The Blood Stained Journal

Two hardmodes in one week, that’s a GG in my book.  This puts us at US 48th.

Mimiron’s hard-mode is one of those unforgiving encounters with a thousand-and-one ways to die, and it takes nothing short of every member in your raid learning how to keep themselves alive under pressure if you want to get the kill.

You have to dodge landmines.  You have to run from the spreading fires. You have to avoid the emergency bots bobbing around the room dousing the  fires.  You have to dodge aerial rocket strikes.  You have to run from plasma blasts and laser beams, while avoiding more fires and landmines and the frost-bombs Mimiron deploys to help his emergency bots put out the fires, all while trying to kill the boss under the strict confines of an enrage timer…

It’s serious.

And you need every last second you can spare with the 10 minutes you’re allotted, because when the timer is up your raid goes down in flames, and you’re singing that old familiar sad-bastard tune of a 1%-wipe:

We should have had this kill last night but couldn’t squeeze out the DPS required.  Chalk up the failures to landmines, or fires, or landmines hidden in fire, or plasma blasts and aerial rockets, you name it…  The end result was a frustrating night of sub-5% wipes.

So we went back to the drawing board and came in tonight with some strat changes designed to milk a few more seconds off the clock.  We didn’t like what we saw, went back to our original strategy, and delivered a kill about an hour into the evening.

Yogg 1-light is all that stands between us and our Glory of the Ulduar Raider achievments, so expect to hear about that soon.  An Algalon kill is in our sights as well…

Beyond progression raiding there’s a lot happening within the guild, and within the game, that deserves mention.

Our healing officer, Hexagram, completed his legendary mace - Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings.  Huge congratulations to him for that.  It’s not as pivotal for progression as some of the other legendaries we’ve seen such as Thunderfury or the Warglaives of Azzinoth, but it’s a great item and more than anything else it serves as a token of respect from the guild to Hex, so it’s newsworthy to me regardless.

On the horizon:  The 3.2 PTR is up with a huge batch of content being added to the game.  There are class changes on deck, a brand-spankin’-new 5-man dungeon, 10 and 25-man raid zones (each with normal and hardmode lockout timers, and some interesting achievments >.>), profession changes - the list goes on.  I’ve got my character copied over to the Test Realms but unfortunately haven’t had the time to log on and check things out first hand.

More on all that when we get around to testing it.  Lots of griping to be done over the priest nerfs, to be sure…

- Rollins