Kil'jaeden is a sweet baby !

Ok, ridiculous title, I give it to you ...
But how sweet is finishing Sunwell for the first time :)

As I posted before, my guild started a Suwnell raid last Sunday. We went up to Mu'ru but stopped there, after 4 wipes, not enough motivation, too many pick-up players that just get tired after something like 10 wipes, which is what we suffered on Felmyst and Mu'ru :P
So last night, after our second down of heroic Sartharion + 2 drakes up (yay \o/ only 3 tries this time, and we only had 5 healers ... tell me about a different raid from last week), we went to finish the Sunwell raid with, this time, a nearly full guild raid group.

I guess all the players that were not in the Sunday raid were surprised by the difficulty, by the damage of the bosses and adds. We had a DK heartstone to get his tanking gear as he couldn't tank adds in his lvl 80 dps gear ... it tells you about the difficulty at lvl 70.

We needed our priests to get used to Mu'ru, after 3 tries he went down nicely, despite the number of bodies on the ground :P
And then we were at the very Sunwell itself. Nobody really knew the fight, even if one of our guildies had tried it 2 times during TBC (oh man, some of our guildies are just that good ... I'm so impressed).

I don't want to spoil, but this is just an awesome fight. From my point of view, it's longer, and a bit more chaotic than Mu'ru, but it's overall easier with lvl 80 gear. We died two times until we got the blue dragon shield right, and then he fell. Huge ! Great ! I love Sunwell :)

Sunwell is tough !

Weekend of raiding, as usual in my guild. We're a casual raiding guild, most of us are working full time, and several have families and kids and all that kind of stuff. So, as you can guess, our weekends are our most intense raiding time, and we decided this weekend to give a shot to Sunwell.

We had about 18 guild members up on Sunday afternoon and got a few friends from other guilds to complete the roster. Several of us (not me :p) already raided Sunwell during BC and told us that, even with lvl 80 characters, we should not take it lightly, so we went there with a full roster of 25 lvl 80 people.

And I can tell you, Sunwell is still tough !
We went up to Mu'ru in about 2h30 hours, and stopped there, after about 4 attempts. Until him we had people who had beaten these bosses during TBC, and could explain the strategies and lead the raid, but noone had killed Mu'ru before, and it took us some time to understand that these awfull floating skeleton heads have to be dispelled.
All in all, the raid dps is incredible compared to lvl 70, the tanks are much stronger and healing can keep you up in most cases. But, Sunwell is not forgiving for the uncaring. We wiped quite a few times on Fellmyst, just because the green vapor zones during phase 2 are even worse at lvl 80 (a lvl 80 toon with 200% damage just OS any healer around). The Eredar twins go down very fast, but how incredible the damage from the conflagration is, we lost 10 people in 5s, just because the guy with the conflag stayed in his group ...

It was a really great time, finally seeing these wonderful bosses & trash & dungeon design & music ... etc
But it really show how hard this raid was (and it has been nerfed 2 times, not counting the pre-WotLK nerf), and how pale in comparison the challenge is in the WotLK Naxxramas.
If you ever have the occasion to go there, and haven't yet, just go, it's really a great raid.