Ulduar!

I'll put up some WoW background sometime later... just wanted to put up a note that my guild has dived in to Ulduar this week, clearing Heroic: The Siege of Ulduar and 2/3rds of Heroic: The Antechamber of Ulduar in the last 4 days of raiding.

Tuesday was fairly slow between some late shows and server instability; we got Flame Leviathan down, cleared the trash to Ignis twice and each time had an instance server reset drop all our progress on that overtuned trash. So we headed over to Razorscale with 30 minutes left and couldn't really nail the fight, but got some practice in.

I was off on Wednesday, but others managed to kill Razorscale, getting Heroic: A Quick Shave; not sure what else they did, but they didn't make any further progress.

On Thursday, we ended up wiping on XT-002 Deconstructor a bunch of times -- we were going with a 3 tanks/6 healers/16 DPS setup, and we hit the enrage timer once or twice, plus lots of trouble on the trash. On the plus side, I got my cooking to 448 and about 6 points in fishing replacing all the Dragonfin Filet I ate.

Our normal raid schedule is Wed/Thurs/Sun/Mon, but some people wanted to get a second extra night in on Saturday. I had other plans, and it sounds like we didn't have enough DPSers interested to get a raid going. If you'd told me back when I started raiding Kara that I'd see raids cancelled on account of not enough DPS showing up, I don't think I'd have believed you...

Sunday night we absolutely took Ulduar apart -- XT-002 Deconstructor in 3-ish tries (with both Heroic: Nerf Engineering, and Heroic: Nerf Gravity Bombs). About 4-6 attempts later, we got Ignis along with Heroic: Shattered (I died for that one!). We then wiped and died on trash for 45 minutes or so and then battled Kologarn 6 or 8 times until we finally got the kiting and the healing and the DPSing and the taunting and the not getting hit by the stone guys down. We'd been raiding for almost 6 hours at that point, but decided to peek at Iron Council to be ready for Monday. Two pulls later, people got Heroic: I choose you, Stormcaller Brundir. (Iron Council seemed really easy on easy mode - our first "let's try this" attempt saw us get to about 65% on Stormcaller Brundir.)

Ulduar is a blast - it's nice to see the rust being shaken off some of the basic raiding skills like not killing everyone else in the raid. It was funny to see the raid leaders try to figure out how to pull the group of 4 iron dwarves and 2 iron constructs at the entrance to the Antechambers until someone suggested that we could try some crowd control.