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.