Wipe-tacular: Part Two

For part two, I wanted to focus on the not so successful foray into the newest raid, Trial of the Crusader. For some reason, I got the bright idea to go ahead and take our group of 25 into this one ever though we weren't quite ready for it, forgoing the normal Obsidian Sanctum run we do on Tuesday nights. Wilder humored my request and away we went, into the Coliseum to fight it out with the Beasts of Northrend. I say humored because in terms of progression, we shouldn't have been anywhere near this frisky building as a whole group. We haven't cleared the level before this one yet. This is sort of a one step at a time thing. (Individually, we have quite a few people who are more than ready for it, both in terms of equipment and abilities thought. As a full group though... eh. >.<) Surprisingly, we did rather well with all things considered.

The fight starts out with a rather large Magnatuar, which is sort of a centaur hybrid: part Giant man, part woolly mammoth. He has a few tricks up his sleeve for the unsuspecting, but all in all the fight is pretty straight forward. You have to watch out for his creepy mouse like friends known as Snobolds. The shot off a Molotov cocktail worthy of any mob warning that spreads fire on the ground under the unsuspecting fighter. Two or three seconds is about all you get before you are one crispy character and your group is down one player.

Next, two very large worms called Jormongers come barreling through the gate. They were a bit more indepth, as one of them could be frozen in place while the other one got drug around the room, spewing acid bile at whomever it happened to be facing. (This is where I have to give mad props to our tanks - Ciggaspally, Yungwoptoo and Wardone did the honors for us through this one- those guys have to dance around, dragging a cranky beast and keeping it's attention focused while 20 people do their damnedest to kill it. Quite the job.) Of course, one of them had to die before the other and the coordination to do it wasn't there that night. Valiant effort for all involved though.

(We went through with a 10 man group after the 25 man attempt and managed to down the jourmongers and the guy that came after them. A super cranky, head butting Yeti that looked like the thing you fly around on in The Neverending Story. We got him too. *flex*)

The next one, the demon guy who was accidentally summoned from the nether by a cocky gnome, was a bit harder. He punted the gnome (which earned him my undying gratitude) and proceed to open portals to hell and summon forth frisky wenches bent on domination and death as well as some angry elemental demons whose one goal in life appears to be burning something alive. Needless to say, we haven't downed him as a group yet. But we got pretty close. Maybe this week. :)



I need to toss out a quick update: We downed Mimiron last night, after only a few quick tries!!! (I'm really happy about it too because my A-number-one arch-frienemy Arcarsenal the Ret Pally got to come with us for the first time in quite some time. His lovely real life job has gotten in the way of our verbal sparring, which I enjoy immensely. Keeps me on my toes.)

I'm really proud of our group as a whole, too. The last attempt, where we actually downed the boss was epic. We managed to get him all the way to that lovely Phase Four I was so excited about in the last post (O.o) and all three of our very dedicated healers bit the dust. Probably because they were so focused on keeping us alive that they neglected to pay attnetion to themselves. Love for that. :) We'd already lost three of our DPS (the damaging classes, who deal out the punishment - that's what I do. *flex*) so things were looking shaky. But we'd come so far that we only needed a few seconds of what we call "burst damage" - where you use up all of your items, special abilities and magical trinkets in order to do a huge amount of damage in a short amount of time. Most of those things have a very minimal duration, meaning you only get about 15 seconds to do what your going to do before Cinderella happens and your coach is a pumpkin.

We pulled it off. Myself, Cigga, Avatie and Zalderick were the only people left alive and we managed to burn the last of his life off in time to clear out the Keeper's of Ulduar.

The last part of that run should probably be it's own little post, maybe tomorrow. General Vezacx.