Tonight was our first genuine attempt at getting The Immortal on our alts. We had a few mains left over from Tuesday’s raid that came along, but for the most part our group consisted of casual town and the alts. Naturally, the first four wings and Sapphiron go off without a hitch, I don’t think anyone even dropped below 50% health during the boss encounters. Kel’Thuzad goes great for the first 75%…and then he finally decides to cast mind control, Trizen and Optik both get MC’d and naturally attack the SAME TARGET, which happened to be Kloze, Klorox’s shaman.

Now here’s the question - was this just RnG screwing us over, or was this a failure on the raid’s part? I’ve had a few hours to think about it, and to be honest I think we could have prevented Klorox’s death. I know I could have polymorphed Optik faster, but in the same respect, the warlocks could have helped out with some fears. All the crowd controllers deserve equal blame I suppose. I am still shocked we came that close, everyone played exceptionally well, I really am proud to play with some of these people. We’ll keep trying for immortal until the patch comes out, and I suspect we’ll get it sooner rather than later.

I hate achievements like The Undying and The Immortal, because in my opinion they’re so dependent on getting good RnG. You can have the best players in the world and Kel’Thuzad could decide to mind control the two add tanks, correct me if i’m wrong, but tin that situation, nothing could be done. The new PTR build today revealed that Ulduar will have Immortal/Undying equivalents, so I guess we’ll just have to learn to embrace these types of achievements, because they aren’t going anywhere soon.

Last night Blizzard had us testing the encounter just beyond Ignis and Razorscale, The XT-002 Deconstructor! The fight is pretty simple, he will cast two abilities on raid members - “Light Bomb” and “Gravity Bomb” both of which will require the person to run away from the raid. Light Bomb will hit everyone for 2500 damage every second, and Gravity Bomb will detonate after 9 seconds, causing ~20k damage. XT-002 will also cast Tympanic Tantrum, an earthquake like effect that deals damage equal to 10% of your health every second for 12 seconds, everyone in the raid will need a heal in order to survive. Every 25%, the XT-002 will spawn three different types of adds - Scrapbots, Boombots and Pummeler. The Pummelers just need to be offtanked, they don’t hit very hard, but they do cleave, the Scrapbots will heal the boss if they reach him, and the Boombots…go boom, they explode for ~13k. For 20 seconds, you will be unable to target the XT-002 but instead you can target the “Heart of the Deconstructor” which is related to this encounter’s hard mode.

The hard mode for this encounter is enabled by killing the Heart of the Deconstructor, which has 5 million health (but takes 100% extra damage) and is up for 20 seconds. So within those 20 seconds your raid has to do the equivalent of 2.5 million damage over 20 seconds (125,000 RDPS) in order to enable the hard mode. The major bug with the heart was that melee could not attack it. I think we could have enabled the hard mode if we made some group changes but due to time limitations, we decide to kill him in easy mode once again and get more people familiar with the fight. Once hard mode is enabled, XT-002 is healed to full and gains 25% more health and damage, in addition, Light Bomb and Gravity Bomb gain new effects. Light Bomb now spawns an add that will cast Static Shock on the raid, on 25 man it will hit for 1500 damage every 3 seconds.

3.1 PTR - XT-002 Deconstructor Preview

The 3.1 PTR may be coming to a close soon, I believe there are only two bosses left to test, Mimiron and Auriaya, since Algalon and Yogg-Saron more than likely won’t be tested. A guildmate brought up a good point the other night, Patch 3.1 has to be out before April 12th, because of the Noblegarden changes. That gives us a few potential 3.1 release dates - March 24th, March 31st, April 7th. I’m gonna put my money on March 31st, mainly because the 24th seems too soon and April 7th is cutting it too close to Noblegarden. Either way, 3.1 is coming!

On Sunday Morning at 10 am server time, Daelo had scheduled for the PTR’s to be up and running with the Flame Leviathan encounter enabled once again for further testing. Normally we don’t raid at this hour, so some of us were a little skeptical of attendance for this fight, but we managed to get 10 people online the PTR ready to go for the Normal version, but the moment that the encounter was brought online, the rest of the PTR got locked out. This lock out lasted… for about 4 hours.

