Quite a succesfull raidweek this reset, I might say. Not only did we repeat all previously completed hardmodes, we also managed to do two new hardmodes and as icing on the cake we also completed Jema's legendary mace. After completing it, he was the prime attraction in both Dalaran and Ironforge for a while and although the acquisition of fragments is obviously 100% RNG, we're still quite proud to be the first guild with a level 80 legendary on Lightbringer.

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Before going more into Three Lights in the Darkness, first things first. Last week, we didn't try any hardmodes on the nerfed Flame Leviathan and XT-002 because we had other priorities for the week - we didn't feel like spending time on Flame Leviathan and we wanted to do the Must Deconstruct Faster achievement for XT-002. This reset, however, we had some time to do their hardmodes and we finished both on wednesday. I must say, I *really* like Flame Leviathan and many in Gathering share that feeling. In the first weeks it looked like a really boring and stupid fight, but as you get to know the vehicles and add towers, it becomes a really awesome fight. Especially the teamplay between the bikes, the demolisher drivers and their gunners is awesome to see in motion.

XT-002, on the other hand, isn't even worth mentioning. Killing the heart is now just a matter of using heroism and DPS'ing regularly instead of a burst race with potions and cooldowns. We wiped once to the enrage because we had lost five or six DPS to poorly controlled gravity bombs and stuff and proceeded to easily kill it on the next try. This is by far the easiest hardmode in Ulduar now.

Of course, since last week's Yogg-Saron kill Jema has had 30 orange fragments and we just needed to kill Yogg-Saron with three watchers helping to finish the quest. For obvious reasons we chose to do without Hodir's help and spent the entire monday on it. The first pull was actually quite promising as we saw a very smooth phase 1 and phase 2, but completely messed up the transition from phase 2 to phase 3. What then followed was two hours of wiping until just before 22:00 when we had a really amazing attempt that ended in an extremely frustrating enrage wipe when Yogg-Saron had about 150.000 health left. We actually never saw the enrage before and I thought it was quite cool to see your entire raid just die instantly.

One rather annoying thing in Gathering is that after an almost-kill, we somehow always manage to mess up really easy things, which is exactly what was happening this time as well. Another two hours of wiping followed during which we didn't even reach phase 3 anymore and were just screwing up things in phase 1 and phase 2. Since we don't raid on tuesdays the time to add Hodir and kill it normally started creeping closer and at around 23:40 we decided to do one more try and then ask for Hodir's help and kill it. To be honest, it didn't look promising. We had to waste a rebirth to get one of our tanks up in phase 1, had a melee DPS mind controlled in the first portal phase and lost one more DPS at the very start of phase 3. Still tasting the bitter defeat of two hours ago, we pulled as much DPS off of the adds and onto Yogg-Saron as we could without getting overrun. When the enrage was 30 seconds away, we just ignored the adds. The tanks blew all their cooldowns to stay alive and the entire raid nuked Yogg-Saron. Adds went out of control, people died to Lunatic Gaze, healers were DPSing and for 20 seconds, I don't think anybody had a clue what was going on. Needless to say, I had my hands shaking when Yogg-Saron died 9 seconds before the enrage and by the sounds of it, I was not alone.

I know it's not a true hardmode, but I think Three Lights in the Darkness is much, much harder than Heartbreaker, Orbit-Uary or Lose Your Illusion. I can't even begin to think how hectic it is with two less watchers. Awesome job done everyone.

A week after our first Ulduar hardmode kill, it's time to update the news again.



We downed Thorim on hardmode. There's not much to say about it, other than that I mostly echo Befsztyks's comments in that Thorim should have been like this in the first place. It's actually quite a fun fight in hardmode, unlike its normal variant which is just a glorified trash pull.

I personally had a good amount of fun in the gauntlet where with each attempt we were trying to improve our time. It's unfortunate that the first two packs randomly stun your tank, because while it doesn't make any difference in whether or not you make the timer, it adds randomness to how fast you can do the gauntlet. I guess you could just run it with two tanks, but well... Blizzard likes random.

Phase 2 is where it gets hectic. At first we were pretty poor at dodging the lightning and the blizzard, which in turn makes it look like you're nowhere near meeting the soft enrage. Of course it didn't help we started losing tanks when Thorim had 7 or 8 stacks of his buff, but still, it gives you that good old "how the hell are we supposed to do this?" feeling. The raiddamage from the chain lightning is rather high and mostly unavoidable and on top of that Siff is nuking your raid with AoE Frost Volleys. We spent the whole thursday night on it (24 pulls total) and our best attempt ended around 40%.

We went back sunday with one less healer because we were convinced that healing was not the problem - it was dodging lightning and just general positioning that was killing us and not lack of healing. After an hour or so, most most of us had finally stopped eating 20k+ lightning charges and we were all properly moving out of blizzards. Once we had that going for us, all we needed was a few more tries for the tanks (and their healers!) to learn how to deal with the crazy damage output on them at more than 10 stacks. Eventually we had an extremely clean kill with only 3 raids deaths and all tanks alive at the 13th stack.

All in all Thorim on hard mode is a fun fight that is tuned well for a guild that has a few weeks of Ulduar clearing under the belt. There's not much randomness involved in the actual fight and it forces you to play very well, but you don't need to play perfect. And that is, in my opinion, a good thing.

With Yogg-Saron finally down, we have started working on partial hardmodes as well as real hardmodes. What we generally do is practice the fights a bit, get a feel for the boss' abilities and just spend an hour or two on a hardmode before killing it on normal mode. We have had some minor successes by completing encounters like Flame Leviathan with two towers up, Freya with one add up and Iron Council "medium mode" to get the quest item for Algalon.

Naturally, we also spent a good two hours on Hodir's hard mode last reset and we managed to get a 4:07 kill in a fight that felt extremely sloppy and saw multiple deaths. After that result, we decided to take Hodir as our first serious hardmode and arranged the raidweek for that. We did, however, insist on repeating Freya with one add up and she gave us some troubles which in effect lost us a full night on Hodir.

Regardless, tonight we stacked a raid with 1 tank, 5 healers and 19 DPS to have an optimal chance at getting it. The first try we were at 37% at the 3 minute mark. That didn't look too promising and after a couple more "decent" tries with ~25% left when he destroyed the chest, we made some strategy changes in how to spread the buff love. There is a very fine line in how much you can stack up to share the Stormpower while still staying spread out to minimize the time you spend avoiding icicles and we were slowly finding it. By the time the trash repopped we were consistently pushing it under 15% at the 10-second mark and were basically just waiting for that magical try where the RNG gods favored us a bit.

That attempt came at around 23:40. It wasn't really a good start compared to our previous pulls. We had set 55% at the 1:30 mark as benchmark to pop heroism with DPS potions and on this one we were around 59% at that time. I called for a heroism anyway and during the 30 seconds that followed the raid DPS suddenly shot up to insane levels. Stormpower buffs landed on the right people, Death Knight's got a fire, Hodir decided to not use Icicles on people in Starlight - everything you want to happen just happened. When we saw we had 37 seconds left to push the last 20% we knew it was a done deal. We popped the DPS potions anyway, ignored the NPC's (who were frozen at the time) and just went all-out. We made the timer with 6 seconds to spare.

Awesome job everyone. Let's see if we can repeat it with less luck next week.