It’s been awhile since the last post but ES has continued to muscle through content impressively while many guilds fail.  We’re now 6/8 on Heroic Dragon Soul, with lots of pride for having not changed our base morale and goals.  We bring everyone fairly without stressing the “perfect” makeup that a lot of sites recommend and work and adapt as needed to have whatever group it may be continue to kick ass.  We’ve also been proving ourselves by earning a lot of achievements like Taste the Rainbow and Deck Defender.

Morniel has stepped up and shown her versatility with a dual spec heal/dps combo that has helped us greatly when switching back and forth between 2 and 3 healers, and our backup tanks Selene and Weriik have been working to keep us ready for anything RL can throw at us.  With the whole guild getting busy with work and living changes, we can still be proud to say we’ve shown our dedication and loyalty by sticking together and getting things done.  Its been a great few months for ES and I personally think we’ll stay strong and knock out all heroic modes before the next changes.

Death to Skittles!

Well, it has been an interesting couple of months in Azeroth. ES has seen many changes. We lost our Guild Master, Raid Leader, Backup Raid Leader, Main Tank, backup tank, several officers, still more healers and DPS, and we transitioned to a 10 man raiding guild after being a 25 man raiding guild for around 4 years. In most cases, when you hear news like this, you would assume that the guild was on it’s death bed, suffering it’s final throes before it disappears from this world forever. We, however, are not most cases. While it is true that ES has been through the wringer, it is also true that we have come out clean on the other side. The transition has been a great success, and as is evidenced by the above screenshot of a fresh Heroic kill, we are well on our way to being a competitive Lightninghoof guild once again.
Transition is nothing new to ES. I am actually the fourth Guild Master, and now Kithandra is our 5th raid leader. Kith has had lots of experience leading 10 mans in the past, and I think she has done a wonderful job picking up the reins and running our new raid. We also still have a lot of the old guard left in ES including our officer core: Me, Cendra, Kith, and Ildara. Plus, in order to have better availability online, and also to get some fresh perspective we have unanimously voted to add Lofaz to the officer ranks. Lofaz is a long time tank with a great knowledge of the game, and apparently a lot of free time to play We are glad to have him onboard.
We also have a strong and dedicated group of players outside the officer core. I can already see the forums starting to pick up once again, and the calendar is starting to show life outside the regularly scheduled raids. There will be more events in the future, and of course anyone is free to set up an event and try to run with it. Guild unity and friendship has always been one of our main goals…that and melting Heroic Boss faces.
The future looks bright in ES. The new raid is really starting to click, and we should be seeing more and more progression bosses dropping their loot at our feet. Thanks to all of you who stuck it out and continue to make this the best guild in all of Warcraft.

With 4.3 hitting last night, we took our first furtive steps into the new raid, the Dragon Soul. All the confusion of new content that we know and love was available in generous quantities, as we brutalized our way through the first three bosses.

Admiral Morkchop fell over with barely a protest, feeling more like a 5man boss than anything! Warlord Zon’ozz gave us some trouble as we worked through the mechanics of the fight — both when they worked, and when they didn’t. And Yor’sahj the Unsleeping was just embarrassing. Deathwing needs better minions, a four-minutes-to-go “let’s do one attempt” one-shot shouldn’t be!

Like Han Solo said, let’s not get all penis-y. The bosses ahead will assuredly be fairly difficult, before we hit the big guy himself. Still, great start to the week! Onward and upward, twirling, twirling, etc.

After many, many weeks of coaxing him out of hibernation to show up to raids to get his items, Sheepin has finally assembled the Horde-side 2nd Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa’s Rest!

As per new guild policy, we’re going to be referring to Sheepin from now on as “the staff”. Aka, “the staff is dead”, “battlerez the staff”, “the staff is tearing up the meters”, etc. etc.

Hopefully we can churn out staff #2 a little more quickly!

Yes, we skipped Beth’tilac. I wasn’t actually in the raid for the Beth’tilac kill, which was accomplished through an elegant ballet of spiderling control, drone dps, and web climbing, or so I was told.
Baleroc, however, was a boss of a different color. While we have decent raid discipline in terms of dps switching, staying out of fires (mostly), and using cooldowns, Baleroc’s mechanics require extremely tight discipline and need the healers to completely override their normal instincts. For us, this means Rhidach dies. A lot. We used a pretty standard strategy, healing in three groups of two (then two groups of three when we panicked, then three groups of two again when we stopped panicking), two sets of six man shard teams (one melee, one ranged), and two tanks willing to bankrupt themselves on repair bills. We initially faced a few major problems: 1) the first tank switch, where Ronada had a couple stacks and we were switching to Rhidach, who had none, often resulted in Rhi biting the big one, a trend that continued as we worked on the fight, 2) Healers accidentally refreshing Vital flame before they got the hang of it, impairing our ability to gain stacks, 3) DPS trying to be heroes and tanking shards for longer than they should, resulting in deaths. Luckily, none of these issues were anything that practice couldn’t fix, and every time Rhi or Ronada bit the dust, we wrenched them from their peaceful slumber and threw them back into the fray. Healers learned to build stacks efficiently, DPS got a feel for how long they could handle shards, and we gradually made progress. The tank deaths… well, we didn’t eliminate them entirely, but they got less frequent. After steady improvement, we had a few low percentage wipes, held things together a little bit longer, and then finally killed him, 15 seconds after he enraged. Since then, he’s been pretty easy and seems to be one of those “once it clicks, it’s not bad at all fights.” Rhi still dies, but that’s nothing new.
We’ve spent the last couple of weeks on Alysrazor, learning to dodge tornadoes and learning that baby birds are assholes.

