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