On Sunday, 6/21, Kori organized a raid on the horde leaders for the double purpose of getting more people their war bears, and to extinguish the flames in the Horde cities for the Midsummer Fire Festival. The raid was a great success! In all, eight members of Force Recon attended and five got their war bears. Congrats to Eriene, Floradelle, Nestra, Terrandil, and Zendorf on their spiffy new mounts.

Here are some of us with our bears:

Kori has posted in the forum that she might organize another raid in case anyone missed this one. Please post in that thread if you are interested.

Thanks again to Kori for organizing the raid, and thanks also to Kirsdarke for helping out during the raid with flame locations and more. :)

Set Team kills 3 Ulduar Bosses in the Dungeon's First Release Week and Continues Adding New Bosses for the Next Two Weeks

* Note - This article was written to cover the first few weeks of the new patch. Another will be written for the newer news items.

The FR Set Team was very excited to begin raiding Ulduar in its first release week. We headed in there with a few friends on Apr 17 and 19th. The first encounter is the Flame Leviathan and pre-FL area. This is a very interesting idea and encounter. In this area, every member of the raid must either be a driver or passenger of a vehicle. A few of these vehicles are similar to those found in Wintergrasp, so that is a good practice area for those who might want to try their hand at vehicle combat beforehand.

There is a gauntlet of iron dwarves, enemy vehicles, and towers that must be destroyed using the various vehicles before you can engage Flame Leviathan. Similar to Obsidian Sanctum, there are also various hard modes that can be engaged. With Flame Leviathan, there are four Towers in the gauntlet area. Each one you leave up increases the difficulty of the Hard Mode and makes the Flame Leviathan fight more difficult, both with additional health and damage from the Flame Leviathan itself, as well as various other items in the encounter such as extra adds or patches of flame to avoid, etc.

Once you finish clearing the gauntlet area of adds and buildings, you can engage FL. During this fight, FL picks one vehicle to chase. That vehicle has to stay away from FL, while the other vehicles continue to do as much damage as possible and use their abilities to slow down the FL, as well as interrupt the FL's abilities so the pursued vehicle takes less damage.

For our first attempt, we decided to try this event in one level of Hard Mode with one tower up, and we were able to successfully defeat the Flame Leviathan. Here we are with the destroyed vehicle:

This is the achievement for getting him with the 1 tower up:

Next we headed off to Ignis and Razorscale. They were both extremely difficult and we didn't down them on our first day in Ulduar. Normally most of our set team in Naxx10 does 2500- 3k DPS. However DPS was lower in Ulduar to about 1800-2500 due to the difficulty of the bosses. Our first attempt at Ignis, had us all dead within about 5-8 seconds. He hits that hard!

But we went back and on Day 2 of that first week, we were able to down both Razorscale and XT, which unlocked the next area of Ulduar. Razorscale is the Proto Dragon from the quest chain in Ice Crown. This fight has 2 phases. The first requires alternating damage between adds, as well as the Proto Dragon. During this phase, Razorscale can only be damaged when she is brought to the ground. NPCs are present during this phase. They help fight adds as well as repair some gun turrets on the ground. In 10 mode, they can repair 2 turrets and when both of those are activate, Razorscale is brought to the ground for a short amount of time.

In order to get to phase 2 of this encounter, you must get Razorscale to 50% health during the times she's on the ground. Once phase 2 begins, Razorscale no longer flies out of combat range and must be tanked on the ground until defeated.

Here we are with Razorscale's corpse:

We managed to do this fast enough to get the following achievement:

Next up was XT. XT is a large robot, who also calls series of robots to the fight, some of which heal XT, so the adds and XT must be taken care of. He has 2 alternating phases, regular phase and heart phase. Heart phase happens every 25% of his health decrease. During Heart Phases, his heart is exposed and doing damaged to his heart increases the damage done to him. It is also during this phase that he calls additional adds. Here is a picture of XT defeated and the achievements we were able to obtain with that first kill:

We've been returning to Ulduar on a weekly basis. On Apr 25, we successfully completed a few achievements with XT and our first kill of Kologarn.

