Tidewalker. What is there to say about Tidewalker? He’s big…and purple…and farts green bubbles? This fight is easy. The strat is almost laughably simple. Execution; slightly harder. I don’t think anyone would disagree that this is a bit of a gear check.

Mostly a healer check. Can you keep up the raid when they all take damage (earthquake), when half (or more) of the healers are suddenly mia for a good 10-20 seconds (watery grave), when two tanks have to grab crazy aggro on two gaggles of murlocs that everyone else has to aoe down (gogo pally tanks), and when the tank is taking OMG SPIKE DAMAGE! Of course it’s also a tank check to survive that OMG SPIKE DAMAGE. As well as a raid health check, to have enough health to make it through the watery grave.

Our healers rose beautifully to the challenge, with only minimal complaints. And things went much better once our second pally tank actually went and specced protection. (ie, he didn’t die if I got graved.)

Like Maggi-poo, it was our first time to the last phase, but everything went off without a hitch. Those of us not dpsing the boss (and thus not seeing that he hit 25%) were correctly informed of the shift into the hallway. All of the nefarious bubbles despawned a good distance away from us, and never gave us a problem.

Of course to add to the excitement, our MT succumbed to the OMG SPIKE DAMAGE at 1%, and the gaggles finished us off after we finished Tidewalker off. Yay DI and SS.

After that we went to play with Karathress a bit. Talks of the leet 2Her abounded as our raid leader stumbled through the strat. Luckily some of us had actually read it beforehand in anticipation of Tidewalker’s imminent demise. We pulled! And I died in 16 seconds. (Tanking the lolshaman with lolwindfury and lolspitfire.) It was impressive. I wish I had a screenshot. I’ll apparently be tanking the priest from now on. 🙂

(Okay fine, not really Onyxia…) Magtheridon, or Maggi-poo as I tend to call him, is more than a bit of a pain. Since we no longer need to impress our guardian snowflake in order to get into The Eye, the general consensus was, “Why bother?”.

Rich lore (and progression) aside, he’s a jerk of a fight, especially since we only have two regular warlocks. Our problem was not so much downing the adds (four down before Mags came out with 10 sec to go, on our kill) but keeping the add’s adds from having their way with our healers while we were doing so. So we turned to the veritable army that is our guild’s hunters for trapping goodness.

Once we actually got to the cube part without people dead, I found it a lot easier than I was expecting. After all the qq on the forums about clicker lag and such, I was expecting another few hours to lrn2cube. As everyone will probably agree, I called out *way* to many “get to your cube” warnings, but the clickers handled it like he was on farm. Even with the great fun that is earthquake just seconds before clicking time.

Plus since it was our first time below 30%, we had a few random deaths due to rocks. (I swear, I was up until 3%.) If not for those cave-ins, this fight would’ve been the easiest tank and spank in the world. Almost feels like the cave-ins should start closer to 50% so the healers have something to heal other than just Koi. But I digress.

After some confusion about Maggi-poo’s head, and Rosa getting leet gloves for 31 dkp, we were more than ready to be done for the night. Not a bad way to start off the weekend.

After two weeks of disappointments and wipes, we headed to SSC with new resolution. Or perhaps it was just the alcohol dulling our senses. With flying jackalopes running invisibly around our feet, we wiped away the trash and posed for a picture in front of Hydross.

Look look! There he is in the background! 🙂 Koi went through his amazing two hour strat in a mere fifteen minutes, (We still got to role play.) and charged in.

And

Hydross

went

down.

There’s nothing more to it than that. We moved flawlessly through phase changes, and besides a few people pulling aggro on the adds, we had them down with a good mark and a half to focus fire on Hydross before the next phase change. At 13% we burned through him, leaving an easy 30 seconds on his enrage timer.

With a one shot of a new boss under our belts, we headed for Lurker. And we found a new challenge. After finally mastering “The Elevator”(TM) we found a new environmental nemesis. The hole. That’s right, we lost no less than 7 people to watery deaths while attempting to get around/over a deviously designed break between walkway and platform. We hope to cut the number of deaths in half by next week, but that might be a little ambitious of us. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those who lost durability during these trying times.

But there was light at the end of the tunnel! Our paladin squad now has a full set of matching purple boots! They are now snazzy enough that looking directly at all of them at once may cause blindness. (It’s good practice for tier 5.)

And did I mention three nether vortexes (vorticies?) dropped? We finally have our first piece of pve crafted gear. Gratz Suthee. I want to wring your neck for that little joke.

btw, this is what happens when I actually have time to write an entry as opposed to throwing up a kill picture while we’re clearing trash to the next boss. 🙂

Two nights of serious attempts, and a two shot tonight. Once people learned to channel their inner fish this boss went down really really fast.

Our raiders are improving by leaps and bounds, and it won’t be long before the next few kill pics go up. For now. Flouder is served.

Practice makes perfect.

Took us way too long, mostly due to attendance issues, but he’s down, and OOB has teir 5 shoulders. Maggi-poo is next in our sights.

Go away for a weekend and see what happens? Anyway, I’d say we’ve officially stepped into 25-man content as of last Friday.

It’s currently 5am, and I can’t sleep.

I wasn’t there…so I know nothing.

Sorry about the picture for the moment of death. We came back and got High King Maulgar.

Organizing 25 people is hard…I’m going to have to get a little more practice. btw, two warlock/hunter/mage tokens and I didn’t get either. qq Gratz to Rosa and Amber, and to Koho who got the Hammer of the Naaru.

Then we wanted to clear trash to see Gruul before we left. Yeah, that was fun.

Never had to do kill pictures two days in a row before. Yay for us.

Feels kinda like a dream, (or maybe a vision…lol nm) but I knew it was coming.

Watching that huge pile of bones crumble after a one shot of Prince for the third week in a row is something to be proud of.

And really, he isn’t that hard. We’re ready to finish off the High King tomorrow.

So this happened last week, but I held off posting it, mostly because every time we get a boss to 1%, we come back the next week and pwn him.

I was right.

OOB has downed the Prince. And to think we almost didn’t get this attempt in because he bugged and we had respawns popping up behind us. We had to pull in a flesh beast. What fun. 🙂