So we reconvene at 3 pm with a full 25 this time around and find that the PTR is much more stable. Groovy! Lets get testing! After buffing and explaining what our goals were going to be for this, we begin the encounter. For those that don’t know the encounter, it’s a unique vehicle based fight in which the raid uses 3 different vehicles to work together to bring down the giant Flame Leviathan construct at the end of the warzone. There’s a Siege Engine, which works as your tank (obviously). However, it’s not your conventional tank: it ‘tanks’ Flame Leviathan through kiting it around the enclosed area. The second vehicle is a Demolisher, which works as your ‘DPS’, but another function of the Demolisher is that it can catapult its passenger up onto the Flame Leviathan so that they can overload the 4 circuits on him and stun him. While he’s stunned, the Leviathan takes 100% more damage, so it’s very important to make sure the passengers don’t miss when they get flung up top. The last vehicle is a Chopper, which is a Motorcycle that moves really fast and drops oil behind it. The oil slows down any enemy affected by it, but what it also does is allow the Demolisher to light the oil on fire with a Mortar and erupt that spot in flames, burning all enemies within it for a lot of damage.

I started out by using the Chopper, but after an attempt or two on the Flame Leviathan, I was switched to being a passenger on the Demolisher. We managed to get Flame Leviathan down to 10% health on our 3rd attempt, but he was bugged and wasn’t doing some of his abilities, making the encounter trivial. Because we wanted to learn the proper way to do the fight, we forcefully wiped the raid (even though we would have killed him if we continued) and that, unfortunately, was pretty much the best we could get with the huge FPS lag that was taking place on the PTR before the closed Ulduar for the evening.

All in all, I found the starting encounter in Ulduar to be a very fun fight, but I can see how some people that complain about using the vehicle mechanics in fights (ie: Oculus, Malygos, etc.) wouldn’t enjoy this fight. It’s a fight that requires a lot of coordination, communication and execution, though it does become quite easy to understand once you know the mechanics. Just that those mechanics might overwhelm some of the novice players that are new to the fight.

Next up: Monday - XT-002 Deconstructor testing will take place at 4 pm server time.

On Friday night we got another opportunity to test The Iron Council again. We only got an hour and a half worth of testing before they closed the instance. Most of that time was spent learning the hard mode version of the encounter, which involved killing Steelbreaker last. The difficulty level for this encounter is determined by your kill order. Whenever a council members die, the remaining members receive an increased damage buff in addition to new abilities. The ability Steelbreaker obtains when he is the last mob up is very similar to Vaelastrasz the Corrupt in Blackwing Lair. The debuff is called “Overwhelming Power” which is cast randomly on raid members, it gives them 200% increased damage for 1 minute, after which the player will die and hit everyone around him for 9000 damage. Additionally, whenever one of your raid members dies, Steelbreaker’s damage will be increased by 25%…essentially this turns the fight into a DPS race, similar to M’uru Phase 2. We came pretty close on a few attempts but once the developers announced that Ulduar is closing in 15 minutes we decided to get an easy mode kill and check out the loots. This time, I remembered to record the encounter.

The Iron Council Preview - 3.1 PTR

Tonight was Kologarn, the “bridge boss” of Ulduar which can be found just beyond the door leading from the Antechamber to the Shattered Walkway. As usual, our night was plagued with crit errors and many fierce battles with the blue bar boss! In the midst of our troubles, we managed to pull together and defeat the boss the right way. I talked to a few of my friends in Crimson & Alpha and they all used a strategy that involved focusing all DPS on Kologarn himself, completely ignoring the arms. In my opinion, this is not the correct strategy. The strategy we developed has the raid focusing DPS on the right arm until it dies, then switching to Kologarn. Wait for the right arm to respawn, kill it, get back on Kologarn, rinse and repeat!

Kologarn Preview - 3.1 PTR

It’s a bit refreshing to know that the hard modes for Ulduar will present a decent challenge at the very least. Two of the encounters we’ve been able to test so far didn’t have a hard mode (Ignis & Kologarn). I’m definately looking forward to testing more encounters that have a hard mode enabled.

