10-man content cleared, 25-man Freya hardmode defeated

Last 2 days been awesome for 10-man raiding, we did great (and also a lot of fun stuff).

<Prophecy> clears 10-man Heroic Coliseum without any deaths!

This Sunday, our team went in Trial of the Grand Crusader and 1-shotted all the bosses, thus earning the achievement A Tribute to Insanity. This can be viewed as the "hardest" mode in the instance (except the one that requires to use only 10-man gear, but that is hardly progression), so yay us. We got rewarded with a shiny 258 cloak (grats Rewyn!), a Swift Horde Wolf (grats Mukk!) and a great enjoyement for all of us.

I`m going to ninja this news post to express my thoughts on this latest instance, I find it really bad. Even though I was happy we got the 50-tries achievement, the whole concept isn`t really appealing to me and I find the bosses in there utterly boring, at least in 10-man. Hardmodes seem just to be a flat % increase in the bosses HP, damage output and DPS/healing required; while, for example, Firefighter and Yogg`s hardmodes were actually interesting, since the fight changed quite a lot.
Anub`Arak should get a special spot in the crap bosses list. Well, one exception, healing Phase 3 is a nice challenge and goes beyond the "usual" healing styles (even though quite stressing I`d assume), rest of the fight is rather boring though; along with the added bonus of "miss a stun, lose your 50-tries" (so nice work Rew!). What I dislike about this fight is how raid stacking pays a very important role here (at least for the first kills), class disparity is huge and this isn`t fun. We were fortunate to have both Bloodlust and a healing taken reduced debuff on him, without these two I wouldn`t like to think how Insanity goes on a weekly basis.

Alone in the Darkness (Yogg 0-keeper) done - Ulduar is now clear!

Last night we managed to form a raid for this awesome fight (I really enjoyed it). This encounter is one of the two final encounters of Ulduar, along with Algalon. Neither are included in the hard-modes meta achievement, but they are significantly more challenging than any of the hardmodes.

Ironically, our biggest challenge in this fight was ... "the trash boss". Clearing to Yogg on a weekly basis in 10-man is quite time consuming, and we had a lot of difficulties doing that. Our 10-man teams prioritised Algalon and completing all the achievements for the drakes; add to this that we also had 25-mans and Coliseum on offnights, it ended up being a pain to even attempt this boss.
Last night we`ve overcome this, and after a very very good first try, we had him on 13% ! I think this was the motivation we all needed, as I have to say I`m impressed of our performance; overall we did great.
The step-up in difficulty from Yogg +1 is quite huge, so it was trickier than most of us expected. Our kill was epic, we had 2 people standing, Kota had 1 sanity left ! Unfortunately no movie this time Sad

Files got corrupted due to an unlucky event; hopefully we`ll get some screenies (WTB more), as I only have from the kill shot.

With this kill, we have cleared all 10-man content that is available in the game (in terms of hardmodes/extra loot). We still got some achievements left, but those aren`t particularly interesting, and I`m not sure we want to do the crap 10-man only gear achievements. Eh, maybe I shouldn`t call them crap, because I like the idea, 10-man guilds should be rewarded with something unique, but ... we`re not a 10-man guild

Who knows, maybe we`ll go for it, but at least for me I`d have to ticket a GM to retrieve all my vendored gear, not really looking forward for it!

Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood (25-man) done, one left for Algalon

This was an earlier kill, around two weeks ago, so I`m a bit late with this. We defeated Freya`s hard-mode, the one with leaving all three elders alive in 25-man. This is a very hard fight, it was one of the hardest fights in Ulduar (on par with Firefighter), even though the latest nerfs did it a bit more accesible, along with 245. Don`t get me wrong though, nerfs were just minor. It still is a really solid challenge and the damage going on there is insane!

We had a really great raid evening on Sept 30, because we got this in our fourth try. We really played at an impressive level that night, had a very good raid setup and performance was just awesome. In that same night we proceeded to 1-shot three other hardmodes - Hodir, Thorim and Iron Council.
With Freya down, the only hardmode we need for Algalon is Firefighter. It probably is the hardest fight in there, but we hope to overcome the challenge (which, so far, seems to get the right healing comp for a raid, along with enough DPS), so I`m pretty confident we can down it soon.

Three Lights in the Darkness (Yogg 3-keeper mode) 25-man completed !

We decided to pay our buddy Yogg a good visit since it was a while since we killed him in 25-man, so we went there to kill him; this time, however, Freya wasn`t with us. We managed to zerg the fight pretty quickly though, just needed 2 or 3 tries, still a lot of room to go towards One Light.

WTB more luck with fragments dropping. Verv`s sitting at 27 right now and we also got the +3 kill, so it`s all a matter of time (and RNG) until she`ll get the legendary !

This news post stretched out a bit, so I`m going to leave it here. Hopefully we kill Firefighter in 25-man soon so I can write another wall of text !