Heroic Morchok Defeated, SoD move to 1/8Hc in Dragonsoul
How much Chok would a Morchok Chok if a Morchok could Chok Chok?
The answer is not very much... With only 8 guildies, 3 rather than 4 healers and a couple of pickups (albeit one being the ever super Terra who has been helping us these past few weeks) it only took us something along the lines of 6 or 7 pulls to get the big man down. All in all not the most challenging introduction to Heroic content!
We've been a bit slow on starting the Heroic progression after christmas due to losing a couple of key members from the team, hopefully this will be rectified soon and we can get some serious progression in on the next few bosses.
Much like our first foray into normal mode DS i completely forgot to take a screenshot of our Heroic Morchok defeat... and didnt fraps it either! so bare with me until next week and i'll sort something then... for now here is a placeholder video to keep you entertained:
Great work as always guys, lets keep the ball rolling and push on through the hard modes.
Madness? This is not Madness... This is... 8/8 Dragonsoul!
A little later than we may have hoped for, but we caught up! After juggling around the raid make up and trying out a few healer/tank combos we finally settled on something that seemed to work and all it took was a seamless execution.
On i believe our 10th shot tonight Deathwing finally popped into a brocade of shiny coins ala mario style and coughed up arguably the shittiest loot for our make-up! But never mind we're ecstatic to finally have him down, opening up the road for some heroic progression.
Huge congratulations to the team and everyone involved in the learning of the fight so far, stay tuned for our first heroic killshots in the near future i'm sure.
Blackhorn and Spine Defeated, SoD now 7/8 in Dragonsoul
Things were looking shaky at raid start with some last minute RL problems, but after managing to find a last minute pickup mage we were on our way... It took a couple of attempts to fine tune but soon Blackhorn was face down on the deck. Admittedly much later than he should have been, but what with our ID resetting we're just catching up!
Next up we managed to wipe in what feels like every unlucky and silly way for an hour or so before managing to defeat The Spine of Deathwing as well, bringing us up to 7/8 in Dragonsoul. There wasn't really anything to take a screen-shot of much like Ultraxion, so I was going to use the Fraps video but it looks awful as my view is impaired for 70% or so of that fight so perhaps we can coax a ranged/healer to fraps one out next week.
All in all another great night, some good first looks at Madness although it seems a bit buggy with Impale one-shotting Thrun through Ardent Defender? We'll see how it goes tomorrow and hopefully have a new screen-shot to show for it.
Ultraxion Deafeated, SoD move to 5/8 in Dragon Soul
Another late news post, apologies!
Last week after running through all four of the first bosses for the second time (post transfer) we also landed a deafeat of Ultraxion, the last dragon to stand in the way of our persuit of Deathwing.
After he died there was no body... so it would have been a rather dull screenshot considering... but i did Fraps the encounter so figured i would use that for the news post instead! It is our first kill footage (for a change!). Perhaps next week i will actually remember to press the record button for the other fights and even take a screen or video of Morchok at all!
As a mini round-up we cleared through all previously defeated content in one night last night and managed to consistently get to phase 2 in the Warmaster Blackhorn encounter, so i expect him to drop early on Sunday leaving a fair bit of time to ensure Deathwing falls this week, so watch this space!
So, it's been an incredibly busy and eventful past couple of weeks and a news post is long overdue...
First off... and I guess most importantly is the guild moving over to the Horde on Draenor EU. This has been a tough decision to make which has not been without bumps and upset... but for the future of SoD as a raiding guild throughout content to come the decision made sense if only just to see some new recruits. Due to some fairly en-masse migration of many top guilds on Alliance to other servers or to our own Horde, recruitment seems to have dried up, as well as out-of-guild activities such as pugs and just general banter in trade.
All in all, and after just a few days wearing red... i think we have made the correct decision. Horde definitely seems teeming with life in comparison to Alliance and our recruitment spots were filled even before we migrated across... you can't ask for much better than that really.
