Ulduar, you please me
I have been complaining about our guilds raid progress ever since WotLK launched. I found people to be sloppy, slacking around and not giving a damn about Naxxramas other than “I want to be in the raids”. Now there’s Ulduar and everything is different.
Our first foray into Ulduar was a classic. After we figured out how those vehicles work on a first attempt, we downed flame leviathan on the second try. And that was it. We then proceeded to wipe on Razorscale about two and a half hours. Best attempt was around 60%.
But it was different.
Flame Leviathan: The best instance start ever.
First of all we had a great time. The instance is huge. Like, gigantic. Like, awesome. Walking into that ridiculously huge first hall makes me feel all heroic and important and there definitely is a feeling of “we gonna kill some hideous stuff in here”. And then the first thing to encounter is Flame Leviathan. I’m not a big fan of the fight as a raid encounter, it’s more like a gimmicky minigame and there’s really not much to it, but there’s some important things this encounter gives out to any approaching raid group:
- A shitload of fun
- Variety from everything we’ve seen before
- The feeling of killing something really, really nasty big and nasty
- Some easy loot to get started
- Did I mention fun?
This is an ingenious encounter that’s not only easy to get through, but it totally psyches the raid. This very encounter establishes a great mood and a first feeling of accomplishment that really kicks off the night. You just know that whenever you enter Ulduar, at least you’ll get to ride a tank and kill a gigantic machine with it. Mad-Max-alike fun guaranteed.
The first encounter is the one and only that should be vehicle based and I’m glad that Blizzard learned from the huge failure that is the Oculus. Kick the instance off with a fun and different encounter, then proceed as usual.
Behind the gate
But i digress. With the ‘up’ feeling of the Flame Leviathan fight every wipe-fest is so much more bearable. Razorscale didn’t go anywhere near dead, but no one complained. Also our raid members did a much better job than on any Naxxramas raid night. We had people way beyond 2.5k dps, some finally approaching the 3k mark.
The same people did 1.8k dps in Naxxramas. With the same gear. Motivation, anyone?
I wasn’t in the raid for our second visit, when they downed Razorscale and XT. Slow, but steady progress. It was the third attempt I joined again, and it was awesome. Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT were no problem (thus we wiped on XT once because of add chaos). We then also got Ignis down and succeeded on Kologarn after a couple tries and the embarassing realization that I wiped the raid two times by challenging shouting the adds … hint: Don’t challenge shout when you’re not in Kologarns melee range. He doesn’t like that. At all. Oh, a nature resistance totem heavily decreases the raid damage taken by his left arm’s shockwave.
With only half an hour left we didn’t make much progress on the council, but I’m psyched to get back to that fight, for it seems to be a rather difficult thing to do and I really like the feeling of hard-earned progress.
This week we scheduled two raid nights and it looks as if I’ll be in both, so beware Ulduar, for here we come!
Congrats on the progress with your guild.
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