The Diuturnal Order

Another milestone for the guild last night as we completed Dragon Soul on normal mode! Possibly not the cleanest kill ever, with only 1 person left standing as the achievement flashed up the screen, but a kill is a kill! :)

It's a great effort to be honest, as we've essentially had to rebuild half of our raid group since Christmas, when quite a few of our members decided to take a break from WoW for various reasons. In fact, only 5 of the people that were present for our first Ragnaros kill were also there for our first Deathwing kill, so it's very pleasing that we were able to adapt and continue on successfully.

Video footage will be coming later (for Spine as well) although don't expect it for a few days. I'll post up here when they're available for public consumption!

They've been sitting on my HDD for a while, and I've finally got round to uploading them! Videos for our first kills of Yor'sahj, Zon'ozz and Hagara are all now up on YouTube and can be seen by following the Progression link in the menu over to the left and then clicking through to the appropriate bosses.

There isn't one for Morchok since I wasn't able to attend the guild's first raid into Dragon Soul, although really, there's nothing very exciting about watching a Morchok fight anyway, there are harder bosses in dungeons like Grim Batol.

As for our most recent kills, I do have the 2nd half of the fight against Ultraxion so I might consider putting that up, the first half of the fight would have looked pretty much exactly the same as the second half anyway so you won't be missing much :P As for Warmaster Blackhorn, I'm afraid we don't have that one since he fell over the first time we got through the initial adds, which I wasn't expecting and hence I wasn't recording it. I'll try and make sure we get videos for the Deathwing fights when we complete those though, as I suspect they'll need a bit more practice than some of the earlier bosses.

Enjoy!

Morchok and Yor'sahj are officially on farm now. We did have a single wipe on Yor'sahj but the reason for it was easily corrected and just down to a change of personnel compared to last week - he went down easily on the second attempt.

And so it was on to Zon'ozz. Most of Friday and all of our Sunday time ended up going on him, including having to re-clear the trash with only half an hour left on the Sunday. But, we finally got him on what was going to be our last attempt of the night. Which just goes to show that sometimes it's worth sticking at it! We got him on our 41st attempt overall, although it's worth noting that the raid group changed 2 or 3 times over the different evenings, so there was a lot of re-learning to be done, especially for the healers and things like dispel timings and raid cooldowns. Still, we got him!

Bit of a break coming up over the Christmas period so possibly not much raiding until the New Year now, but we'll be looking to take down Hagara quickly once we're back up and running.

New patch, new raid. We headed in to Dragon Soul this week to see what it had to offer.

First boss is a bit of a joke, he went down at the first attempt. As long as you have people that are able to run in a straight line to an appropriate spot every now and then, there's really not a whole lot more to it.

Yor'sahj went down at the 6th attempt, and just needed us to adjust a couple of things to get right. I think it's probably fair to say our least favourite combination for the oozes is the traffic lights - i.e. red/yellow/green. We get rid of the green no problem but that still leaves both the yellow and red ramping up the damage on the entire raid. Good usage of things like Spirit Link Totem, personal damage reduction CDs and healthstones got us through OK, although I'm not sure we'd want to see that combination more than once during the fight with our current gear.

Zon'ozz next then, and he's posing us a few more problems at the moment. Bouncing the ball isn't too hard but we still need some practice on dispelling at the right time I think. More practice next week!

Wow. What a night! After getting Ragnaros down to 11.7% on the Sunday night, no-one wanted to be left out on the Monday, and the same group of 10 returned the next night. In the end it only took 3 attempts on the Monday. After some confusion on Son of Flame assignments on the first attempt, and a spectacular double death fail by someone *cough* on the second attempt, the third time was the charm.

It took us 82 wipes and the efforts of 17 different people practising the fight over the course of 7 weeks before we finally got him. A big thank you to everyone that helped get us this far. This is the first time we've faced a proper "progression" boss where we've had to work hard to get it, and says a lot about the character of the guild that we got through the wipe nights with a positive attitude and a friendly atmosphere.

Don't forget to check the Progression link on the menu over on the left to see both the trophy kill screenshot, and also for the first time, video footage of the whole fight!

Congratulations to all!

We're not quite there as a guild yet, but one of our members (Fisal) was part of a successful PuG raid on Ragnaros last night. As well as getting himself a shiny new bow, this does mean that we have the option of trying some of the earlier bosses on heroic when he's available to join the raid.

As such, it's well worth raiders having a look online for Heroic Shannox guides so that you're ready for it. Lots of 391 items on offer, as well as the upgrade token for the heroic tier legs, and also [Crystallized Firestone] for upgrading other items such as the [Ranseur of Hatred] to the much more shiny [Ranseur of Hatred].

I've put a poll up on the forums for our raiders to vote on. Please head over there and let us know what your preferences are, so that we can try and aim to do raid content that most people want to be doing!

With the help of some previous posts from people on the main Wowstead forums I've worked out how to add our World of Logs data to the site, you should see it over on the right hand side near the bottom.

For those of you that haven't seen it before, basically our raid leaders log the data from the fights and then upload it at the end of the evening. There's a vast array of information you can get out of it once you know how to use it, but even at the very basic level you can just have a look at Damage Done on specific fights for example, and see how you compare to the other people in the raid.

Feel free to have a play around with all the pretty graphs on there!