A few of us posing up our new faces after the swap across.
Next along in the news world is the release of Patch 4.3 and with it a brand new raid instance to conquer - Dragon Soul.
Our first night of exploration in the new raid was done still as Alliance, we figured that if we cleared as much as possible and then transferred over we would get our ID's reset and could do the same bosses again for a bit fo extra gear and to help Fax along with his dagger quest line a bit... which is exactly what we did.
The first night proved reasonably successful, we cleared the first 4 up to Ultraxion and then ran out of time, so we got to clear through them again Sunday as well.
The first boss we pushed over literally in one shot with no real effort needed at all was Morchok. So little effort was he that we even completely forgot to take a screenshot. Both times we killed him. So... nothing pretty to look at there unfortunately. (EDIT - Frapsed our kill two weeks after)
Next up we went to Warlord Zon'ozz and his er... Beach-ball of Doom. I don't remember exactly how many attempts we took, but it wasn't many before he was face down in that sexy looking puddle on the floor. (Edit - video added)
Then we hopped across to Yor'sahj the Unsleeping and his multi-coloured balls of goo, i believe we one shot this guy as well although not without a couple of deaths near the end after an un-tidy pull... but still, a testemant to how easy these normal mode bosses seem to be at the moment. Perhaps its the heroic gear or maybe they really have tuned Normal modes down alot for this patch. I guess we will see!
Last up we managed to fit in a defeat on Hagara the Stormbreaker, with possibly the most fun mechanic i have seen in a long time in having to chain some lightning between posts with our bodies forming a long line... it brought back memories of passing the core on Lady Vash which was one of my favourite fights of all time. Again not the most challenging of encounters, well apart from certain melee liking to walking into the ice waves! But we shan't name names shall we ;o)
All in all a good first Night's work, looking forward to knocking over Ultraxion tonight and hopefully getting up to the big man himself so that we can test out how much of a step up the heroic modes will be.
Stay tuned for more headshots and Videos in the near future im sure.
A quick one-liner to say that Shin has uploaded footage of one of our Rhyolith kills to youtube, i have edited it into the Rhyolith News post a couple ones down, so go give that a watch!
Hopefully over the next couple weeks or so we can capture shots of the rest of the bosses to go along with them... time to start watching all the profanity i use on vent i think...
EDIT: Shannox vid up too! (Shin, how do you see through all those addons!?)
EDIT 2: Added videos for Bale, Beth, Alys and a second PoV for Shannox from a kite-tank perspective. I have another PoV for Ryolyth and Alys to upload so expect those soon aswell.
Back on form it seems, or perhaps we attempted the bosses in the wrong order! But after just one night of really attempting Beth'tilac she was toppled from her web in really short order... perhaps 10 or so pulls?
There wasn't much struggle with this boss to be honest, so nothing really to report on how we 'finally managed to beat it!' after a few goes everyone knew their jobs, add dps got better the more familiar everyone got with the rhythms and on our second clean transition into phase 2 with a bit more organisation of cooldown rotations she relented quite easily.
This kill pretty much pushes us to the highest position we can fight for outside of pulling out a server-shocking Raggy Heroic kill, which we will start working on next week! (Wowprogress currently being weird and not updating, so no specific info im afraid)
Even With a break on Sunday we cleared all 6 other bosses on heroic in two nights, so we should be set to have at least a good evening next week to suss out what we are up against with Heroic Ragface.
Stay tuned, who knows! we might just pull it out of the bag.
EDIT:
Kill video added, Cailin - Prot Warrior (Downstairs) PoV
It's taken us a little while with this one, probably a combined total of around 4 nights of work to get everybody familiar with juggling the crystal soaking, enhancing our communication skills and the healers to get their rotations down pat... Monday just gone saw a multitude of infuriatingly close calls with around 5 or 6 0-1% wipes!
