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.