I went to two raids since my last post.

The first raid we fought and defeated Auriaya then we went back and beat up Ignis.

Auriaya was fun, still a bit nerfed ( yeah, I noticed ). Our plan was to take down her four adds then focus on her. We had three people assigned to AE her kittens that pop in to see what's happening but leave the defender alone. We knew that during the AE the defender takes some damage, so I have to help deal with it. Once it gets to about about five to ten percent, it is my job to taunt the thing out of the group and stun it. Well that didn't quite work right, I did taunt, I did stun but it didn't want to come to me on the taunt. Instead the AE dpsed him down in the raid group, luckily everyone was quick enough to move out of the area before they died. The defender came back only one time before Auriaya died. One other thing we didn't do was move out of line-of-sight of the defender's death spot. I would have expected at least a couple of people to be feared through the void zone, but I don't think one person died to that thing. In the end it all worked out and we got our first progression kill of the evening.

So with Auriaya dead, we went back to the beginning to see Ignis. First of all his trash is challenging ( I don't know what it was like pre-nerf ), and took some strategy. There are patrols at the bottom of the ramp leading to Ignis, these need to be handled one group at a time. There are Molten Colossus(es/i) that get tanked apart. If I remember correctly, they explode when they die. There are also Magma Ragers, they throw out a tornado of fire that we need to avoid. To make these guys easier we had a hunter kite one of them far away from the raid, only feigning once the first one was dead.

This was the first time I had seen Ignis, and I had only read up on him a little bit. It took us six tries, and I think I was the reason we had to do two of those. Once I figured out the adds and we had a second tank ( Karthis ) helping, it became like a dance where everything just started to come together.

We also went a took a quick look at Hodir with the last minutes left to the raid. His trash was challenging, though not as bad as Ignis'. Merely another learning curve. Hodir of course thrashed us after the quick description by the raid leader.

Tomorrow I'll post about Sunday's raid, we did well then too. More progression, let's keep it going.

Post nerf experiences

Well I went back into Uldaur again. As I said in my comments on Karthis' blog ( see the link to the right ) in response to other people's comments, I was going to wait and see what the nerfs looked like. I also made a silent promise to Jacemora to experience it first. Here are my observations on the changes.

First noticable nerf:
XT-002 - The tantrums were noticably shorter, did they NEED to be? I don't know I would have to hear from my healers on that. I know that I really didn't have a lot of problems in tanking its adds. I have also done this fight now on my undergeared mage, in it's old form I would have had to count on my healers during the tantrum, now not so much. The enrage time is noticably longer as well, having DBM tell you one minute to enrage though makes that one more obvious.

Razorscale - I don't know if any of the nerfs are obvious, but then again I think we had this fight down already.

Auriaya - We cleared the instance up to here and got one shot before the end of raid time. We got her considerably farther than ever before. It's hard to tell if its the nerfs or just us understanding the fight a little better, though in support of my previous post I choose the former :)

I was also able to learn two new fights ( to me at least ):
Iron Council - we three shot this fight. The first wipe was attributable to me, I wasn't quite ready for the runes that were put under the bosses and didn't react quick enough. The second wipe was one of the other tanks not seeing a rune under the boss he was tanking. All in all a pretty simple fight, we got the "Heroic: I Choose You, Stormcaller Brundir achievment.

Kologarn - we two shot this, I don't remember what caused the first wipe. Another simple fight for me anyway, I just had to pick up the adds from the right arm and DPS a little bit when the adds were gone. It again seemed to be a pretty simple fight. I have also done this now with my mage. From this side of things I had to pay a little more attention to the lasers, I didn't pay much attention to them while I was tanking adds on my paladin.

Hopefully a few guildies or any other readers will post their thoughts about the changes to these fights.

I still stand by my position that they should have waited another month before "tuning" these fights down. Stay tuned for my comments on the next round of nerfs that you know have to be coming.