Ascoli

We're full for the moment. I'm not sure how much success we'll have with this but if we go for another round I'll let you know.

Become a Champion of Ulduar! The achievement requires killing every boss on the first attempt without anyone dying. As with the Undying run, I expect everyone to have experience with all Ulduar bosses. The runs will either be Tuesdays or Thursdays starting at 8.

Well that was surprisingly easy (with only one or two oh crap moments). Thanks to everyone that joined in for the fun. Wondering if anyone would like to go again so Kadiana and Skywatcher get a shot at it? (200g for 2 hours)

With Cataclysm coming up who knows what will happen to the Undying achievement. Since I can't seem to get into a decent Undying pug and there is a title that comes along with the achievement I guess I have to organize it myself. I'm not expecting us to get this on the first try. The plan is it would be every Tuesday or Thursday night (depending on what is best for the group) from 8 to fail, until we get the Undying achievement. I'm looking for people who have cleared Naxx more than once and are comfortable with all the fights. This is not a gear my alt/learning run... Anyway, post something in the thread or let me know if you're interested. Oh yes, if Naxx is the weekly, I still plan on going (will complete the weekly even if we fail at Undying).

I was planning on doing this myself. I already have a level 1 in Orgrimmar waiting.

Since I can't sleep, here's our Halion strat recap (might change a little once boss mods are updated I guess): Phase 1: - Remove magic/curse the debuff (ideally after the person moves to the edge of the circle), the more marks are up the bigger the circle. - Avoid meteor strikes and don't stand in the fire trails. Phase 2: (everyone inside the portal) - Remove magic/curse the debuff (ideally after the person moves to the edge of the circle), the more marks are up the bigger the circle. - Orbs move clockwise, tank moves away from the orbs and everyone else chases them: A | B ------ C | D Let's say the orbs are at the top and bottom, tank would be at B, everyone else at A or D (make sure you are with a healer), dragon tail is at C (stay away). Phase 3: - Group splits into two, "melee" group stays inside, "caster" group goes back through the portals. - Same abilities as in P1 and P2. - We want to keep Corporeality at 50% (it's indicated at the top of the screen), to do this: when it goes above 50% inside DPS stops, and below 50% outside DPS stops. Oh yeah, stay in range of healers at all times in P3 since one of the groups will only have one healer, we don't want them to have to chase you around, there is plenty of room. I think that covers most of it...

I know we're off this Wednesday, but I'll probably try and get a Ruby Sanctum run together (assuming they release it). Realm will be down tomorrow so I won't be able to ask everyone to see who is interested. Let me know if you are.

I guess I should have posted this link earlier. But here is the guide for heroic Marrowgar that I was talking about. Basically, during whirlwind we split up in 4 groups around the circle in the middle of the room. The groups would be something like: Holyssa, Ascoli, Kailand, everyone else. Ascoli would be west, Kailand east, Holyssa south and everyone else north. If the bone storm heads towards the big group, everyone should move as a group and not scatter. Anyway, this is just a suggestion, we'll see what Kailand decides to do!

Sindragosa Yes, I know I'm in tank gear so I have a massive health pool and I have my run speed talent so I should be more patient and give everyone a chance to learn... I decided to look a bit more into Sindragosa's abilities since I was convinced there was no slowing ability on Icy Grips. Well, there isn't any... the only movement reduction ability she casts is Frost Breath which is a 60yd frontal cone that hits for more than Blistering Cold (the nova she does after the grip). No one but the tank should be getting hit by Frost Breath (unless it's somehow bugged?). I guess there is also the possibility of getting knocked down by a Tail Swipe but I don't see how that's possible... she shouldn't be doing anything other than casting Blistering Cold while we're running out. Something we might want to consider while learning this fight and getting used to the movement would be using our good old frost resist gear. Right now with frost aura and mark of the wild people are resisting on average 20% of the damage. With 3 pieces we'd get around 40-50% resistance. According to the resistance thread on EJ, with 340 resistance (2 pieces, mark + aura) you are guaranteed to resist a minimum of 30% of the damage. Anyway, it's something to think about... (I know, we lose DPS, but what we need right now is more practice at staying alive). I expect we will down her on Sunday so I guess I should be looking at the next fight instead.

You can scratch those off the list since I got my #1 piece (Blood-Soaked Saronite Stompers).

If you ask me tanking the big blob is pretty much out of the question, even for 10-man raids. The only advantage I can see with having a tank kiting is being able to survive a little bit longer should a slime puddle appear below their feet. It's true paladins do have more ranged threat abilities although during the few attempts we did with Kailand's 10-man I also wasn't able to hold threat. In any case, for the moment what we really need is more practice.

For those like me who like useless numbers, according to GuildOx we're the 4th raiding guild on the server to complete the Steelbreaker last 25-man achievement. Seems most of the other guilds opted for the (easier?) Runemaster Molgeim last.