The XT achievements are:

For Kologarn's fight, he has 3 areas you can attack on him - his torso, his left arm, and his right arm. To defeat him, you must get his torso to 0 health. However, killing either arm causes him to lose 15% of his torso's life. In addition, the arms respawn. Each arm has different abilities as well. So while they are "alive" they do different things to the raid. For example, his right arm will occasionally grab and hold a raid member. For this raid member to be release, sufficient damage must be done to the arm or it must be defeated. Here is a picture of us standing on Kologarn's rubble:

During the following week, our 3rd in Ulduar, we managed first Kills of Ignis, Auriaya, and the Iron Council. Here are shots of us over their defeated bodies:

Ignis:

Auriaya:

Iron Council:

Come back soon for more tales on our work in Ulduar.

Kori

2nd/Open Team has their first kills of Noth and Heigan!

We've been continuing to hit up the various raid locations within Wrath and FR continues with its raiding successes. On March 21st, we had a bit of a rocky start with several people who didn't make it and some scrambling for bodies, including a nice PUG for Naxx. Our OS team was Blueberi, Sleepyeyed, Maxtel, Metaxa, Caritheri, Lurik, Trundlimp, Silx, Leith, and Valarra. We got in there and killed Sartharion on our 2nd attempt.

Then we headed over to Naxx, where we picked up a DK, Lowfat. We preceded to 1 shot all of the spider wing. Then we headed over to Noth the Plaguebringer and not only had our first 2nd team kill of him, but also 1-shot him! Great job! Here's a picture of us:

Before we ended the successful run after about 3 hours, with all of OS and 4 bosses in Naxx, we also got some practice in on Heigan.

Then our open team returned to Naxx on Apr 4, 2009. The team that day consisted of Blueberi, Valaevil, Maxtel, Moxe, Eriene, Serrin, Caritheri, Verosh, Draenevil, and Katagana. We headed straight into Naxx. Many hadn't been there before or had very little experience in there.

We still ended the day with 5 boss kills, including a new one of Heigan! What a crazy fight that was! Several folks got caught and died early. A few more dropped as time passed. By the time he died, only 4 were left standing! Thank goodness, it was 1 tank, 1 dps, and 2 healers! The entire fight took over 19 minutes! Here's the screenshot of us over his body and of the timer!

Set Team Completes all 10man Naxx Achievements

Later on in the day on Apr 4th, the Set Team went into Naxx with the express purpose of attempting the last 4 achievements we hadn't gotten yet. These were:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Momma_Said_Knock_You_Out
http://www.wowwiki.com/Shocking!
http://www.wowwiki.com/Spore_Loser
http://www.wowwiki.com/The_Hundred_Club

Great job to the team, who achieved all of these on the first try.

The team that day was mainly Nestra, Nathelien, Falarelle, Sleepyeyes, Terreis, Valasca, Mixtel, Narlexia, and Kori. Agarosi came for most of the run, and thanks to Leith who stepped in to help for a fight.

Congrats again on completing all Naxx 10 achievements!

Kori

The Undying

For the past few weeks, the Naxx set team has been working on getting achievements in our weekly Naxx run. Each week we've started with trying for the Undying, which is the achievement and title you get if you kill all the bosses in Naxx in the same raid reset without a single member of your raid dying on a boss. So we would head in, kill a few bosses, and as soon as someone died on a boss, we'd switch to working on other achievements since we'd lost that one already.

Well, yesterday, Sunday March 15, the Ides of March, we never had to switch to other achievements! We just kept on keeping on with the Undying. We had a few scary moments, like when some people missed the jump in Thaddius, or when Brostin and Nath both got frost tombed near the end of the Kel'Thuzad fight, but other than that it went perfectly.

We tried to keep the mood light during the run by joking and laughing and only referring to what we were trying to accomplish in a lighthearted manner, but we could all feel the tension mounting as we downed boss after boss. We all knew that everyone was very serious about it despite all the "Brostin jokes." :) By the time we were on KT, vent was extremely quiet, with people only talking when they needed to. But after KT fell and "The Undying" achievement splashed on our screens, we all started babbling and talking in vent at the same time. It was a great moment!

