I am guessing a lot of people have enjoyed the lighter moments in WoW like comedy wipes against a new boss.  Sometimes these wipes are unintentional like how I got the entire raid ported to Yogg-Saron while everyone was clearing to Ignis.  Yes, I zigged when I should have zagged.

What about a comedy screenshot?  A couple of people went a little crazy with the bunny costumes and before you know it, the entire raid looked like the rabbit bin at a pet store.

One of the most disconcerting aspects of Ulduar is the occasional screaming by Sara (A.K.A. Yogg-Saron).  It is actually frightening.

Imagine the following.  You are in the middle of working on a new encounter.  You have most of the kinks in the strategy and execution worked out.   Things are going smoothly and then out of nowhere you hear a woman screaming.  It is not just any scream mind you; it is an ear piercing, fingernails on a chalkboard type of scream.  It is enough to freak anyone out.  Seriously, is that really necessary?

After a while, it sort of becomes background noise and you do not really notice it anymore.  Either that or you turned the sound off.  Fortunately, it has not prevented us from moving right along in Ulduar.

It will be nice to shut Sara up once and for all soon.  Once we do, we will be sure to kiss and make up later on.

Ulduar is finally here and not a moment too soon.  Most of us did not have time to raid on the PTR so this is truly new content for us.  If the initial Wrath raiding content was Raiding 101, this is a nice step up to Raiding 102.  Learning new encounters and even the new trash mobs is quite enjoyable.  After cruising through Naxx for the past few months, this is a very welcome change.

The first week went more or less as expected.  The patch and addon craziness certainly took place.  Unfortunately, there’s a really nasty video bug that prevents some of our members from playing because it crashes their machine every few minutes while in Ulduar (sorry Deadwing).  Hopefully, Blizzard and/or the nVidia/ATI will get these bugs addressed very soon.

Below are some quick snapshots of the week.  Three bosses down, eleven more to go.

The picture above was taken more than a month ago after one of our raids.  With content fairly limited right now and at a Raiding 101 level, we need to find ways to fill in our abundant free time.

We filled up the raid with all available EC members and brought along a few friends from other guilds and blitzed and ransacked the major Horde cities.  For the Alliance!  It was a rocking good time.  We also discovered that many of us have no sense of direction when it comes to travel. Left.  No, your other left…

With most Horde raiders in instances at the time, we controlled the city center of Orgrimmar for a good hour.  Ashik (A.K.A. Rage) had a penchant for killing off the bankers.  Given the current state of the global economy right now, I cannot say I really blame him.

Now that we’re officially done with all the content, we’ll probably be doing more fun things like this in the coming weeks until Ulduar is released.

The overall setup of the Obsidian Sanctum reminds me of the skill levels in Doom ranging from “I’m too young to die.” to “Hurt me plenty.” to “Nightmare!”  Like most guilds, we did the “I’m too young to die.” level first with just Sartharion himself to get our feet wet.  Seeing how easy it was, we ramped up to the “Nightmare!” level pretty quickly, which is Sartharion with three Twilight Drakes, the hardest encounter currently available in WotLK.

Prior to the recent changes in 3.0.9, the encounter could have been very difficult if you were not careful.  Fissures were the same general color as the background and could easily be masked by AoE.  Players coming out of the portals needed to be careful on their timing as to not get hit by a random fissure or a huge lava wall.  The overall structure of the encounter is not too difficult.  You need enough DPS to minimize the overlap between the Drakes, coordination to handle the Acolytes, and attentiveness to not standing on or in the path of some very bad things.  There’s nothing really special here.

However, it caused us a bit more agony and consternation than we expected and we bickered like Sartharion and his siblings.  Unlike them, we did not let our feuding get in the way and pulled it together to finish the encounter once and for all.  We were not going to be defeated this.  It isn’t even the most challenging encounter that Blizzard has created.  I personally think that most of the final bosses in TBC were far more challenging and interesting.

Other than the achievements, we are now done with all  the initial encounters in WotLK and eagerly await the arrival of Ulduar.

Congratulations to Pomato on the Twilight Drake mount.  Pomato had a brief stare down with a Horde player who insisted on being in our screenshot.