I'm basically of the same opinion as Markenhoof for the DKP system: - Same system as we have now. - Minimum of 0 and some maximum. (I guess this should depend on the tier of content. Maybe 3x the average cost of items?) - Some DKP per hour (or per raid night). Maybe: - "Eroding" DKP (In my opinion this is both good and bad: good in the sense that if you don't raid your dkp goes down, but it's also bad for replacements that only come once in a while to give us a hand... I'm not sure what to suggest, maybe different decay rates for regulars vs replcements? That seems like a lot of work.) What I don't want to see: - Variable item cost, specially with silent auctions. - Cost for off-spec items. (Obviously because I'm a paladin, doesn't seem fair as I have 3 possible specs with no gear overlap.) --- As for hard modes, only thing I can suggest is EVERYONE go look at videos (even if you only look at one video, for most fights it's at most 10 minutes of your time). Obviously these might not reflect our exact strategy, but it might give people ideas about how they could improve their performance on specific fights. Zu has the last word about strategy, but he shouldn't have to micromanage what everyone is doing. In any case, here's the TankSpot hard mode Iron Council video: - Iron Council

Yogg-saron one light: http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f206/54146-...-hard-mode.html

Ok, I was looking at how we could improve in the brain room... For the 3rd time, here are the portal entry points: There are 3 different visions of Yogg-Saron's mind, two of them have a circular layout while the 3rd one is split into three groups. For the circular layout I would suggest splitting up like this (the numbers are you portal assignments): 1 & 2 take the first tentacle on the left 3 & 4 skip the first tentacle on the left and head to the second 8 & 9 take the first tentacle on the right 6 & 7 skip the first tentacle on the right and head to the second 5 will go where he is needed (if someone can't get in or someone dies) 10 is the healer Once your tentacle is down, skip one and go to the next: For the layout with 3 groups: 1, 2, 3 go left 4, 5, 6 go straight 7, 8, 9 go right

I know I'm not always on the main target if I'm tanking other things, but I have Vindication in both my specs... Does a 574 AP reduction and is up at least 90% of the time if not more.

Well, these are my expectations: - Kill Yogg (without extending the raid lockout) - Work on hard modes to reach Algalon (we could extend the raid lockout if we do this) - If we do extend the raid lockout for Ulduar we should also give ToC a shot (maybe give it an 1-2 hours per raid lockout period?) - Go back to VoA when they introduce the new boss We've shown that we can reach Yogg and give it a decent number of attempts in one week so there is no point in extending the raid lockout. We could start working on pulling things faster, last week was a good start, but we need less ready checks... To be able to reach Algalon we need to complete 5 hard modes (council, freya, hodir, mimiron, thorim) in order to get the key. If we plan to do this I think we should start working on hard modes right away (limiting it to 1-3 attempts per week), extending the raid lockout if needed so we can also work on Yogg. Yes, for some hard modes gear could be a limiting factor (although at this point most people should be pretty well geared up), but most of the time it's just getting used to the fights.

Cleanse only works on friendly targets, so pallies can't do anything about it... I sent a note to Zu regarding my idea already, but if you look at the WWS the evokers are easily doing over 1M in heals with their HoTs (like 8k up front and then 6k per second) as well as throwing up their runic shield (absorbs 120k magic damage and reduces physical damage by 50%). We could try to interrupt but with the haste aura the warbringers have it just gets harder and harder as/if we fall behind. If we have someone dedicated to removing the HoTs and shields I think it would make things easier. We would probably get more out of it than the person could put out in DPS. As far as I know our options for this are dispel magic, tranq shot, spellsteal... anything else that might work?

We already did Shattered, twice, so unless someone was missing on both weeks... Crazy Cat Lady seems like it might be doable but tough on healers. Rubble and Roll, we just need to kill the arms over and over. Happy Birthday! Getting Cold in Here, no one getting more than 2 stacks of Biting Cold, not sure if we're not getting this because of the occasional Freeze (which just means we need to be faster on dispels) or just long cast times. Didn't look at the rest since we still need work on the rest of the bosses.

Would it be possible to open the front porch to withdrawls until the end of the week? It seems like that'd be a lot easier than pestering an officer... there is a lot of stuff there that hasn't left the front porch in weeks. Or just open it up permanently and increase the withdrawal limit on all tabs to what it was before?

Since we seem to have the hang of them, we should start trying for some of the achievements on the first 4 bosses. Shattered seems easily doable (blow up 2 constructs within 5 seconds of each other during the Ignis fight). Try for the 1 air phase Razorscale. Also maybe try Flame Leviathan with one defense tower up? Didn't really look at them in details so there might be more we could do.

Just some notes/comments for the front groups on the 4-horsemen achievement... Ok, so we messed up the rotation a couple times and I hadn't seen the post about the strategy we'd be using so I didn't have a chance to read up on it. 3 group rotation strategy: Apart from the "doing stupid stuff" issue here is the key point that was missed when the strategy was explained over TS: All the rotations (including DPS) must be done keeping the meteors in mind... This makes the rotations slightly more complicated than rotate at X amount of marks: * Thane DPS group should wait until the Rivendare DPS group relieves them before moving out to Rivendare. * The middle group should wait for a meteor (and their Thane stacks to run out) before they run in to relieve the Thane group. * The Thane group should wait to be relieved AND for a meteor before they run out to relieve Rivendare group. * The Rivendare group just moves out to the middle whenever they get relieved. All this is done to avoid a tank/healer group getting hit by a meteor (which will most likely kill the healer). (Check out the link Zu posted, it explains everything in detail.) 2 group strategy: This is basically just swapping Rivendare and Thane around so it's quite a bit simpler than the 3-group rotation: * Everyone (including tanks) stays in their respective corners. * Tanks wait until 2-3 marks AND a meteor before doing the switch.

Very nice. As long as they don't increase the mana cost...

I've managed to get some Red Winter Clothes transferred over from the Alliance side. Cost me 20g per so if you'd like some let me know. I'll be dumping the left overs on the Horde AH in a couple days.

Nice to see people are interested. Happy Birthday!