It's been a long time since the homepage has gotten some love, and while I probably should write some stuff here more often, not much stuff worthy of writing about has been happening as of late. Sure, we killed Algalon months ago, but since it was only a few weeks before 3.2 and we did it like, server sixth, I didn't think it'd be worth posting a picture. Then there was the first Icecrown wing that was as easy as everyone expected and even killing Anub'Arak with less than 5 wipes in total is hardly worth spamming the website with.

Three weeks ago the doors to the second wing of Icecrown finally opened and much to everyone's surprise, the bosses weren't as easy as we would have imagined. While Festergut and Rotface died on the first few pulls, at least you had to actually have some sort of strategy for Rotface and some sort of gear for Festergut. Then Putricide turned out to be a lot harder than anyone could have predicted. Granted, the hardest component was the limited amount of tries, which I still think is a stupid idea. Fifty for Trial of the Grand Crusader was alright, but ten for Putricide was a disappointment. I could go on and complain how we lost multiple tries to disconnects (followed by another wasted try when that person reconnected) and that we actually would have gotten it a week earlier if not for those disconnects, but the fact remains that we used 26 tries to get this guy down and I'm pretty sure that's the most wipes we've had on a non-hardmode boss other than Yogg-Saron.

The fight itself is actually quite nice. Phase 1 gets you familiar with the mechanics of the two different ooze-add types and is a nice moment to get into the flow of the fight. Then phase 2 is where the fight is won or lost. The addition of raid hazards that need to be avoided at all costs makes for an intense experience where you need to be very much on the ball when ooze fixates and malleable goo's coincide. We struggled quite a bit with where to tank him and changed the positioning and mobilty in phase 2 multiple times. We ended up using a some sort of reversed version of the "table strategy" and that has proven to be very stable for us. Once you get past phase 2, phase 3 is just a hard burn phase, but any guild getting past Festergut should easily manage the DPS requirements in the last 35%. In that area, I was actually quite surprised to see three of our raiders sitting comfortably in the european top 15 DPS done on Putricide on WoW Meter Online. I know meters like this don't mean a lot, but it's a nice compliment for three amazing players as well as a confirmation that the positioning strategy we developed is one that maximizes DPS.

The only thing I don't really like is the artificially tacked-on need for a third tank in phase 3. It's bad enough that you are pretty much forced to put a tank in the Abomination (although Stormknight does an astounding job at it), having one tank just be a sunderbot for 70% of the time is just lame. However, overall I think Putricide is a fun fight and it's extremely well-tuned as well. Compliments to Blizzard for finally giving a "middle of the pack" endgame guild like ours a challenging fight without it being an utter cockblock.

Alright, actually we killed it twice now and the first kill was a while ago, but I haven't gotten around writing the obligatory wall of text. Besides, I wasn't actually there for the first kill and had to get boosted by the rest of the guild to get my kitty points.



So where to start. I'm a bit torn on Anub'Arak. Let me start with saying that I really think it's an awesome fight to learn, to execute and to finally beat and that I believe it's actually proper hard as well. He surely is hard enough to be a worthy "end of content" boss. Too bad his normal counterpart is such a pushover and doesn't in any way prepare you for the heroic version.

On the other end of the spectrum, I quite dislike him because after some 150 pulls, the fight *does* get old. While I do like the fact that Anub is by no means a numbers fight and relies for 99% on strategy and performance, there is just so many small things that can (and will) go wrong. Given that in any phase even the smallest mistake usually means a wipe (at least did for us) you're forced to go through the same motions and phases over and over and over again, seemingly without progress. For me, that's quite a frustrating thing.

After the first kill, repeating it was almost as hard as getting it the first time. Sure, we didn't exactly spend another 150 tries for the second kill, but we actually didn't manage to get him down within the 50 tries we had. I blame the mechanics of Penetrating Cold combined with taking a different healer setup, but excuses aside, we did fail.

This week was a lot better and we killed Anub in 5 pulls. We should have gotten the Tribute to Mad Skill, but we didn't quite expect a quick Anub'Arak kill after last week's deception, so instead took the relaxed approach (you know, showing trial members the fights, sitting out the best geared people because they don't need loot anyway) and wasted a few tries on the Faction Champions. In our defense, we had a godawful setup to beat.

So, all that remains is Algalon now and while we should have killed him months ago, we are not really trying. I think we have spent 4 hours on it since we have access. We just can't get motivated to try, mostly because it involves clearing boring, old bosses and because the 1 hour time limit makes for a not so relaxed raid atmosphere. Maybe some day.

A while ago I wrote that as far as I'm concerned stuff like Algalon and Firefighter was still very much "on the cards". Yes, having item level 245 gear readily available for everyone makes a lot of fights a lot easier, but then again, only one guild on Lightbringer has actually defeated Algalon while as of today, no less than five more are trying.

And so are we.

The first months after the summer have been tough for us as a guild. School started, which meant some of our more reliable and regular raiders called it a day and stopped raiding, or quit the game altogether. With normal mode content being as trivial as it is, finding new blood is hard and we ended up cancelling a lot of raids. Not willing to spend the little time we had in old content, we hadn't really tried to finish Firefighter to open Algalon's room, but luckily enough we managed to create stable roster again. This resulted in a Firefighter kill fairly quick after we started trying, followed by One Light in the Darkness in the same reset. Not only did we (finally!) open up Algalon's room, but we also completed the meta-achievement for our Iron-Bound drakes.

Of course, while Ulduar is fun and finally getting those achievements done is quite satisfying, Ulduar and Algalon are not the main priority on our progress list. While normal mode circus tent may be an utter joke, heroic is quite interesting. Since the last update, Gathering has re-acquired the alliance 1st position by downing both Faction Champions and the Twin Valkyr's. There isn't much to say about the champions as they are neither interesting nor very hard. Our strategy mostly consists off "interrupt the healers, cyclone the rogue and kill the warrior while spamming dispels all over the place" and this has proven to be a rather stable way to do the fight.

Twins, on the other hand, were a different story. To be fair here, we tried to do it the proper way with essence switching and ball dodging. We gave up on that after 15 wipes or so. Then I ran into a strategy where you basically ignore the whole fight mechanics and just burn one twin and heal through the damage. That sounded interesting, but unfortunately Blizzard hotfixed it by making them heal for 50% instead of 20%. We developed a variation on the "ignore mechanics" strategy that has a little RNG component in it (basically, we will wipe 25% of the time ) but is otherwise very reliable and, maybe more important, very simple to execute. We got a kill fairly soon after adopting this strategy and have repeated them this reset without much hassle. It's gonna be a pain when trying to get "50 tries left" tribute chests, but you know, we haven't even done Anub yet, so I'm not too fussed about that.

With that said, all that remains is a picture. Hopefully I'll be able to post Algalon and Anub killshots here before Icecrown Citadel.