Defender of a Shattered World! Nefarian 25 down!

As Nefarian fell in 25 man mode tonight that gave us a shiny new title:
Defender of a Shattered World!





It's hard to describe what an adrenaline rush this fight was! We got him tonight on our third try having spent 1 previous night on 10 man with 21 wipes and 2 previous nights on 25 man with 27 wipes in total. Here's the WoL for our kill.

I'm not going to delve into abilities and detailed strategy for the fight, I really recommend the guide on Tankspot by Aliena for that. I'll just briefly describe my point of view.

Phase 1
Before the pull I set Nefarian as my focus target as that helps me to see the percentage of his health in Pitbull so that I can know in advance when high raid damage is incoming and everyone will need to be topped off. A small tip is to jump down in kitty form to save some health from the fall, it's not really needed but it saves some health and mana at the start.

I'm on the left side healing the Onyxia tank. This means annoying Tail swipes that you can't avoid and healing everyone a lot when Nefarian does the Electrocute (huge raid damage). I keep triple Lifeblooms on the tank with Nourish spam to refresh it, Omen of Clarity procs are most often used for Regrowth on the tank. A few Wild Growths to heal the Tail lash damage and on Electrocute I use Efflorescence and Wild Growth combined on the melee group. Mana Tide Totems helped a lot in this fight as we had a couple of shamans in our raid. You need as much mana as possible going into the next phase.

Phase 2
I spent phase 2 on the south east pillar, popping Tree of Life and rolling Lifeblooms with instant free Regrowths. Then I used Nourish and Wild Growth with a Lifebloom stack on someone. As the Electrocute is about to hit I use Barkskin and Tranquility to get everyone to max health. When the lava goes away I hop down and run off to the 2 add tanks.

Phase 3
In phase 3 we had our warrior tank that was on Nefarian in phase 1 tank him on the right side with the raid stacked up close. The paladin add tank from phase 1 kited the adds assisted by the warrior that tanked Onyxia to keep the adds in control while they both were being healed by a holy paladin and myself. The key here is to not let the adds touch any fire! It was pretty hectic healing them both on the move while dodging fire and adds because the incoming damage was so high and add to this the huge Electrocute bursts!

That felt great! :)

That's A Lot of Bait

My guild did a fishing raid last night in order to get the guild achivement [That's A Lot of Bait]. The reward from that is the very useful [Recipe: Seafood Magnifique Feast].

It was arranged as a one hour competition where the winner with the most pools fished during that time won 2k gold from the guild bank. People kept fishing beyond the raid and that hour though and eventually we got it! We started at something like 4800 fish caught so we got 5200 fish in one day! Tracking the achievement and seeing the counter increase every second is a great motivator when doing this one!

Guild chat exploded like if we had downed a raid boss and people called for heroism in the end! I think it's a nice thing to do together and having people work together like this helps out with team building! :)

Outland Raider

This one was a bit overdue. I hadn't gone back to Zul Aman since Wrath arrived so I didn't have that one achievement registered. Luckily for me there were a few others in the guild missing some old raids as well so we had a stroll through Hyjal and Zul Aman as well as a quick kill of Magtheridon and Gruul.

It was great fun to go back to those old encounters but I distinctly remember them being harder back then. +100 wipes on Archimonde in a 25 man raid compared to killing him in less than one minute with 8 people. Raids doesn't age very well in this game.

This is also what my UI looks like now that I've got a new screen running at 1920*1080.

Conqueror of Ulduar

I finally got Conqueror of Ulduar done! I was missing Thorim, Mimiron and Vezax before tonights raid.



Please note that Rippel is a druid and is showing a remarkably low amount of health on that screenshot of our Vezax kill. He was dead one millisecond later...phew! ^^

We also had a huge improvement in performance on Yogg + 0 tonight which we got down nicely after a few attempts! This is the state of the whole raid at 1%:



Just a smidge more control here compared to last week! :)

Alone in the Darkness and some other fun stuff!

Here's what I've been up to lately!




Besides discovering how fun and easy it is to solo Zul Gurub and AQ20 I also got to see Sunwell Plateau cleared, hit exalted with Zandalar and in tonight's raid we managed to get Yogg+0 down earning us Alone in the Darkness (25 player).




We had it all along! ;)




I also got to 5 man and tank all of BWL! Never thought I'd be tanking Nefarian, it was great fun! :)

Glory of the Icecrown Raider (25 player)!

After having wiped for most part of tonights raid on heroic LK 25 we completed Neck-Deep in Vile (25 player) for Glory of the Icecrown Raider (25 player)!



Sweet reward: [Reins of the Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher]



The challenging part of Neck-Deep in Vile (25 player) besides the AoE and dps requirement is that Defile will cause more trouble in that last phase. As you spend a lot of time grouped up and you can't drop it in kite path there's a chance something will go wrong.

Glory of the Icecrown Raider (10 player)

I just wanted to show my fancy new mount from [Glory of the Icecrown Raider (10 player)] that I got last week!



Now if only for the elusive [Neck-Deep in Vile (25 player)] I'd have another one!