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!