Tonight, we’re working on a brand new Ulduar boss: Kologarn on Heroic mode. He’s a large titan that stands at the top of the stairs in the Antechamber. And by large, he’s a bloody huge one! However, we only ever see above his waist and interestingly enough, his hands are also targettable to be DPS’d as well. His hands grip 2 people at a time for a lot of damage, similar to Encapsulate from Felmyst, and to break out of them, the hand has to suffer 450,000 damage. His other abilities he has includes a Nature damage based Shockwave, a targetted Eyebeam, and a Petrifying Breath on random people as well. It’s also interesting to note that when you kill an arm, he spawns a number of adds that do about 7500 AoE damage when you kill them (similar to the adds from Garr in Molten Core). Lastly, he hits the tank with a stackable armor debuff for 25% each application.

So, after getting everyone in the raid and buffed up, we engage Kologarn and try to damage his right arm first. We end up killing it, but because we didn’t know about the adds and the AoE damage they did, we (of course) AoE’d the adds and our raid just gets smoked in the end. Second attempt, we try DPSing the left arm first this time, but we found that the people gripped in the right arm weren’t being freed and, as such, those people ended up dying.

After those 2 attempts, people started crashing and, of course, couldn’t get past the blue bar boss. After nearly half an hour of trying to get the rest of the raid together, Daelo ends up punting everyone out of Ulduar and back to the login screen.

However, that doesn’t stop us from continuing. No sir. We get everyone back together in front of Kologarn and ready to go, even after Daelo announces a shutdown, and proceed to kill him within 2 attempts after the reset. All in all, it’s a very fun fight, though perhaps there could be a few tweaks needed here and there.

Our videos of the fight can be found at here:

Streaming Video: http://blog.forlornlegacy.net/videos…ideo-kologarn/
HD Video: http://media.forlornlegacy.net/fl-kologarn-ptr.avi

Next up, Flame Leviathan Round 2!

So tonight Blizzard had us do another round of testing on Hodir. The only notable change was his HP, he went down from ~35 Million to around 25 Million, easy fight becomes even easier! My guess is that they did this in order to make the hard mode possible. It’s already been discovered that Hodir’s hard mode requires you to kill him within 3 minutes, before he shatters the rare cache of Hodir. In order to accomplish this, the raid must put out a minium of 138,888 DPS. With the help of some Ulduar gear and the buffs we get from the adds, this achievement should be doable once it’s on farm status.

Hodir Preview - 3.1 PTR

Since the previous Hodir video was buggy, and was recorded in 10 man, I decided to create a new one! Again, please let me know what you think of the quality.

The hardest part of this encounter was getting everyone in the instance. After about an hour of fighting the blue bar boss, we were able to get 25 inside the instance, three attempts later, Hodir was dead. Easy boss, slightly more challenging than Flame Leviathan & Ignis, definately looking forward to doing the achievement.

So tonight we got to test Ignis The Furnace Master in Ulduar. The encounter is extremely simple and requires no real strategy whatsoever. Ignis will randomly cast Scorch, which will leave a large flame patch on the ground, he will also spawn a construct every minute which must be tanked or rooted inside the flame patch. As the construct is sitting in the flame patch it will eventually heat up and become molten. Once the construct has become molten it must be moved into one of two small pools of water. Once in the water the construct will become brittle and will die after 5000 damage. Ignis’ only somewhat menacing ability is Flame Jets, which is cast on the entire raid every 30-45 seconds. Flame Jets will interrupt any spells and lock you out of that school for 8 seconds, so when you see him casting the spell, hold off on casting until he finishes his cast. It will also leave a fire damage DoT on everyone in the raid. Easy.

We did Ignis in both Heroic (25) and Normal (10), I didn’t think we’d kill him so fast in Heroic so I forgot to record the kill, but I did manage to get the 10 man version. Again, I am still experimenting with different encoding options so please feel free to comment on loading speed, video quality, etc. When Ulduar is released on live realms I’ll have a real nice intro scene for future Achievement/Boss Kill videos. It’s in the early planning phases now and when I get some more free time I’ll finish it up and post a preview.

Ignis The Furnace Master Preview - 3.1 PTR

These encounters are much easier than I had hoped for. To be honest, i’m a bit worried about Ulduar, I had some really high expectations but thus far i’m really dissapointed. I know that the hard modes will be more difficult but I was Definately looking forward to testing some challenging content in the near future.

