Ulduar Competence!

[Edit: OMG, Arust actually blogged about this too! Well, it will give you an idea of how things look different through the Frostheim goggles.]

10 man raid night, and it’s Ulduar again.

This time, through some strange alignment of the planets, our 10-man team is firing on all cylinders. It’s always a good sign when Hrist comes out of the gate cranky. I don’t know if this is because he plays better when fueled with rage, or if everyone else plays better when he’s fueled with rage.

Either way he got started before the first pull.

We went through a pretty textbook Leviathan takedown in one shot and moved on to our nemesis, Razorscale. The previous week we wiped on razor for two hours straight. Then came back another day with a couple of new people and one-shotted him. I had no idea which way it would go. We’re schizophrenic like that.

But one of my jobs on razor is to mark and call out the single-target dps targets, for which I need to be raid assist. Hrist was feeling downright playful.

Well, we managed to one-shot Razorscale, keeping completely in control of all the adds the whole time. It was a nice change of pace for us, though Hrist suggested that they nerfed razor’s damage for phase 2.

We moved on to the Deconstructor, where we cleared some trash and suddenly I saw the telltale animation of my favorite buff, Vigilance — only it was flashing around someone else! Surely Hrist must have misclicked somehow.

XT-002 was a new boss for a few of our members, so wiping on the first attempt wasn’t unexpected. However, Hrist had a chance to try out his evil sneaking elf wannabe FD ability. He was thrilled to finally realize his secret fantasy to be a hunter and escape a death.

A little gem of a moment came right before pulling some seriously difficult adds. Everyone got in position, Hrist did a ready check, verified that we hunters were ready to each MD to a different tank. We hit our MD macros and were literally a second from shooting when Cheerleader healer, assigned to heal Hrist, tries to wipe us.

We decided to skip Ignis and get inside Ulduar proper for the first time. We started pulling the mobs there without a very clear idea of what their abilities were, and learned it on the fly. Hrist, I think, was surprised that we were able to do this without wiping.

Finally we hit Kologarn. There was definitely a learning curve with dodging the eye beams and healing through the spike damage. I even made a macro for when I got grabbed and crushed to announce that I’m in need of healing — but then Hrist ordered them not to heal me (because he’s a bastard). Not realizing this was a joke, I died the first several times I was picked up and crushed.

After getting chased by the eye-beams for the first time, I realized they were not nearly as bad as they looked. They only affected a relatively small patch of ground so you could weave between people while running, and they moved so slowly I actually had time to stop and steady shot when I got too far ahead of them (I prefer to keep them close to me so I can control their path more precisely. When you get too far ahead they take the shortest route to you, which can steer them into your teamates). We started doing much better on the beams once everyone realized they didn’t need to run from other people’s beams.

But after a bunch of attempts we got him down, giving us some pretty good progress for a learning night in Ulduar.

Any night you kill a new boss is a good night.