Yogg-Saron, the Fiend of a Thousand (Ugly) Faces was slain at the hands of DPC tonight in the server-first heroic kill on Aggramar EU!

It took 3 full nights of tries to get the strategy and execution down, mastering such tricky feats as "moving away from cloudy things", "not standing next to exploding things" and "looking away from the scary things".  A tough challenge to be sure, but one we were well prepared to rise to.

Some pictures:

The Victorious Old-God Slaying Team

Errr.... we're not sure what happened here...

Needless to say, some silly celebrations swiftly followed in Dalaran, and we learned a lot of fun things to do as a raid of 25 bunnies.

Anyway, moving swiftly on, congratulations to everyone involved in the kill!  Now on to the hard modes...

Week 2 in Ulduar saw another 4 bosses (and a whole lot of fun trash) defeated:

• Hodir

  

  Hodir posed little challenge as we stormed back in on our second week. He was easily taken down on the first attempt despite a frosty reception.

• Thorim

  

  Adding a little more AoE and a little more control into the arena team, we soon slapped this guy silly, and he thanked us for it too.

• Mimiron

  

  Quite possibly the most awesomely fun fight in the whole of Ulduar, this mechagnoam was definitely the most challenging of the 4 keepers. But nothing compared to our next challenge...

• General Vezax

  

  ...No, not the boss himself (though yeah, he was tough too), but those damned trash packs before him. Fortunately our stints in 10-man Ulduar taught us well that:

  1. Those packs have a huge aggro range
  2. Fear is bad mkay
  3. Whatever you do, clear the room from right-to-left

  But we soon also learned that:

  1. Ulduar rogues can shadowstep all the way to the instance entrance (and they have 800 energy... WTB)
  2. Staying up on the ledge above while the rest of the raid is pulling is a surefire way to get the entire raid toasted in just a matter of seconds
  3. Packs not resetting properly after a wipe can result in a similarly toasty feeling on the next pull
     

  But undeterred, we cleared it all and scored our latest kill.

Then we briefly peeked in to see Yogg-Saron. From what we saw, it would appear that moving away from clouds is beneficial to your raid's survival.  More useful tips to come!

We've been awaiting the arrival of Ulduar very eagerly, so as soon as the instance became available we boosted through it.

Some individual boss comments:

• Flame Leviathan

  

  We had a general idea on how to kill this guy (lolvehicles!), but the finer details were quite beyond us on the first pull... So we just winged it true DPC style, and ended up 1-shotting him with the achievement "Shutout" without knowing :-). All in all a boss which seems to have been put in place to get people motivated to keep going, as it's not really a hard encounter, but extremely fun!

• Ignis the Furnace Master

  

  Summary of the first 2 nights on him: "Mensai got raped". Completely bugged encounter,  melee'ing people who get charged, as well as absurdly increasing damage on the MT. We decided to wait til he got hotfixed, and 1-shot him on Tuesday instead.

• Razorscale

  

  We beat the un-nerfed version of this fight, which seemed perfectly tuned to our liking, but I guess one of the early bosses deserves to be a bit more forgiving. Killing dragons, fun!

• XT-002 Deconstructor

  

  Amadrienia had to admit after pulling this guy (?) that she's earning some gold on the side by being a voice actor for Ulduar bosses. Extremely fun fight, very demanding on DPS and a lot going on. More of this please!

• Assembly of Iron

  A multi-boss encounter with no Warlock tank, what's this World (of Warcraft) coming to?? In either case, the easy-mode version of this fight didn't prove much of a challenge, we 2-shot them.

• Kologarn

  

  Big guy who likes to grope people. Became scared when he saw our strategy on him was improving and just despawned when we were about to kill him. Came back the day after though, where we 1-shot him.

• Auriaya

  

  Summary of the first few pulls on her: "Mensai got raped". "By pussies". Deadly Pouncing Cats vs. Deadly Pouncing Cats became a true heroic deathmatch where we had to master the pull (which is the fight really). Soon as that was sorted we made quick work of her. Still bugged as well, as her 4 sentries respawned midfight, but we had tunafish ready to divert them (thank you Lizarb!).

• Freya

  

  God damn hippie treehugger boss! We had 15 minutes left after we'd killed Auriaya on Monday, so we decided to pay her trash a visit... Some serious AI going on in that there Conservatory of Life: plants who can use teleporters, find a surrogate parent if their real one gets ganked, and dryads who like to trick our people into dispelling, ... suffice to say, we had loads of fun :-) The boss herself only took a few pulls to master Phase 1, Phase 2 was pretty much a walkover on easy-mode.

Our 10 man squads did some awesome work as well, having everything but Mimiron down so far.

Mimiron sounds like Blizzard gave the guy who developed Gnomeregan one more chance to prove himself, and yeah well... he failed. Completely bugged encounter, where you either wait until he's hotfixed, or just keep bashing your heads until you get a lucky break... Which we didn't unfortunately :(

All in all, a very productive first week for DPC, and we're definitely not giving up while we're ahead now!