On our fourth attempt, we got it.
The effect of the patch was significant. We did more dps, Archi had less health, we had more mana, even our fear wards came up sooner. Some things didn’t change though. Fires can still kill, and they did. People still could land in trees, or get separated. Last night 25 people finally got their game together and broke a bit of a dry streak for us.
Now we head back to Black Temple. Reliquary of Souls is our next target.
As the time for this Burning Crusade chapter of WOW and Steel Legion draws to a close, we realize that our time is running short. We have fewer than 18 raiding days left until WotLK changes the game again.
Gratefully we have been making solid efforts towards new content for us. In Black Temple we are well on our way to vanquishing the Reliquary of Souls. And we are close to getting Archimonde. The placement of our efforts is often dictated by our roster at the beginning of the raiding week. Last night we plowed through the first four bosses on Hyjal.
After several, no, a plethora, of attempts this past Monday, we did not expect to be facing Archimonde again, so soon. This fight has officially gone past its due date. Past the ripe stage. But with our efficient four boss take down last night, we are set up once again to face Archi.
Tonight is another chance to do what we know we can do. We’ve been in the spot of facing a boss that has brutalized us before. We’ve been in these spots where progression seems to halt. Each and every time, we keep going. “Your resistance is insignificant!” and “This world will burn!” have been marks of our doom for a long stretch of time. But tonight will be different.
Archimonde, you life force is running out! Thanks to all the Legionnaires who put in an epic effort on Monday night. We’re going to take a break from Hyjal and go back to Black Temple for a bit. So Archimonde can rest easy for a bit, but not too long.
We are now at the point in the Archimonde fight where we seem to hover around the constant 80% threshold. We survive multiple calamities and have good survivability, until something weird happens, like our MT gets air blasted, or a fear and stacked grip debuff strikes the same decurser or even worse. These events are a part of the fun and glory of the Archimonde encounter.
We’ll develop more survivability, and maybe get less crap thrown at us. The next post here will have a picture.
A few items of note:
We continue to delve into Black Temple. This Wednesday we repeated the work of Monday in clearing up to the Shade of Akama. Along the way most of our crafters hit honored with the Ashtongue. In so doing we’ve been able to craft the entire shadow resist set. Later that night, after the raid, we spent a good portion of the hearts in our guild bank towards making us shadow proof. These efforts are all geared towards making us viable against Mother Shahraz, yet they have other immediate benefits as well.
A few of the bosses in the Hyjal instance use shadow, and the second to last boss in Zul’Aman uses massive shadow damage. That last fight in particular was run through last night. Ten of us went in wearing at least 150 shadow resist. What a difference that makes. Almost to the point that the fight seemed illegal somehow. Well, we earned it.
Monday leaves us with a choice to finish up Mt. Hyjal or try the Reliquary of Souls. We’ll see.
Azgalor one shotted. After a bit more planning than usual, and some hasty crafting of shadow resist gear, we defended the Horde camp and handed out our first taste of T6 gear.
As I post this, we are heading up the hill to greet Archimonde.
[Follow Up] We spent a bit of time having fun with Archi. The most important thing we accomplished was being somewhat familiar with the fight. Now the written strats will make much more sense. We have one more day in our raiding week, so it ought to be a good one.
The other thing, is that we should be able to clear at least 4/5 bosses a week in Hyjal now. Everyone will have a shot at T6 gloves anyway. And this is only the beginning.
Last night was the end of the raiding week and we had just completely cleared SSC. Having a little more time in our raid schedule, we decided to head up to Mt. Hyjal.
Winterchill and Anetheron both coughed up loot very quickly. We sent our miners ahead for gems and figured that while we were there, we might as well try a new boss. Only a few of us had even read the strats. So we took a little time to read them and figured out a plan.
Fighting a new boss is fun. It’s been about a month since we’ve hit new content, so this was a treat. The new monsters, especially the frost dragons, were very different. After clearing the waves Kaz’rogal came into the Horde camp. About two minutes later, he too was dead.
A first time one shot. I am pretty sure that that’s a guild first. It’s nice to hit a really easy boss once in a while, isn’t it?
Looking ahead to the next week, we are going to concentrate on the Kael fight. Several of us are exalted with the Sands of Time, and we want our rings. We want the glory, some want the title, most would like T-shirts. T5 Shirts that is.
A nice surprise after killing Anetheron: we get more epic gems. This was our 2nd try of the afternoon, and our third night of attempts on him over the last four or so weeks ago. We finished the raid day by testing our skills out on Lady Vashj. We got one shield generator down. One more day in the raid week for us to try things out…
We started poking around in Mt. Hyjal ever since patch 2.4 came out. It was new content and even the trash drops have proven productive to us. After a few weeks of off handedly grabbing random loot, recipes and hearts of darkness we’ve built up our fight knowledge of the first encounter.
We’re calling it a one shot for the day. Even though our first attempt was interrupted by a server outage, we came back from a brief respite over on the Sisters of Elune server. Hogger was fun, and again the level two warrior known as Kawaihae proved unworthy, but memories of the riverside brute taking us to school were quickly forgotten once back defending the Alliance camp. Yesterday we polished off Winterchill.
Our immediate plans include finishing Tidewalker, and really starting to carve our way through Tempest Keep. We will keep SSC in the rotation, but will start to focus on Al’ar until we have the phoenix down (twice).