This was a difficult achievement and title to earn, and we were all very proud and excited to get it. Not a lot of people have done this. In fact, we're the 20th guild on Argent Dawn to achieve it, according to GuildOx. Congrats to the whole team, which was comprised of Brostin, Falarelle, Koriander, Mixtel, Narlexia, Nathelien, Nestra, Sleepyeyes, Terreis, and Valasca.

We took a screenshot with our new titles. Kori was so excited that she forgot to change her title for the picture, but she got it too. :)

More open team Naxx success

The open Naxx team headed out on Saturday for its second try at Naxx. There were some last minute personnel changes so the team had a bit of a "warm up" period in Obsidian Sanctum. But things settled down and we got Sarth and then headed for Naxx.

This week we started in the Military quarter, which is a much more difficult quarter than what we had done previously. The first boss in that quarter is Instructor Razuvious. Razuvious hits hard and it's not really possible for us to withstand his blows, so the fight is done by mind-controlling the understudies he is training and tanking him with them. Naturally, it was a little rough at first as our tanks, Floradelle and Metaxa, needed to learn to use the crystals to mind control the understudies. But after a few practice tries, they were able to get into a rhythm and we defeated the boss on the 4th attempt.

Here we are with his body:

Emboldened by our success, we continued on to Gothik the Harvester. We split into two groups and moved into the two separate rooms so we could kill what spawned on both the "live" and the "dead" side. Even though it was our first time seeing this boss as this group, we were able to handle the entire fight pretty easily and we one-shot Gothik with no deaths!

At that point, time was getting short so we ignored the taunting of the Four Horsemen and headed back to the Spider wing to finish up the run by clearing those three bosses. It was a good second run and we all look forward to achieving more there in the weeks to come. Congrats to those who attended: Blueberi, Caritheri, Ephany, Floradelle, Maxtel, Metaxa, Myrili, Regor, Sleepyeyed, Valarra, and Melosa who subbed in for the final boss.

Thanks to everyone who attended and to those who expressed interest in attending. Special thanks to Fala for bringing a different toon than she intended so that we could actually do the run. Keep an eye out for sign-ups for the next run.

Set Team Continues to Move Forward in Completing Achievements

I posted on Feb 14th regarding a set of achievements that the FR Set Team was going to work on within Naxx. This totaled 8 new achievements with various ranges of time.

We've been working on various ones, trying out new strategies, and using our determination to forge through these. As you all know from my previous post, we achieved both Make Quick Werk Of Him and And They Would All Go Down Together last weekend.

On Sun, Mar 8th, due to some unusual circumstances, we ended up with only 8 online for our Set Team run, so we decided to see if we could make a go of

The Dedicated Few - Defeat the bosses of Naxxramas on Normal Difficulty with less than 9 people in the zone. http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=578

We weren't really sure how it would go, but we definitely decided to give it our best. By the end of our 3 hours for this time frame, we had completed 3 quarters with only the 8 of us. This even included several deaths in different boss fights, yet we made it through the Military, Plague, and Spider Quarters. At this point, we were energized, but knew we still had some large challenges ahead of us. We met back on the eve of Mon, Mar 9th. We got through the Construct Quarter and picked up this achievement:

Subtraction - Defeat Thaddius in Naxxramas on Normal Difficulty with less than 9 people. http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=2180

Then we headed off to Sapphiron. We knew he was going to be our last major hurdle. Though KT is the last Naxx boss, we've always found Sapph to be a more difficult fight. We wiped once and got ourselves back in. We only had a small amount of time before our OS run was to begin, so we got started. And several minutes later, we had one more boss under our belt towards the achievement!

Then we headed off for our Obsidian Sanctum and Eye Run with our 2 other friends who joined us, Forgiven and Brostin. We had to try a few attempts, but managed to down Sarth with 1 drake again, and then we quickly 1-shot Malygos. From there, the 8-person FR Team returned to Naxx with just a bit of time before the night was out and some of our raiders had to head off to bed. We got inside...and proceeded to 1-shot KT with the 8 of us!

Congrats to the Team on an amazing achievement - Nestra, Falarelle, Sleepyeyes, Nathelien, Terreis, Valasca, Narlexia, and me.

Kori