A great night, a great week

Coming off of our guild first kill of Anub’arak in 25-man Coliseum (on Tuesday), and after 3 months and 70+ attempts, Nerd Rage finally downed Yogg Saron last night. I would like to take a moment to thank the academy, and the fans…..errr, wrong speech.

Last week we suffered a heart-breaking 3% wipe on Yogg. What made it worse was that one of our best DPS’ers was not in raid because his account got hacked. We knew that had he been there, we would have downed Yogg that night.

But this night started much differently. We were actually just minutes from calling raid altogether, because an hour after start time we still didn’t have 25 people online. People were restless in vent. I know I was joking around trying to keep everyone loose (let’s just say the conversation revolved around Canadians and bacon, while being laced with plenty of healthy sexual innuendo). It just didn’t seem to bode well.

We finally get a raid put together. We pull. We pop an extra Guardian right at the beginning to help us get through Phase 1 faster. It wasn’t our cleanest phase 1, but it was good enough. Phase 2 really was a thing of beauty. We actually found ourselves with nothing to kill on occasion. We would down the crusher, kill corrupter, and stand around until the brain phase ended for more tentacles to spawn. Phase 3 started, and no one had gone insane, and all 25 were still alive. I knew right then that we had a chance. Phase 3 is among the most hectic settings I have ever tanked in. With Guardians, that will one shot a non-tank, spawning every 10 seconds or so (thankfully Hand of Reckoning has an 8 sec cooldown). All I could think about was just keeping up with the guardian spawn rate. Consecrate, hammer, taunt, shield, judge, taunt, holy shield, hammer, taunt, etc... I heard someone ask on vent what his health was at…2 million. Then 1.5 million. Then 1 million. Then suddenly the mad rush ended. Two achievements popped up on my screen. It was over. We had done it!

There was a moment of silence before vent just exploded. I actually had goosebumps. Not only had we just downed Yogg, we one-shot him! What an awesome encounter. Thank you Blizzard.

We were on a high. Then we ran into a quandary. What to do with the rest of the night. We had already cleared the Coliseum on Tuesday night, so we decided to go and do three Drakes since we had never done it either. We one shot that too.

So now let the hard modes begin. We had been extending our raid locks since 3.2 hit and focusing on killing that no-eyed, old god since long before that. The guild leadership was steadfast in its position that no hard modes would even be attempted until we got Yogg down. I agreed entirely, and I have to say kudos to our raid leaders for standing strong on that position when people were crying for hard modes.

But we can worry about hard modes another night because…Last night was a great night.

The Crusaders’ Coliseum

I meant to post this blog like a month ago, but here it is anyway.

Wow….the prospect of a trashless raid instance was something that I was interested in seeing. Nobody likes killing trash, but Blizzard is correct in stating that it is one way to “Pace” an instance. Facing a raid instance with no trash at all, just feels a little strange, and definitely less EPIC.

At least to me.

Northrend Beasts

Gormok was easy-sauce (one-shot). On a side note, why is it that BigWigs can give me an alert of the debuffs on the other tanks, but DBM will not? I find myself running both BigWigs and DBM because I like features of both but neither one will do everything I want it to. Can someone in charge address this please?

The Two Jormungars was a bit tougher. It took us a few tries to beat these worms. Mostly because it took a little while to get people used to the mechanics of the different debuffs you see in that fight and how to address them. If Dreadscale is mobile, you will get paralytic poison and the only way to clear it is to get close to the person with burning bile (the Dreadscale tank). If Acidmaw is mobile, you will get Burning Bile, and you will need to go clear the person with Paralytic poison (the Acidmaw tank). It boils down to one simple phrase…If you get a debuff (regardless of which one it is), run to the tank of the mobile worm. I was on Acidmaw and our DK was on Dreadscale (why doesn’t Stoneform clear that paralytic poison again?). Despite our early troubles, on our first kill we did get the Not One, But Two Jormungars achievement.

Icehowl was tougher still. We actually didn’t down Icehowl until our second night of raiding in the coliseum, due mostly to people getting hung up on walls and whatnot when trying to avoid the charge. I don’t have much else to say about this fight, except that when Icehowl enrages, he hits REALLY hard.

Lord Jarraxus

Easy-sauce, one shot. Kill adds, heal people, kill boss. Simple.

Faction Champions

I will stand by my statement that this is actually the hardest fight in the whole instance. I am not the biggest fan of PVP, but I have done quite a bit of it. Everyone likes to say that this fight is just like PVP. I disagree. I have NEVER PVP’ed against anyone that had over 2 million health. Be that as it may, kill the healers first, using all of your possible interrupts along the way. CC is not so great in this fight (mostly because of its unreliability), but interrupts are king.

Twin Valkyries

I found this fight just engaging enough to be really fun, but not so complex as to be frustrating.

Anub’arak

The big bug is back. And this time, he’s pissed! (LAWL)

Fun fight with a pretty tight DPS requirement. Healers, for god’s sake, don’t try to keep everyone at full health in phase three. No one in the raid (other than the tanks) should ever be above 50% health once Phase three has started. The more health your raid has, the more Anub heals, and the longer it takes to kill him.

All in all, the Crusader’s Coliseum is a fun (if fast) raid instance.