So we got onto PTR tonight and without too much trouble were able to get our raid group in the zone. They had Ignis spawn @ 4 pm server instead of having the zone come up so that was cool. I hope they do this in future testing as it removes the complete pain in the ass the world server. The fight itself is pretty underturned in it’s current version and I know that many guilds out there opted to just offtank the adds instead of using the molten/brittle system that was intended so the encounter defiantly needs some work. Seems to be more of a MT gear check (25k hits in some cases) and an AOE healing check than a real encounter. We also downed him on 10 man which seems to be more balanced than the 25 man version.

Anyway we’ll get to see what they did to Hodir tomorrow and hopefully get an idea of how hard they want the encounter to be.

I’m hoping to get to the point were we can really start churning out some video content on the website (fraping encounters) as well as streaming video from raids. Our website is really great and we should be taking advantage of it!

Alright thats it for now, I’ll try to get another post in for the Hodir PTR testing!

Well after about 2 straight hours of being constantly disconnected, having the world server down, and random fatal errors our guild finally got into Uldar and got the Iron Council down.  At the time of this posting to my understanding the only guilds that downed the encounter were Forlorn Legacy - Windrunner (Thats us!) and Premonition -  Sen’jin.  It’s a very interesting fight similar to the Bug Trio in AQ40 but with new abilities.  Some people may say that this is a cop out on Blizzards part, not having “NEW UNIQUE ENCOUNTERS!” but IMO its a perfect blend of a boss with new abilities in a different style.  I like it!

A lot of people really stepped up to the plate for this.  It’s really really fucking enjoyable to see us play that well after months after months of old, repeated, easy content. The biggest let down of all of this is the PTR servers being totally unstable, its a real huge challenge to just get your entire raid in the zone.  It took us 4 attempts to get it down after all getting in there.  Sadly Brann Bronzebeard didn’t yell for us like he did for Premo, you can check out their page at http://premoguild.com/forums/portal.php  (Hey, it’s all love!)

Oh, and get this…we 24 manned it one of our ranged DPS was offline the entire fight.  GG Blizzard servers.

It would have been awesome to try some different kill orders because the “super power” of the small guy at the end is kinda weak after you figure it out.  I can also see why Blizzard made the heroism change (Enh Shaman here) because the enrage timer on this fight is 10 minutes.  It’s going to be neat to check out how all the damage testing on the Patchwerk Dummies will be.  Blizzard is making some smart changes to the class (hi expertise on UR instead of AGI) and I’m liking the direction they are taking it.  Sadly I couldn’t get a good feel for my DPS on Iron Council because Shock and Awe was broken, not showing Maelstrom Weapon procs.  The addon is pretty much required to do max dps.

All in all it was a pretty good night, we got a buncha combat logs from Council to go over and catch anything we missed during the fight.

Looking forward to finshing up some missing loot spots on my shaman and getting ready for Uldar Live.  See you there!

EDIT: Just heard Crimson - Greymane also downed the Council, I’m sure there might be a few others that I missed also.

Yesterday afternoon Daelo announced that Ulduar would open its doors at 4pm PST/7pm EST for testing Hodir. This goes without saying…but the servers were extremely laggy and unstable. The real challenge for the night was just getting into the raid instance. Our GM made the decision to transfer the guild over to the PVP server as opposed to the PVE server in hopes that the PVP server would have better stability…well if last night was any indication of what future PTR testing is going to be like, i’m not really looking forward to it. It was pretty difficult to get a raid together with the world server crashing every minute.

With any luck the realm stability will improve, i’ve heard from some friends over on the PVE server, and apparently it’s even worse. So, definitely glad we’re on the PVP server, even though getting ganked randomly is extremely annoying.

I’ve created a simple video that shows the 10man version of the Hodir fight. We were only able to get in a handful of attempts, but we managed to get him to 16% and ended up wiping to the enrage.

Hodir Preview - 3.1 PTR

I’m also testing out higher resolution streaming video on the website, please let me know what you think! Stay tuned for The Iron Council tomorrow night @ 4pm.