It seems that all it took to push that last percent off was the few upgrades we sorted from the few kills between Monday and last night and the now solidified familiarity everyone has with the fights execution.
(The cleanest screeny i could find through all your aoe shits!)
All in all it was a great raid, clearing 4 heroics in one night is something we haven't covered before, so congratulations to everyone! Just beth left to look at before we're staring down Ragnaros again in his most unforgiving setting.
This kills steps us back up to second on Alliance 10man progression as according to Wowprogress and 5th including 25man teams. So pretty good! Lets keep the ball rolling and finish off Beth this weekend.
Well, I called that pretty well! One day later and we land a killing blow on Majordomo Staghelm.
All it took to turn the RNG wipes into kills was a change-up in the orb soaking tactic from protecting the melee stacks to instead sacrificing them to prevent random 1-shots from ranged soakers getting leapt on... after that... he done fell overs.
Congratulations to everyone involved, 2 heroic bosses in one week, that's more like it! 2 left to go before we square up to the big man again!
We are in week two since the nerfs of Firelands content came into play, both weeks have seen our existing kills of Shannox and Ryolth repeated consistenly, the difficulty of both having been reduced quite dramatically!
The next boss we set our targets on to learn was Baleroc, assuming that with the health reuduction this encounter would be easily achieveable as pre-nerf the dps requirement was pretty astounding but now the numbers are well within reach.
After spending roughly three nights on him though we decided to shift our attentions to a few of the other bosses first and return to him a bit later, as he is still proving to be quite a tricky encounter.
So! Last night we decided to have a poke at Alysrazor on heroic, being that he drops an upgraded token and Beth does not... It took us pretty much an entire evening to fully explore every single method of dying before the last attempt of the evening saw a picture-perfect execution *cough* and the boss fell down appropriately!
Congratulations to everyone involved, another heroic boss in the bag.
Adept managed to pip us on a Balreoc kill this week, so we have ended up trading 2nd for 3rd place on Alliance 10's according to Wowprogress, im sure we can turn the tables again next week in our favour (or of course later tonight!) so stay tuned for more kills hopefully in the near future.
Also! A big shout out to Blue team for getting up to Ragnaros in their first week post-nerf, fantastic work, hoping to see a raggy killshot from you very soon.
Two days ago there was an announcement from blizzard stating that from next wednseday there will be some sweeping nerfs to the heroic encounters in Firelands, we decided that in this last week of unaltered difficulty we would put some considered effort into trying to get one or two more down pre-nerf for the 'prestige'!
After quickly breezing through Beth on normal (we didnt really fancy that one on HC) we managed to dispatch Heroic Shannox in recored time, i believe 2-3 pulls, along with an emergency tank who had never tried it before, good work Xhi! And everyone else, a very smooth kill.
This left us with the rest of the evening to pick our next conquest, which turned out to be Ryolith. To say i was suprised he fell over tonight would do everyone an injustice, in the back of my mind i expected it to take longer... but we've always had the capacity for fast-paced progress and tonight was just one of those nights.
After i think 4 or 5 pulls and an off-the-cuff decision to try out 2 healing the encounter we downed him first time...! Fantastico.
Congratulations to everyone, an impressive night of progression!
As of the time of posting we have jumped up quite a few ranks with just the one kill according to Wowprogress...
We rank 2nd on alliance for 10man (12th inc horde) and 4th on Alliance including 25mans as well (20th inc horde), so thats quite a progressional jump.
With still 2 raid nights to go this week and 3 encounters left on the board to go through, who knows we may see Domo fall pre-nerf aswell and shoot us up a bit more. Roll on the weekend
EDIT*
Shin has taken up Frapsing some of our runs and whilst this footage is not the 'first kill' it seemed appropriate to link it. If not just for the fact Shin dies whilst filming :D
DEATH KNIGHT
DRUID
HUNTER
MAGE
PALADIN
PRIEST
ROGUE
SHAMAN
WARLOCK
WARRIOR
