I am still working on the Wrath Raiding Wrap-Up will posted it as soon as I'm done. Until then, there is more exciting news on the FR Cataclysm Raiding.

The Set Team has been working hard on additional bosses and I'm very excited to report that we have defeated a new boss for each raid week of the last 4 raid weeks! That is 4 bosses in 4 weeks! Excellent work and a big congrats to everyone who's participated - Nestra, Nathelien, Terreis, Falarelle, Koriander, Narlexia, Valasca, Mcsquizzie, Dakoran, Caritheri, Brenda/Aridonna!

We are now 7 of 12 for this tier of raiding in Normal Mode!

Now, let's talk a bit about how we got there.

First up is the Conclave of the Winds Encounter. This is an interesting encounter with 3 enemies standing on 3 different platforms. Each of the bosses has different abilities, and must all die within 1 minute of each other. It is interesting in that you cannot see at all what is happening on the other platforms and we have to have a lot of trust in our teammates to keep it together or to let us know if they need something.

It wasn't uncommon for us to hear a lot of, "I just fell off!", "I didn't jump in time!" and "I missed the platform!" It's also good to note that for the most part, everyone but Narlexia, is jumping between platforms during the encounter to be on other platforms at specific times, timed to the boss abilities and changes.

This one required a lot of movement and different types of raid work depending on what platform you were on and depending on which phase was occurring.

Here's a picture of us on Apr 17th, 2011, by one of the corpses of one of the djinn on the center platform. You can even see one of our future targets, Al'Akir, in the background:

Next up, we returned to Blackwing Descent to hunt down our next target, Maloriak. There is one side "boss" after Magmaw and Omnotron before getting to Maloriak's area. It is reported to be the most dangerous encounter and supposedly has killed more people than anything else in raids in WoW, This is the new elevator boss, the BWD Elevator!!! It really is only at the top level for a second. If you're not moving on it right away, the floor literally drops out from under you and you come crashing to a halt at the bottom, where either your friends are attempting to rez you, or are laughing at your expense....Or sometimes both....

I must admit, we have not all escaped this side boss unscathed, but we won't name any names here....(especially those who think they have a fool proof way to make it down....until the other unbeatable boss, Lag, kills them.)

The first part of Maloriak himself reminds me a bit of the potions boss in Shadowfang Keep. He has different color potions that he throws into a cauldron in the back of the room. Depending on which potion is used, the raid had to do slightly different things. In addition, all through these potions phases, he casts Arcane Storms which do a TON of raid damage and must be interrupted, AND he also summons adds. The adds are summoned by a cast, which can be interrupted. There are a total of 18 adds, generally released 3 at a time. Each add has a buff that reduces damages to the other adds near them so if too many are up, they cannot be killed easily until Maloriak utilizes a "Green" potion which temporarily removes this buff.

Controlling these adds is similar to the dragonhawk boss in ZA and the panther boss in ZG, in that when a specific later phase hits (when Maloriak gets to 25% health), all the remaining adds are released in addition to 2 "Prime Subjects". It is generally best to have all the adds down before this phase starts.

We did notice an odd thing in this encounter, which might be a bug. Maloriak would sometimes interrupt himself when he moved to the cauldron. We kept asking in raid to see who was doing the interrupt since we needed to release the adds at this time, until Narl noticed he was interrupting his own cast!

I'm pleased to announce that we were able to get our first kill on Maloriak on Apr 22, 2011, on our first raid night of that raid week and I believe only our 2nd week at attempting him. Here's a picture of us:

Our next goal was the Valiona and Theralion or the twin dragons fight in Bastion of Twilight. You might remember Valiona as the dragon from Grim Batol who escapes us. This, like many other Cata flights, has multiple bosses in the same encounter with different abilities. In this encounter, one of the dragons is on the ground while the 2nd is in the air. Both dragons have different ground and air abilities and they switch back and forth. This fight has a lot of raid movement, collapsing in on a raid member, running out to be at least 6 yards away, running out of blasts from the sky, running from flame breath, running from puddles of all types of color on the ground. Let me tell you, our toons have lost a lot of weight from all the running in this encounter.

We were able to defeat these twin dragons on May 1, 2011, and you can see this screenshot of the day:

The fourth downed boss in four weeks is Atramedes, the blind dragon in Blackwing Descent.

