Sometimes raids just click. Usually this is when no good films are on TV in any European country; when Fadge isn't in the raid, or when the stars align in a very rare, but unique and beautiful format. Oh man, when those stars align right... *looks skywards wistfully* we can be very, very dangerous.
So tonight was good for three reasons. IC HM was finally broken with Steelbreaker dieing last, Yogg+3 died too, and we got our first [item]Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings[/item].
We've tried a lot of different variations of IC HM, two tanks, three tanks, killing Molgeim first, killing Brundir first etc etc. We've basically done the HM version in all of its forms (which is kind of cool in terms of seeing the encounter and its mechanics), but with each tactic we always came up a few percentage short and just missed out on the kill. Tonight though, the DPS stepped up and took Steelbreaker down with 10-15s to spare and total raid DPS near 125k, and the healers finally spammed hard enough to keep the tanks alive for the duration. I would say this is a pretty simple Hardmode but that it is very unforgiving, especially for the healers - whether you are raid or tank healer, being one or two seconds slow will result in a death and subsequently a wipe. Tonight we hit P3 in all attempts, and finally got the kill we deserve.
This next week will also see me referring our top 5 IC HM Phase 3 DPSers by whatever title they wish to be known by as some kind of reward for their ability. I can only hope they don't take advantage too much...
We also got our IC HM kill pretty quick, which meant we had three hours spare for Yogg+3. We've spend maybe a couple of hours on this in the past, tagged on to the end of other raids but this was perhaps the first night where the raid was really expected to make some meaningful progress on it. Until now, we had had some problems with portal DPS, and in response we took a look at a different movement strategy for the Portal group and after doing a little tweaking here and there (and resolving one massive gaff) it started to look doable and indeed we started to consistently reach P3 within three portals. I think perhaps on our third or fourth P3 attempt we took it all the way to a kill. A little messy perhaps - I think our melee don't need to rush so much to attack the new spawned Guardians as a few died - and in the end we needed to call all DPS to focus on the boss to beat the enrage timer (and I prayed it was called late enough for healing Guardians not to effect us). But a lot of first kills are like that, its more fun that way. I\m confident we can recreate that kill again in the future.
And finally, this Yogg+3 kill opened the way to our first [item]Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings[/item] and quite well timed too as Liina only reached 30 Shards last week I believe. Congrats to her on this Achievement and well done to the guild members for all their help!
Freya+2, +3, Thorim and Vezax are our next targets and with a little hard work we hope to have more victorious News items posted over the next couple of weeks. If you want to be part of the fun, check our Recruitment
