I guess my dancing around with the skeletal dragon right before ICC’s Gunship Battle was great practice for this encounter.  The encounter itself takes elements from Sunwell’s Kalecgos, which was on of my favorite encounters, and throws in a few interesting twists such as the Twilight Cutter.  Success is centered around awareness and control as the last phase is a balancing act between the two realms.

Ruby Sanctum is nowhere near as epic as a Sunwell Plateau was as the final expansion raid instance, but that was Blizzard’s intention.

With all the basic content now fully complete, we’ll continue to focus our efforts on completing as many hard modes and achievements as possible before Cataclysm is released.

Congratulations to Nachtung on completing Easy Company’s first Shadowmourne.  Nothing screams “Kill Me” in PvP like a big orange bull’s-eye on your back.  Somehow I think he will be OK with that.

He is one of the founding members of Easy Company, a dedicated officer, an outstanding player in both PvE and PvP, and just a great person.

Everyone in Easy Company is overjoyed and proud to have played a part in completing this legendary weapon.  A job well done.

Congrats, Nachtung!

Lich King kill number 6491 in the world (number 2202 in the US) according to WoWProgress.  It still feels good to finally complete the main encounter for WotLK even though it took us much longer than we originally expected.  The road to success is sometimes a bumpy one, but #6491 still feels pretty good to me.

Now we’re looking forward to working on a few hard modes, waiting for the new raid content, and eventually the new expansion.

No encounter in ICC has frustrated us more than Sindragosa.  The lagging gunship battle might be a close second.  It’s not even the mechanics, which are simple enough to understand.  It’s the voice.  Yes, that horrible, screeching, fingernails-on-the-chalkboard-like voice that beats you into submission.  Wiping is frustrating enough due to lag or mental lapses, but the constant berating she gives is not only deafening, but also maddening as well.

We finally finished her off and now we can turn the sound effects back on.  This marks the completion of all the wings of ICC for Easy Company.  Next up is the Lich King himself.

Blood-Queen Lana’thel is probably one of the most fun and finely tuned encounters in Icecrown Citadel.  In short, you have 5 minutes and 30 seconds to finish her before she enrages and flattens everyone in the room.  Along the way you’ll also have to deal with an exponentially scaling number of bites that will be the key to success or (repeated) failure.

Sounds easy right?  It actually is, but I can certainly see where it can lead to a lot of frustration.  Even with the zone wide buff starting this week, everyone still needs to execute properly to finish this encounter.  In other words, no one can die at least for now.

Another wing is finished and only a dragon now stands in our way to some quality time with Arthas.