after our first reset of raiding. I would personally rather go back and spend our 20 hours of raid time getting the next normal boss down getting our upgrades for the raid and move on and learn 1 of the other 14 bosses we haven't downed yet. I like the idea of progression. I like getting a new boss down and working toward the next one. Once we finish off the final boss I would love to come back and try it with 1 tower up because thats the next logical step.

We ended up coming back to Ignis on night 3 of raiding. We had more people log in that night and had a well balanced group. BLizzard implemented a new set of hot fixes on that boss and we were ready to give him a go. We decided to make our strategy less complicated and have the entire raid stand in between. I then kite the scorches in a diamond pattern around the raid and have our Ot's pick up the adds make them molten pull them in the water and have a dedicated mage break them. This strategy coupled with the hotfixes allowed us to one shot this boss.

I have to say I havne't compared a ton of tanking items from Ulduar. What I have seen so far have been slight upgrades and I'm waiting to get a comprehensive list of what is available before I determine what I'm going after. With that being said it has been said that if you wanted to be a min/max main tank you need to have Jewelcrafting as a proffesion. I currently run Blacksmithing which gives me about 48 stam currently and Mining which gives me 50. JC will give me about 52 but it also gives the best trinket for a tank, the monarch crab which gives 63 stam plus 2 extra sockets. I really didn't want to unlearn a profession because the 2 I had already took me forever to skill up and cost a descent ammount of gold. The main reason I didn't
was becausae i knew Ulduar probably would have some descent trinkets for tanks that wasn't blue. I'm really glad I did because the only item I was salivating over was The Heart of Iron. 162 Stam base and a on use ability every 2 minutes for 452 dodge. When the trinket dropped my jaw dropped to the floor and I wept tears of joy. I was 1 dkp over the other tank in guild so I knew it was mine and I knew I wouldn't have to go and train JC up!.