15/10/09 - On our 4th kill of Anub'arak hard mode we've completed A Tribute to Insanity! We should have pulled it off just days after our first kill, but a heartbreaking 2% wipe on October 1st prevented that effort.



I wish I could talk about what a fantastic instance it was, how interesting the content was and what a great job blizzard did with this instance. That is not the case. "Luckily" for us, this content was made interesting and challenging by the fact that Blizzard did such a poor job of implementing it, and various unforeseeable difficulties we as a guild found ourselves in.

After all the changes we faced with this instance I couldn't have imagined we'd do this well. And in so few attempts, too... I'm talking of course about Frostmourne being so unplayable the first 2 weeks that we couldn't use our attempts up...

We had a few personnel problems along the way, so there are many core raiding spots available in this guild going into Icecrown. We like to keep our roster to about 35~ raiders maximum and nobody sits on the bench. Interested? Submit a private app!

Will try to update this post shortly with more details about the "joy" that was the Crusader's Colliseum.

No where near as exciting as Algalon, but on our second attempt of the nerfed Yogg0 we came away with the kill. The first attempt hardly counts, we tried to use an alt Ret paladin to get our raid started a bit earlier and abandoned that idea after wiping in phase 2. We were very surprised to be the first Oceanic guild to do it - At least one oceanic guild had 35 people online and was straight into Ulduar when the servers went up, and we felt that with the nerfs it would take a couple of phase 3 attempts at max. Many of our raid for Yogg0 had work/uni commitments until around 6pm server time, so in the early afternoon we started undermaning Ulduar with whoever we had on.

The world of logs for our raid day/evening for anybody interested:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/qsGN ... Hk/fights/

While we're happy to have Yogg progression behind us now, we really wanted another week on this without the nerf. Our progression on this in the last week had been extremely encouraging - particularly Monday night, with many sub 10% attempts. The nerf turns the damage check into a complete joke, not only because of the 20% HP reduction but because 3 beacons gives the raid so much more damage time with less people being required to move them and takes the strain away from AOE. In hindsight we could have been in a better position for a pre-nerf kill if we had pushed harder earlier on rather than ending raid nights early/skipping raids. After killing Algalon the feeling was that 3.1 was done and motivation wasn't there initially to get stuck into yogg0.

The kill was definitely not one of our best attempts on the boss, with a mage being disconnected in phase 1 and ending up insane for the entire encounter as a result - we were contemplating calling a wipe but kept going to warm everybody up. A healer DCed in the middle of phase 3 and a few of us accidentally ended up insane towards the end, but a kills a kill!

Lastly to any exceptional players out there - we are always on the look out for you! We are a guild that values quality over quantity. We are looking for vocal, observant people that can take criticism, are willing to get involved in strategy discussion and communicate any questions, problems or mistakes they have or make. As a guild we spend a lot of time joking around so a sense of humor comes highly recommended as well. We raid 7pm-12pm Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday and Monday. Once or twice per progression cycle we will occasionally have a Friday raid if we are extremely close to killing a boss and the right raid composition can attend the raid - this happened just once in Ulduar. We raid the same number of hours or fewer than other Oceanic guilds, but we have very high standards and expectations of our raiders. If this is you, please get in touch with us - with the new faction transfer featuring coming we are looking for promising horde players looking to make the switch as well. We always have core raiding spots available for players that meet these standards, exceptional players are never bench players.

Edit - video for anyone bored:
http://www.filefront.com/14208199/TsuvsYogg0.wmv

Oceanic 1st, US 6th, World 14th!

First attempt of the night, total time spent attempting Algalon 25: 1 hour, 6 minutes, 30~ seconds!

Edit:
Video of last 10% of Algalon with vent: here
Mimiron hard mode (non-massively nerfed) kill video: here


It wasn't without its dramas, having a mage offline for 50% of the boss, and we killed it at the last possible second before Algalon completed casting Ascend to the Heavens and ported off, but that made it even more satisfying.

As a guild that raids 4 nights per week, Algalon was a great opportunity for us to show what we are capable of by limiting all guilds to one hour per week, and the speed at which the guild picked this up well and truly surpassed my expectations. Sorry to those that we couldn't fit in for the kill, we couldn't have done this without our strong roster.



What really set this up was our rapid Mimiron progress, giving us a very productive Algalon hour last week. We haven't got around to killing it yet this week, but the nerfs appear to take all of the difficulty out of the encounter. I'm really glad we can boast killing it when it was difficult, Mimiron was second only to Algalon in how satisfying it felt to come away with the kill.



For some reason the Algalon chest decided to be lootable for 5 seconds only, so after killing Algalon at about 8:15 server time, we decided to celebrate our Algalon kill by defending the chest, while waiting for a GM to service our ticket. Still waiting on that ticket...