Nefarian down

Nefarian down!



This actually happened 2 weeks ago, but better late with the photo than never.

It was after 4.2 and they really did nerf the crap out of him. We killed him on our 2nd try. The only reason we didn't 1-shot him was because one offtank had a mouse malfunction.

25man progress

It's taken Darkfall a while to build up to a full 25man raid. However I'm very proud to say that last night and Tuesday night we actually had full DF raids.

It was glorious!

Not only do I have to spend less time explaining every fight, but we are actually starting to gel as a team. And the loot is faster to give out as well. Though I'm not sure if that is an artifact of Earthen distributing it instead of me or it actually being faster.

On Tuesday We knocked out 5 bosses. We took out Argaloth and then the first 4 bosses in Blackwing Descent. We had a couple of attempts on Atramades as well, but ran out of time. We'll go back on Sunday and wipe the floor with him and then beat on Nefarian for a while.

Last night we plowed through Bastion of Twilight. We one shot both Halfus and the Double Dragons. And, the actual sign of progression, only had one stupid embarrassing wipe on the trash, when I didn't explain a new strategy for the last pack of trash before them well enough.

But the triumph of last night was that we finally killed Ascendant Council on 25man. We last killed them on 10 man in early April.



Even though we already had a 10man kill shot I made everyone stand in front of the corpse so I could take pictures. If you click through and look closely you can see the belt that is all that is left of those stupid elementals.

Atramades Down!

Booyah! We killed Atramades for the first time last night.



It is definitely one of those fights where we need a lot of coordination, and specific people doing very specific jobs. It did take us 8 tries last night, but it was pretty excellent to see the blind dragon fall over dead at the end.

Chimaeron

Chimaeron Down!




Once we got the feud phases down that last 20% was a real nailbiter. We had one wipe at .1% with and then the next time we kicked his ass. It was lovely ;-D Die stupid overgrown poison hydra thing!

I'm Here to Kill Dragons - Update

Tuesday night Darkfall ran our second guild 25-man. We had to pug some people, but there were 21 Darkfall guildies in the raid. We hit Blackwing Descent and, despite patch day woes, we killed Magmaw and the Trons. We had a few good attempts on Maloriak, but ran out of time due to earlier problems with the Trons activating in an entirely random order.

Our first guild 25man was in Bastion of Twilight on Sunday. We actually had only one pug then. I remain super pleased about that. And in true Darkfall fashion we did quite well on the bosses and absolutely noobed it up on the trash. We one shot Halfus, and 4-shot the dragon twins with a new strategy. But the trash in Bastion is brutally annoying. There isn't much space and the packs are very close together. Also after the gauntlet before the dragon twins we had a group that didn't reset to the right location. So there was a fair amount of confusion as to where the extra mobs were suddenly appearing from.

I think we still need to do more recruiting, but we're in pretty decent shape. It turns out that a bunch of the people we'd pugged in on Thursday, had been in a guild together. However, their guild leader quit WoW and disbanded the guild. So we ended up scooping up a bunch of new recruits. We also had a few people see my forum post and join from there too.

So, all considered, I'm pretty pleased with our progress towards full DF 25s. I just hope that our progress continues tonight, with good kills and less trash wipes in Bastion.

Maloriak

So last Sunday the healer I'd pugged in for Bastion came with us again for our attempts on the Ascendant Council. We didn't get it, but we did make good progress for never having pulled that boss before that night. We were regularly getting to the 3rd phase by the time we were done for the evening, and I think we'll kill them the next time we do that fight. Anyway after the raid the pug healer was talking to me about Darkfall. He'd looked at our webpage after seeing my post on the forum and was interested in joining. So, because he'd been running with us the past two raids, I told him to let me know when he wanted an invite and I'd bring him in. His response was "now", and Voila! we had another healer in the guild who would actually show up for raids!

So on Tuesday we went to our regularly scheduled Blackwing Depths run. Again I picked and choose the raiders to come. While I don't feel bad about leaving some people out others should have been able to come as well. So I will try for a 25man BWD next week. /gulp

Well once we got in there it was pretty smooth sailing. We oneshot Magmaw, and got parasitic evening for the raid members who didn't have it yet. And then went on to 3-shot Omnotron. I was quite pleased. Especially since Mornara was the only person who wanted Akirus the Worm-Breaker a rather fantablous 2hand mace.

Then it was deeper into Blackwing Depths to Maloriak.

Darkfall had never seriously tried Maloriak so I was expecting what happened with the Ascendant Council to happen again. I thought we'd make good progress on learning the fight but wouldn't actually kill it this week.

Maloriak is a complicated sounding fight that isn't actually so hard once you get the different things that need to be done assigned to the correct people. And it only took us three wipes to get things working right. On the fourth pull Maloriak fell over dead. It wasn't a perfectly clean kill. There was a fair amount of confusion, especially since that was the first time we'd gotten him to the second phase and weren't sure about the mechanics of that phase. But he died, and it was glorious.


This means that in the past week-ish we've actually killed three new bosses. I'm quite pleased. I am very happy with the people I've been able to bring to the raid. And I'm excited about swapping to 25s next week. We'll have to pug a fair amount of people, but there are too many people getting left out of the current 10s.

Omnotron and Dragon Twins

Tuesday Darkfall went into a fresh Blackwing Descent. I remembered that I'm here to kill dragons and picked and chose from who I wanted to bring to the raid. I have to admit that I intentionally left out people who last time were unable to follow directions on who to target and people who are chronic fire-standers. Unsurprisingly there was some overlap there. I also pugged a healer.

And we pretty handily killed the first two bosses in Blackwing Descent.

It wasn't a one-shot for either of them. It took us a couple of tries for everyone to remember what they needed to do for Magmaw. In that time, our pug healer bailed and I found another one, the alt of one of the people that came to Ulduar for the drake runs. But once we pulled in the new 3rd healer we killed Magmaw in two tries and even got the Parasite Evening Achievement.



Omnotron was harder, because we'd never killed him as a guild before. And, in fact, most of us had never killed him at all. It took several tries for everyone to get a feel for the rhythm of the bosses abilities, especially when the order is not set until you actually see it. But it felt really great to kill the stupid Trons.

***********

Thursday we formed up for Bastion. I again pugged a healer. And off we went. Halfus was one-shot. Just boom, dead. We had a pretty brutal drake combo too, with slate, nether, and whelps, so the boss was hitting pretty hard and there was annoying aoe. But the three tank setup we figured out a week or so ago really works like a charm when the slate dragon is present.

Next we went to the twin dragons. I really wanted to kill them. Darkfall has been having so much trouble with them due to fire standing of various sorts. The fight is really about testing the ability of everyone to get out of the bad at the right time. And there are a variety of different bads and ways you need to avoid them. This is challenging because at present one person messing up usually cascades into a wipe.



But with a really great suggestion from DraNgNon about my placement of the Theralion we managed to get them! And double bonus Darkfall got guild level 20 from the our kill xp.