I recently promised I'd get back to you with a progress report on how we're doing in Icecrown Citadel, and well... here we are. The raw facts to begin with:
◌ we're only doing 10-man content thus far.
◌ we're 7/12 overall on progress.
◌ we've not yet entered the Crimson Halls.
◌ we're up to five different tanks total so far.
◌ we're incredibly sick of mail drops.
Overall, we're a bit behind the "bleeding edge" of the "internet elite" on progress. We did, however, not actually start the instance before the Plaguewerks opened due to the holidays and recruitment issues - overall, we've had four resets plus the current one in the instance, so we're quite pleased with our overall progress. And this week, we hoped to see some fruits of our labour.
From the moment we started invites, we realized this was going to be one of those raids. We had a tank stuck on the bus home from work, several DPS not showing, no one bringing enough fish feasts (even when we have a guild bank full), people showing with only one flask, people announcing they had to leave early for extra shifts at work. Our eight o'clock raid finally kicked off some trash at quarter to nine, certain DPS (*cough*) died on the first pull, then we had som disconnects on the second pull... it was pretty much as it sounds.
Around nine we stood staring at Lord Marrowgar, having just sent our elemental shaman to Orgrimmar to fix his boot enchant (which I'll get back to in a bit). As we kicked off Marrowgar, people soon fell into character, and a few odd deaths (*cough*) later, he goes down as he's supposed to. Next up is Lady Gaga, and we realize we're lucky enough to get the weekly quest inside the instance on this encounter. Great! Free badges!
...how do we do this exactly?
A quick search later reveals that the NPC in question will spawn with the waves, have a rather unimpressive health pool, and needs to be controlled as he for some reason believe he's the warrior in the Faction Champions encounter. Huge, mad props to one of our TWO boomkins on the night, Marana, who did a spot-on job keeping him rooted, and our DPS crew, downing Gaga herself in less than no time. From here, we went on to oneshot the Gunship battle, Saurfang and Festergut, before we stand in front of Rotface once again.
Rotface has been giving us quite some headaches over the last few weeks. Having cycled through healers and tanks like Sarah Jessica Parker does shoes, we've never really nailed the cleanse timing, kiting route or run-to-spot properly. Wiping ten times on this boss has not been uncommon to us, and we desperately wanted to change our luck a bit. I'm pleased to say we did - one wipe at a few hundred thousand hit points, mainly due to mess from people dying with adds spawned, we nail him with no deaths on the second attempt. Feeling good, we move on to Dreamwalker, which goes down in two tries. So far, we've established our grasp on seven bosses and grabbed some 20 frost badges in less than three hours - not that bad for a raid that initally smelled of damnation and fail.
Alas, late raid start means that we're out of time and have to call it. I still feel fairly good about the raid - some fancy new loots for me, solid progress for the guild and a few amazing performances (Marana, Lococo and Duvesa, I'm looking at you) - it turned out good in the end. As for the boot enchant incident, we had a few tries on Sindragosa last reset, and finally decided to remove common sense from the equation and just plain out make Tuskar's Vitality mandatory. With promises of lootbans and replacements, we enforced this hard on the night. Fun fact: the player in question still dies from the strangest things (that can usually be moved out of).
Tonight, we're doing Ulduar hardmodes. Overgeared like a baseballer on steroids and hyped like a child on christmans, I can't wait. Screenshots, gleeful posts and maybe even fraps should appear sometime soon.
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