More Drakes and Icecrown

As you know recently a group from my guild (that includes yours truly) managed to plow through the Ulduar 10 hardmode meta achievement and obtained the Rusted Proto-Drake. When we managed to down Yogg with only one keeper the first of us completed the meta and got our drakes. A few members of that raid however, did not get their drakes. Due to attendance they had missed some hardmodes here or there. Last night we set out to complete a few more Glories of the Ulduar Raider.

Of course, there was someone who missed our Flame Leviathan +4 and we started out in the deep end. There’s a lot of random in that fight so it took us 4-5 attempts to get it down, but down it we did. In the end the kill was pretty clean. We moved on to Heartbreaker, which we cleared in one attempt. It also dropped an Aesir’s Edge for our warrior tank’s offspec! Next was Kologarn’s Disarmed achievement, again a single attempt was needed to clear it. We pressed on. Auriaya, Crazy Cat Lady… At this point I was looking at my wife’s screen a bit too much. She respecced her Shamans offspec from Resto to Elemental as her guild needs more ranged DPS. I was looking over her shoulder at the big Lava Burst numbers (which I’ve been enjoying a lot recently on my own Elemental Shaman alt) when my team pulled Auriaya and I got everyone killed by not properly tanking the guardians… oops! We got her the second try though, Auriaya herself down to 50% when the first Feral Defender spawned

We backtracked a bit and downed Assembly of Iron, Steelbreaker last in one go (a fight we usually struggle with) with some hilarity at the end as our warrior tank used the buff to blow up our shaman healer after the fight had finished. Freya was next – not an easy fight by any stretch of the imagination and again we cleared it without a hitch. We lost our warrior tank and with no battle res ready we finished it with 9. We had some time to spare so we headed for Thorim and downed him on hardmode in one shot as well. In all thre people got their drakes, What A Night!

When Icecrown citadel is released I imagine our little hard mode group will start running Trial of the Grand Crusader 10mans for the achievements. The guild will be running the 10man Icecrown citadel as an official raid, and the hardmodes are activated on a per-boss basis (as in Ulduar.) Unfortunately that means we won’t be able to have a separate save for our group as we include some of our best dps, some of our main tanks, a raid leader and a couple top healers. Maybe after we’re comfortably clearing the 25man we’ll have the opportunity to try for some hadmodes there but it’s not likely we’ll be able to run the group in the same way.