Ulduar - Thoughts from a Tree

Fianna had it's first real success in Ulduar this week. The previous weeks since the new raid has been out, we were only able to down Flame Leviathan. This week we brought down XT-002, Razorscale, and Ignis. We probably would have gotten Kologarn had we a little more time, but as always our guild has a strict end time and we called it before we beat him.

My overall impression of Ulduar is somewhat mixed. At first I felt like the place was just too hard, but I'm actually leaning toward the oposite now. This content is supposed to keep us occupied until the next major content patch, but our guild burned through three new bosses this week, and actually one shot or two shot all three. Kologarn was the only one that really gave us trouble, and mostly that was because we were just doing it wrong to start out. I hope the rest of the content is interesting enough to last. Then again, there are lots of hard modes to try if we get bored with the normal content.

Flame LeviathanFor this fight, I usually pair with our elemental shaman, Mirna, and drive a demolisher. This is pretty fun, though I would like to try each of the other vehicles eventually. Overall the Flame Leviathan encounter is pretty fun - but I have a feeling the trash clear is going to get really old really fast. Because of the trash, this first encounter takes quite a lot longer than the next few we tried. Still, I think it is an interesting break from typical boss fights and I applaud Blizard for trying something new.

Needless to say, I have no healer-specific thoughts for this fight.

Drops:

• [Ironsoul] - Congrats to our main tank Nodonn!
• [Lifespark Visage] - Congrats to our boomkin, Shapa!
• [Energy Siphon] - So, this really dropped last week, but I wanted to say how excited I am that I got it, because mana is a bitch in Ulduar!

XT-002 Deconstructor

XT is the next one we went after, and I'm sorry to say I spent almost the entire fight with my face in the dirt. I got myself killed by a light bomb pretty much right off the bat. However, we were running with three healers. We learned due to this mishap that we indeed can (and therefor should) run that fight with only two healers. With the wonderful new convenience of duel spec, it's easy to do this. Not only will that make the fight shorter, it will actually make healing easier anyway because more DPS means more chances to skip "Tantrums" - because it's possible to DPS XT fast enough that he goes back into his open heart phase before doing a tantrum.

Note: We forgot to take a picture of XT :(

Drops:

• [Gloves of Taut Grip] - Congrats to our honorary member, Kanomira!
• [Conductive Cord] - Congrats to Violetress, who was a great first time pug!

Razorscale
This boss was a lot of fun, and went really smoothly. In fact, I think we one-shot her tonight, though we did wipe on her about 15 times last night. Tonight it just clicked with the group make-up we had, and everything went right. I think three healers and 5 DPS works on this one, but if you can manage it you should probably go with 6 DPS since she does have an enrage timer that can be a problem if your DPS is not good enough. But if you can down XT, you can probably down her without too much trouble.

Tree healing for Razorscale was great. This fight, like many others in Ulduar, requires a lot of mobility, which made my healing buddy Celyanna, a holy paladin, very unhappy. There really isn't anything too challenging in this encounter as far as healing goes, as long as people follow one of the basic rules of raiding: Stay out of the fire!

Drops:

• [Breastplate of the Afterlife] - Congrats to Celynna on this excellent holy paladin piece!
• I don't recall what the second piece of gear was, but I think it went to our rogue PuG. His name was also really crazy and I'd have to check my friends list to find it, but he put out good DPS and was overall a valuable edition to the team, especially due to his previous experience in the dungeon.

Ignis the Furnace Master

I had so freaking much fun on this fight. Usually our guild runs with two boomkins in addition to me, and I think normally I won't have quite as much fun as I did tonight because of that. Tonight I was the only druid, and as such it was up to me to root the adds as our (awesome) pally tank kited them around. I stayed out of tree form and healed the pally tank and also spot healed the raid while the other two healers concentrated on the main tank. We didnt have a mage to break the adds, but our two elemental shamans did a great job with it. Really, I can't say enough how flawlessly this went. We one-shot this boss with most of us never having done the encounter before. And I got to feel really important :)

Drops:

• [Gloves of the Smoldering Touch] - These went to our rogue PuG again, whose name is hard to type.
• [Drape of Fuming Anger] - This actually went to off spec, and was picked up by Celynna. Yay for gearing up his ret set!

Kologarn

This fight really sucks. It sucks more when the tanks don't know they need to be swapping the boss back and forth and are eating 20k+ damage spikes. We cycled through three main tanks before we figured that out. Our last attempt was really good, and I'm convinced we could have downed this bad boy if we had more time.

Overall this was a great run and I had a blast. We got really lucky with PuGs, and our usual PuGs upped their game to make tonight a great success. I especially wanna give a shout out to Evilboo, a long time friend of a few folks in the guild who met up again for the first time in quite a while. We need to run together more often!

Tomorrow I'll share some thoughts for people in small guilds who are trying to organize raids, and some idea on how to make that work. But that's it for tonight folks, hope you all have as much fun raiding Ulduar as I have!