We have conquered Hydross and Lurker before, but not on the first night. We’ve strategically shifted our efforts away from Gruul/Mag/Kazzak towards making deep progress in the Caverns.
Last night we concentrated on establishing a good foothold in there. We’ll start the 2nd raiding night of the week on Leotheras. Our best effort there had him at 40-something percent. As always, we will make progress. Just getting there early in the evening, early in the week will be a great help. Look for news on that front soon.
Also the purple recipes are starting to drop for us. We had an unlucky dry spell for a bit, but now the law of averages are starting to round out the drop tables. About time.
So, as another week of raiding ends we find ourselves learning the Leo fight and lusting after additional T5 gear. As strange as it may seem, we find the Hydross fight easier than the Lurker fight. Some say you can’t put the square peg in the round hole. Screw that, we just get a bigger hammer. Or burn both.
This is very much like Karazhan in that our progress of the previous week is erased at each server reset. On the bright side, we do get additional SSC loot from Hydross and Lurker (and Kazzak, Mag, and the Gruul goons when we go there). We will be getting faster at Hydross and Lurker. Hopefully taking them down this week in one night, leaving us with at least two good nights of learning the Leo fight. As always, its just a matter of time until we learn these fights.
Sometimes the only way to save a corrupted soul is to free it from its earthly bounds. (That’s what the crusader’s handbook says anyway). Towards that end we slapped Leo to 45% on our third try. The pulls were quite new and exciting to say the least. Our first attempt got him to 87%, it was nice to see the quick learning that made the improvement. This week will bring faster clears and more days to work on Leo.
Not since the heady early days of Karazhan have we had two boss downings in one week. Many guilds wait until Lurker is down before they start Hydross or even a third boss. We are not like many guilds. We just couldn’t stand to sneak past Hydross in shame while he had our loot. Hydross first, Lurker as reward.
It was nice to swim in the water without getting eaten, or scalded. Monday night will at least take us toward some training in Leotheras the Blind’s room. Prepare yourself demon!
In the classic Steel Legion way, we waited until our last attempt before respawns to take out Hydross. Tradition must be upheld.
We knew that coming into the evening we had to increase DPS and had a few goals. Get more resist to the tanks, tune up our DPS, and use the stay alive strategy. We made some neck piece resist gear for our tanks. This allowed them to stay tanking Hydross longer. We brewed up lots of resist potions, this helped keep them up towards the end of their tank phase. We had a good fighting chance at taking Hydross before we even began.
During the one set of attempts, we continued to improve our strats, we continued to learn the dance. We had a discussion about the adds and marking them. It wasn’t just one trick that suddenly propelled us to victory, it was a small improvement here, and another there. It all added up quite nicely.
The interesting thing was, that our 2nd to last good attempt had Hydross enraging while at 18%. We fine tuned the approach path to minimize adds, our frost tank had full rage, and before the poison phase we chopped Hydross down to 78%. Several cycles later, we were calling out for banish assignments on his last poison phase, but realized that we did not need to banish. We had him at 5% or so with one minute to go. So we decided to just burn him down. We did.
We rounded out the evening on a trip to our old friend the Lurker. Purples dropped like candy and we picked up a nice craftable recipe for one of our tailors. It’s going to be really nice clearing Hydross out, and not trying to skip ahead in the instance. We’re going to turn SSC into our new Karazhan. We apologize to the horde outside of Karazhan. We probably won’t be around to play as much.
Oh, one more thing. We now have the very first boss in SSC, the “Platform Lift Boss” on farm. That guy is easy once you know the strat.
We’ve been in this position before. Having worked on a boss for a bit now, we find ourselves narrowing in on the kill. Last night we brought Hydross through several transitions to the point at which he enraged.
We have the transitions from frost to nature down. We have several tanks geared to the teeth with the proper gear. All that remains is some fine tuning on our DPS. Our best attempt landed Hydross at 30%. It’s always an exciting time when we start dialing in a boss kill like this.
We’ll try again on Monday, and the following days if necessary. It’s just a matter of time now.