This encounter has an interesting twist in that everything is revolving around sound. As soon as the encounter begins, a sound bar is added to your UI. It starts at 0, and increases with damage taken from the various abilities that Atramedes uses to try and "find" you. If your bar ever gets to 100, it's an insta-kill. There are also a limited number of gongs around the room that can be used to interrupt Atramedes and reset the sound bars on the entire raid.

He has various abilities in his different phases, ground and air, where he tries to zero in on someone chasing them with breath abilities. If you get caught, you take a ton of damage. So either don't get caught, or use one of the precious gongs to save yourself or your teammate. In his air phase, it is surprisingly easy to get caught and die to his breath, even with some of the speed enhancing abilities. We are still going to need more practice on him to get through it without anyone dying.

We did managed to kill him on our 3rd attempt of the night on May 8, 2011, which was our 2nd day of trying him. Here we are with his body:

The Set Team has now set its sights on Chimaeron and the Ascendant Council. I hope to have more good news to share soon from the Set Team journeys.

Meanwhile, I also have some news on our other teams and their runs. On Apr 15th, we happen to have quite a few people on and by some luck, the alliance had Tol Barad, so we put together an group and made fast work of Argaloth. Here are Sigmos, Falarelle, Aridonna, Ephany, Ifer, Marlette, Melosa, Valaevil, Mariance, and Eriene by Argaloth's body:

Last, but not least, we had a 2nd Team do a raid on Apr 29. 2011. This raid was also successful in downing Magmaw. Grats to Maxtel, Melosa, Sigmos, Ifer, Aridonna, Marlette, Jaylo, Ephany, Eriene, and Valaevil for their accomplishment seen here:

Man that is a big worm!

Grats again to everyone who has or is participating in the Force Recon raids. Great work everyone and I look forward to more tales to come!

Kori

On Friday April 15, Force Recon held its first fishing contest.

The goal of the contest was to fish from pools. As a guild we are working on fishing 10,000 fish from pools, for the achievement That's a Lot of Bait which provides a recipe that is useful for guild raids.

Participants were: Brenda, Falarelle, Marlette, Narlexia, Nathelien, Valaevil

We fished for 30 minutes and the competition was stiff. A few people got distracted by tantalizing herbs too close to their fishing holes, but most were focused on optimizing their fishing strategy.

There were two winners from the contest - Narlexia won for getting the most actual fish (65 fish) and Falarelle won for the most number of items (55 fish and 25 non-fish). In all, we got 420 casts from pools in 30 minutes. That helped us move to 3115/10,000 for the achievement.

Congrats to Narl and Fala and thanks to all who participated!

We are also well on our way to level 18 as a guild. We hit level 17 a few days ago and Crempuff was nice enough to send me a screenshot. Thanks!

With level 17 we now have instant mail between guild members. That's definitely been a nice perk.

We're making good progress on our road to level 25 and lion mounts. Thanks all for your hard work on this.

Onward!

The Wrath Raiding Wrap-Up is still in the works and should be posted soon, but here's another update on the Cataclysm Raiding.

The Set Team has been continuing to do raiding. We'd been working on Omnitron every raid week after we'd killed Magmaw. We had a couple of raid nights off in Mar, but worked on Omnitron some more and on the last possible try on March 28th, we downed him! Thanks to those who came out to help us this night - Donus, Xassana, and Aridonna. And thanks to the Set Team Members - Nestra, Nathelien, Falarelle, Valasca, Terreis, McSquizzie (and me) for their continued hard work and perseverance.

Here's a picture of us by one of the corpses of Trons:

The following raid week, on Apr 3, 2011, we went straight to Halfus to begin learning this encounter. This Raid Instance - Bastion of Twilight, has significantly more trash than Blackwing Decent. We made our way through the trash and began to learn the Halfus fight. Halfus does not come alone. He has a total of 5 drakes that could be used in the encounter. Only 3 of these are active each week and every raid week, these drakes are a different combination, so you will never see the same 3 drakes up two raid weeks in a row! In addition, he has another friend, a proto-behmoth, that is shooting at us during the encounter.