Rhyolith is the kind of fight we’re good at; even though the initial attempts were chaotic, melee quickly figured out how hard they had to smash each leg, Nordicslayer did a great job of mapping out an optimal course, and the ranged dps were taking care of the adds quickly. Most of what we needed to practice involved seeing the ground hazards through smoke and other ground hazards and dealing with Rhyolith’s parking-lot-sized turning radius. Our wipes were mostly practice-related: a few people dying in fires, losing sight of a couple of adds, stacks building up from not moving Rhyolith fast enough, etc. We gradually improved, got the burn phase down, and got a clean kill on the big guy on Tuesday night. We then ran over to get a try in on Beth’tilac and left her for Wednesday.

Beth’tilac didn’t go so smoothly. The fight requires a lot of independent action and fairly precise positioning, so it took us a while to get drones, healers, and spiderling teams into place. After that, we needed practice. And practice we did. We have thus far, I think, figured out more new and creative ways to die to Beth’tilac’s adds, soft enrage, and meteors than I thought possible, so I’m assuming that, having run out of ideas on how to do it wrong, we’ll have no problem doing it right next week. Near the end of the night, we moved to Occu’thar to feel him out, killing him easily. He’s disappointingly simple, even for a pvp boss.

More Beth’tilac next week!

Great first week, guys!

Maloriak is a fun fight, and it’s one that allows dps to really shine. While the tanks need to kite and healers have to work with puddles and piles of aberrations, the first 75% of the fight is really almost entirely on the dps, requiring both high AoE and enough boss damage to get into the soft enrage in a timely fashion. On our first tries, the dps requirement of the vile swills seemed insane; dodging puddles while following the tanks and maximizing AoE damage was a daunting prospect until everyone started getting a feel for how aggressive they could be and still survive. Our first several attempts, we were praying for a blue phase as the vile swills dropped, as often some were still up at the transition. Before long, however, the swills were dropping like flies, giving us more practice on getting through the red phase’s cooldown rotations and green phase’s dps burn. We gradually tightened things up, but still weren’t seeing the end phase consistently.

This week, however, dps continued to increase and coordination improved until Tuesday’s raid yielded one of those inspiring wipes that let you know you can kill the bastard. Wednesday we knocked out Chimmy and Atramedes and had time for Maloriak tries, which started off well, but required some strat changes as the dps continued to improve. After a couple of sub-25% wipes, we realized we needed to alter our strategy a bit; we’d been blowing bloodlust early, since it would be up again before the enrage, but with the dps powering through faster, we started saving it for the end of the fight. DPS was still fine on the swills, we were still making the boss benchmarks, and then we were into the final phase…

Panic ensued. Monstrous, deadly panic. There was fire everywhere. We tried it again, had another low-percentage, knuckle-biting wipe, then made a couple of tweaks to decrease the fear potential a bit. Nearing the end of the raid, we called last try, then got into it one last time, probably for our last fight of the tier. We sailed through the first few phases with high dps, recovered beautifully from some minor mistakes, and were making the dps benchmarks with time to spare. At 25% we held it together, Rhi did some fancy dancing around flame jets, the healers kept their heads, and the damage dealers containued stabbing, blasting and shooting our way toward victory. Everyone started getting a little twitchy as his health dropped, but this time we managed to avoid wetting our pants and hitting the floor. Maloriak fell, we got our fancy titles, and we ended the tier on a really fantastic note.

Everyone has done a wonderful job of keeping things fun and moving so far, and I can’t wait to see what we can do in Firelands.

So, after last week’s kills, I was 1) hoping the Nef and Halfus kills weren’t luck and 2) hoping to think about further heroic mode progression, working our way through the encounters starting with Chimaeron, because I hate healers and tanks and because 90% of the raid doesn’t have to do anything differently on H Chimmy, which always makes things easier. We started Tuesday by knocking out H Halfus again (which actually took a little longer than last week, but we had a couple minor composition changes, which everyone weathered well. We then moved to Blackwing to knock out the early farm bosses and get some progression attempts in on Chimaeron.

So, I went through the tank-swaps, and we played a half-hour game of “Who’s on First: Raid Edition” while everyone hashed out, rehashed, and then re-rehashed the tank switch rotation and we worked out some minor positioning changes. Then we got started. The first wipe was a tank-splat festival, then the second attempt was a nice solid attempt, even though we used all our bresses fairly early on. A few more tries and we wiped to the enrage timer, then we put him down on our 7th pull by the skin of our teeth, post-berserking and with about 5 people up. Excellent work, everyone, especially with Dara and Bibb out! We went on to put a fun (ie. Halfassed) attempt in on H Maloriak, just to see the black vial phase before next week, so everyone can get used to the idea, then we knocked out normal Mal and Atramedes and called it a night.

Wednesday saw us back in Blackwing to work on getting Nef on farm, which took a few attempts, but he is definitely starting to feel like a farm boss. Woot! Then back to Bastion to clean up, taking some time out to do the Double Dragon achievement on Valiona and Theralion, which will hopefully get our dpsers more acquainted with the shadow phase before we start working on it on heroic. It was a fun time!

Maloriak and Atramedes should be concerned.