Friday, April 17, 2009

Ulduar, you thought it was going to be easy ?

It is not ! :)
Or at least not for the second 10-Man raid of my guild. We have decided to start Ulduar on 10-Man, because we wanted to keep us some fun in the 25-Man version for later (though we are going to do it once a week as a guild party).
So we made 2 raids of 10 people, one better geared, one less geared, knowing the second group (that I lead) will be a little slower.

Results of that ? Both groups downed the Flame Leviathan first night in about 1 hour, once we figured the vehicles, and all that. I posted about that yesterday.
Both groups (with one or two out of guild because we were a little light in numbers last night) went back there to try the 3 bosses after the Leviathan. None of them fell :P

Ignis is very very hard, extremely random, the trash before him is the hardest I've seen since Kael trash (I've not raided BT or SW before nerf and after it wasn't the same).
The trash repop is short (45mn I think) which means relatively few attemps on Ignis before it repops, and it's so hard that we really don't want to clean it twice in a night.
The randomness of the flame tornadoes, and the sheer amount of damage they do added to the push-back than can send you in another one resulting in an instant death, is just enough for me to tell that 3 packs with 2 tornadoes launchers is not something I want to do twice in a night :P

Razorscale is more manageable, we only did 3 tries on him, as we spent so much time going to Ignis, figuring it's trash and then trying on him. I think we mostly got set for the dragon, but now people in the raid need to pay more attention to the blue flames of death that pop on the ground. The amount of damage in this fight can be very high, and (once again) healers have to keep up everyone topped at all times because someone can just endure nearly 20K damage in 3s (double fireball and blue flame pop).
It is a much less random fight than Ignis, and I'd advise you to go on Razorscale before the Furnace Master. But I can't say I like this "healer challenge" which consist in creating damage spikes so high that you need to mash your heals (while moving yay ... happy paladin) to keep everyone topped.

Now XT-002, we only did one try to finish the raid night, just for fun. He's really not that hard, he doesn't hit too hard, as long as you're not too close from your raid when you get the white/black light damage is manageable.
Now there is its hearthquake ... and that is a baaaaaad thing. Full raid damage that can't be avoided, it's a pain to heal, really. I guess aoe healing is the key here, so we'll need to figure some movement to allow for that during the quakes.
It should be better than Ignis though.

So all in all, a much harder instance than Nax. Some things are a lot of fun, but as a "stationary single target healer" I can already feal that I'm going to suffer in Ulduar. A lot of raid damage, a lot of movement, cast interuptions (Ignis) ... no that is not a holy paladin heaven for sure.

I hope you'll all have fun in Ulduar and not suffer to much from the servers. Numerous raids last night including both of ours had several mass dc, and ensuing wipes ... that is not the best part of a raid, as you can guess.

2 comments:

  1. For some insane reason my guild decided to run a 25man last night. FL went down and then we spent the next hour wiping on Razorscale. 25 is very hard. We need better gear clearly.

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  2. Depending on how much healers you have (you need to not lose people to these damage spikes) and the dps of your raid (there is an enrage timer of, I think now, 10mn). Razorscale can be relatively hard.
    I still sincerely think it's the easiest of the 3.

    Ignis is clearly the hardest until your whole raid, especially your healers and tanks get used to it. And XT-002 requires a lot of care from your dpsers, as they have to damage the heart as much as they can when it is exposed, but *stop* dps before it gets broken or they'll activate hard-mode which will most probably be a wipe.

    Good luck to you and your guild, as for myself, I'm off raids for the week, real life strikes :P

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