Raiding Roundup - 25 Man

Lots to update since we one shot Anub'arak in 10 man TotC in the first week he was available, but this is the 25 man post.

We've been working our way through the keepers. Since the introduction of TotC, we've had limited opportunities to really sink our teeth into them, but they have been dropping.

Our Hodir kill was a very close call, after a number of frustrating wipes. It was a huge relief to get him down, with a little help from our cold, cold friends. The number of people that got themselves frozen attempt after attempt was pretty funny (in hindsight), and I enjoyed DPSing for this fight. I have developed an ever diverse set of phrasing to describe each of the fight mechanics, including my patented, "off the circles... onto the circles" over vent during the fight. As it was we managed to get the kill with 7 dead, so I'm looking forward to beating the enraged timer by a significant margin with the whole raid alive.

Freya was another fight that took some time to learn on 25 man, despite a solid strategy and good looking team. I think everyone needs to experience how much the detonating lashers hurt when they explode before they will listen to the advice to single target them at low health. Getting the three elementals down at the same time also proved to be a challenge, and it's very tempting just to add an extra 10% health to the instruction 'stop DPS on X'. Maybe it's something that again needs to be experienced before it's handled better. One of the things I think we do well as a guild, is try and explain the fight from first principles, so that there's a better understanding of why we employ the strategy we do. It takes a little extra time, but I think once the fight has been learned, and won, the terse instructions given for a boss that's on farm seem to stick a little better.

Finally, Thorim went down in Ulduar 25, after just a few attempts over two different nights. In the arena, focus fire (and probably too little DPS on the first night) was the biggest issue, but when we got the balance right, and added a 2nd tank to hallway team, it went like clockwork. A couple of people died in the lightning charge... but we got him down convincingly.

The following week, we went for a romp in TotC25, and got 4/5 straight up. I really enjoyed one shotting the faction champions... with more tanking / plate wearing options to distract the melee, more CC options and interrupts galore it was so much easier than we had found in 10 man. Hopefully Anub'Arak will fall this weekend.