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.

It looks like Blizzard finally put together an encounter where the key focus is on the healers.  How much focus is on the healers?  I think this quote from WoW.com sums it up nicely.

“So while those classes are the ones I would suggest going in, reality says though that you should send in your best players. Yes, send in those players who will do everything in their power to not let those stacks fall off. If they can manage that, then they’re gold.”

That’s not to say that the tanks and DPS are sitting around doing /dance.  There’s still a lot going on outside of the Emerald Dream.  We noticed that the adds do not spawn evenly so having the DPS know when to assist the other side was critical to the success of the encounter.

The faster you can bring the adds down in an orderly fashion, the easier the encounter is.  Every little bit helps.  For example, Nachtung runs up and bandages Valithria at the start.  That’s roughly 2300 less healing that the healers need to do.  Teamwork, that’s what it is all about.

You’ll notice in the screenshot that there a crazy moonkin (Chizzlechest) trying to get on top of the chest.  He did manage to finally get up there.  We would have tried to help him, but he’s already playing a moonkin so it’s probably best just to leave him be.

After the Blizzard post-maintenance lag monster decided to go away for the night, we were able to spend some quality time with the Professor.  A  0.9% wipe the night before galvanized us for tonight.  Dodging slimes, goo, and gas bombs was now second nature.

I even managed to set a personal best of over 12,000+ DPS on the finishing attempt.  OK, I was a giant abomination doing roughly 10,000 damage a swing, but it still counts.

Assuming the Blizzard lag monster does not reappear on Thurs., we should be finishing Valithria Dreamwalker and introducing ourselves to Blood-Queen Lana’thel.

On Aug. 20, 2009, we clear the Faction Champions.  Just like in regular PvP, the protection warrior gets completely ignored and is chain crowd controlled.  Nice…

On Aug. 30, 2009, we cleared the Twin Val’kyr.  Who doesn’t like twins?

On Sept. 3, 2009, we cleared Anub’arak.  He is just as annoying in a raid as he is in the 5-man.  That concluded our run through the Trial of the Crusader.

On Oct. 18, 2009, we completed Yogg + 3 and crafted our first Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings.  Congratulations to Yann!

While waiting patiently for Patch 3.3, we continued to work on the Trial of the Grand Crusader and completed 3 of the 5 heroic encounters.

Icecrown Citadel has been a blast so far.  The encounters so far have been pretty fun and interesting.  It is also good to see Blizzard return to having hard boss encounters.  The gating on the new encounters and the end wing bosses is a little gimmicky, but I think it is the right approach.  It keeps people looking forward to how the story will unfold.  The gating also puts some emphasis on focusing on execution and strategy instead of brute force attempts until people “get it.”

Currently, we have completed the Lower Spire and through the first bosses of The Plagueworks and The Crimson Hall.  Hopefully, we will have new updates to share in the coming weeks.

It took us a lot longer than expected to get this screenshot.  After months of on and off attempts, we finally made a concerted effort to put a checkmark on this guy.

What really helped was to be able to do the 10-man version of this encounter first.  A group when in with the mindset of beating him and found him to be pushover.  Granted we were in 25-man gear and he had already been nerfed, but it was useful to collect some data on the encounter, which we used to modify our 25-man strategy.

We are disappointed that we did not beat him pre-nerf and pre-Patch 3.2, but he is done and over with now.  We have had more than our fair share of ups and downs these past few months.  With any luck, we are on the upside of the next cycle and looking forward to completing the Coliseum.

It wasn’t quite a one shot this time around, but close enough.  There is a lot more going on with Lord Jaraxxus and it is a bit of a step up from the Northrend Beasts.  This one was more of an endurance encounter and handling the various adds more than anything else.  We actually spent a good portion of the fight down several players, but managed to stay focused and pull through to the finish.

Another Crusader boss down and we’re still waiting on Yogg…