Ulduar - Annoyance and Excitement

Eto and I got hit up, by the same weekly PUG group last night, to come tank and heal for their Ulduar run.

Don't get me wrong I was very leery of going along with this guy for various reasons.
1. He doesn't really understand balanced group make up.
2. This is the group that I had the problems with Oingaboinga the previous week.
3. They did Ulduar 2 nights last week and only downed FL o.O

Now granted they had bad tanks the week previous and on the second night ended up running with 4 warriors but still. Oingaboinga was not on the line up for the night so I agreed to main tank it as long as Eto was my healer.

*sigh*

We ended up with a brand new level 80 Disc Priest. When I say brand new, I mean he hit 80 a few minutes before joining the group. The Armory still showed him as 79.

The OT that we had was "a great warrior" the RL found. Who sadly had a gear score of 355. He was pretty squishy and ultimately, ended our progression for the night when he had to start actually tanking things.

So this is how the night went:

Take 30 minutes after the group fills to finally get everyone inside the instance. Had one person afk and never come back. Wait another 15 minutes to get a replacement and get them summoned. The RL begins explaining the the FL fight and instructs people to just pick a vehicle it doesn't really matter. Who cares that gear score of the driver plays a part in the amount of health of the vehicle? "That only matters in hardmodes" so says the RL. After 3/4 of the group wipes on the trash while trying to take out the towers, we finally get to FL. Now I realize that the newbie priest and warrior are teaming up for a demolisher. The Priest informs the group that her gear may be playing a part in the health of the machine. But again the RL insists it doesn't matter. We shoot down the pyrite. Not nearly enough if you ask me but he instructs us to pull.

We pull the boss, the first two pursuits go pretty well then he goes after the priest/warrior vehicle, they die after one hit from him. *sigh* We're down a demolisher and the pyrite is gone. Insert wipe number 1.

Rinse and repeat...6 times! We wipe 6 times on FL before some how Finally we convince the RL that we MUST HAVE MORE PYRITE! Eto and I some how manage to keep FL pissed off enough that he pursues us 3 out of the 4 times, allowing everyone to finally down the damn thing.

Sheesh, Flame Leviathan really should not be this difficult.

Moving on to XT-002. I love this fight. I'm not sure if it's her silly animations and voice overs or the mechanics of it. But I love the XT fight.

The RL does his run down of the boss fight and we get started. Things go pretty smooth, loose our RL/Mage pretty early on but manage a battle rez and he's back up. The OT is keeping the bomb bots occupied, heart takes considerable damage and then boom, we loose the OT and a couple DPS.

Now we have her down to about 16% when the RL automatically starts talking about what we need to do differently next time. He wants to wipe it and start again, but did he forget we have an all powerful, all amazing feral druid among us. Now this is why I love druids! He quickly switches from kitty to bear and rounds the bomb bots back up.

XT has eaten a couple by this point and gained some of her health back but we're not giving up. I refused to give up as long as Eto was alive and keeping me up, we had a few good dps and a 3 minutes left on the enrage timer.

It's slow going, gain a little, loose a little. The druid is putting forth an amazing effort to jump between bear and kitty. Tanking the bots when he has too and still trying to dps as much as he can. We're down to about 10% and a minute or so left before she goes ape shit on me.

At this point I don't see any reason not to burn everything we have. Pop the ghoul, pop the army, burn your cooldowns, if we don't beat the enrage timer I'm toast and it will be a wipe. We have two healers up, Eto and a Resto Druid. 3 of our dps are still going at it. We can do this..we can do this....


WE DID IT!! And the awesome thing? We did it on our first attempt. This is what you call people being on the ball. The few people that knew the fight and knew their class...they were the ones that made this one possible!







Now I wish I could say we had as much luck with the rest of the attempts we made in Ulduar last night but sadly we didn't. The lack of AoE dps made Rasorscale pretty much impossible. We didn't have the DPS to down the Dark Rune Sentinels, plus the other adds, quick enough so the dragon wasn't taking enough damage while on the ground. We wiped this one 3 or 4 times, never getting him below 72%, before the RL decided to move on.

Ignis. What can I say about this one? Sadly, we couldn't make it to him. The OT didn't last more then 2 hits from the guardians before he was down.

With all that being said, I wouldn't call it a waste. People got to see a couple bosses fall and I did get the tank bracers off of FL! =)

So, we'll try again tonight and see what happens. Though I'm pretty sure I'm in for another couple hundred gold in repair bills! Fun time with Ulduar, oh my!