Each of the three active drakes in the encounter start out being caged/chained. We must release them from their bonds in order to kill them off. For each drake released, the damage to Halfus is increased by 100%. This is significant, so we must release as many as we can handle to get this damage increase. Also, each drake, when alive, gives a buff to Halfus or the proto-behemoth. However, if the drake is dead (released and then defeated), they'll provide a debuff to Halfus or the proto-behemoth, making it easier for us to survive and kill him.

On the night of our first kill, we encountered the Nether Scion, Storm Rider, and The Time Warden.

I'm extremely pleased to say that after about 45 minutes of attempts on him, less than 1/2 way through our raid night, we defeated him.

We've now begun to learn Conclave of the Winds in the Throne of the Winds Raid Instance. We'll also start planning for the next encounters as well. Hope to have more to report soon!

Kori

Our push to move up guild levels has paid off again. We made it to level 16 on Tuesday night, just a week after hitting level 15. Thanks again to all for pushing to get these levels faster.

Here's the image of the big moment:

We also have been working on getting other guild achievements as well. On Wednesday Narlexia ran his usual weekly raid event and we were able to get 10 guild members into Malygos to work on the You Don't Have An Eternity - Guild Edition achievement. We got it on the first try. Congrats to all and thanks!

Then, for good measure, we all headed to Sarth 3D to get another mount.

Remember to sign up for these runs if you would like a chance to participate in these events. It's exciting to get guild achievements and it's also an opportunity to get justice points for your mains or alts.

I plan to post a review of the rest of Wrath raiding in the next few weeks, but life has been quite busy lately. However I didn't want to delay this news update by too long.

The Set Team was a bit tired after Wrath raiding. We pushed hard and achieved pretty much everything we wanted to. So we took our time prepping for raiding in Cata. We spent our time leveling and enjoying the new lore and new lands, then we spent more time learning our classes all over again, esp with some of the significant changes that came with Cataclysm (or right before). We started to complete quest zones, gather gear from dungeons and heroic dungeons, work on crafting or obtaining crafted gear.

Now we're back with a vengeance. We worked toward getting our gear to the 342+ range, and first entered Blackwing Decent on Feb 20th. We'll continue our tradition of raiding 2 nights a week at this time. The first fight we decided to tackle was Magmaw. There are only 2 sets of trash before you can get right into the boss fight. The first one is no problem, the 2nd one is a pair of mobs, that should die as close together in time as possible because one enrages once the other dies. With the trash out of the way, we spent the next several days learning the fight, and practicing.

One of the crazy things to note about this fight is that the entire floor over 20 yards away from Magmaw's head is considered his body, so it is very easy for ranged to accidently trigger the boss. We've tested this floor boss and he has caused us a few wipes.

During the Magmaw fight, there are a lot of adds that spawn that require control and fast killing, then a good deal of damage done to the raid that the healers had to adjust to. In addition, every so often, the boss eat the current tank, causing the tank to take an enormous amount of damage and to get a debuff reducing armor significantly. Also, during this time, 2 members of the raid must work to target a spoke on the ground and try to pin Magmaw's head to it.

If this is done, there is a short period of time with no damage to the raid and a reduction in Magmaw's armor, where we can do significant damage to him. Then we return to phase 1 and the adds until we get to the impale again.

On the night on Feb 28th, only our 4th night of raiding this XPac, we were able to defeat Magmaw.

Here's a picture of us by his corpse:

It was nice that it was our first attempt of the night as well. That gave us plenty of time to head on over to Omnotron Defense System, AKA Tron Council to test this encounter out. This fight actually is a rotating set of 4 "trons" up. One is active at the start of the fight, then approximately 1 minute in a second tron activates and for the rest of the fight at least 2 are up at a time. Each one has different types of damage (fire, arcane, nature) and abilities, which range from adds that spawn to a major conal effect like a flame thrower targeted at a raid member.

We were able to spend about an hour on this encounter. However with 25 minutes left in our 2 hour raid window, I realized that we had Tol Barad, and thus Baradin Hold, the new Wintergrasp and Vault of Cataclysm. I rushed everyone over there. We killed a few trash mobs and then were looking at Argaloth himself.

This fight was a fast one for us and a few minutes shy of midnight, Argaloth also lay dead at our feet as you can see in the picture below.

We've obviously got a long way to go and a lot of progress to catch up on, but we are willing to in our Force Recon way to continue to strive to do better and work towards the goals we have set out for ourselves.