Victory at Last.

Ikaruga

Just took down the newest Trial of the Crusader boss last night. Most enjoyable boss fight yet. Kinda easy, (only 2 attempts needed) but very cool mechanics. The twin Val'kyr. One is light, the other is dark. There are 4 charging portals in the arena, 2 light, 2 dark. You charge yourself with one or the other. When charged, you abosorb all damage of the same color, and deal damage to the opposite.
Throughout the fight, black and white orbs appear around the arena and seem to fly around all over the place. Getting hit by the same color starts building up a stacked buff on you. Opposing color seems to do mild damage to you. The stacked buff, however, kicks all kinds of ass. If it stacks to 100, you gain empowered darkness or empowered light. It makes you stupidly powerful. Building up this charge is something to watch during the fight. I wouldn't call it crucial, but it's very fun.
Also, the two bosses share a single health pool, and occasionally fire off a special ability. One might do a massive AOE, at which point you need to switch to the same color as the AOE before it goes off to avoid death. Another might cast a shell on herself and begin casting a big heal. Everyone has to switch to the opposing color and break the shell in order to interrupt the heal.
It's really a lot of fun, and reminded me of the old Gamecube/Dreamcast/XBLA game Ikaruga.
Video of the fight will probably be available next week.

Champions Again.

We took down boss #2 in the Trial of Champions this week in about 3-4 attempts. I also managed to snag the Drape of the Untamed Predator off the first boss. Cause that's what I am.
Here's a video of this week's victory over the first boss.

Champions

Patch 3.2 just launched yesterday and we discovered some bugs that cropped up as a result of a fix. Our XT-002 strategy no longer works (tanking him on the right side of the room), but as a result of fixing the bot spawns, they increased the spawn rate significantly. Our attempts last night had 3-5 bomb-bots spawn from every corner and at least a dozen scrap bots. We were utterly overwhelmed. They have made the boss un-fun. Hopefully a fix is coming soon.

We abandoned Ulduar till it's fixed and went to take on the first boss of the new Colosseum. It's a set of 3 different bosses, and we managed to down them in 3 attempts. Pretty easy so far.
Blizzard has changed how the new content is accessed however. We only have access to the first boss during the first week, and only on normal 25man. We must beat all bosses on normal25 before heroic25 is unlocked, and those bosses are being released in a weekly scheduled I believe.
We also found that the new VoA boss has not been implemented.
So that means, if Ulduar isn't hotfixed today, we may have no raiding to do tonight.
Overall, I really like a lot of the new stuff they've put in this patch, but the caveat is that Ulduar is temporarily broken.

The new dailies actually seem pretty cool, and there are about twice as many as before, so grinding Champion Seals should go faster.
The new Dragonhawk mount is gorgeous, so it's becoming a high priority. 150 seals is the price.
I'm hoping to get a little time in tonight to find the new Ravasaur trainer in Un'goro. I'm getting closer and closer to the 100 mount achievement. I plant to pick up the new low-level Undercity horse as well just to fill in the numbers. Also, I only need 4 more pets to get the 75 pet achievement.

I must say, my favorite addition of this patch is the change to the ammo-box materials. 2 saronite bars gets me 1000 ammo now. Old cost was 15 bars for 2000. Very happy about that change. I also like that Ultra-high shadow settings runs smoothly now.

So yeah, 3.2 gets a thumbs up from me.
Check out my youtube channel. I have almost every Ulduar boss video posted now. Still to go: Flame Leviathan and Yogg-Saron.

No Clean Shave Today.

Razorscale goes down in 3 rounds. We were missing 5 or 6 people this night.
In other news, it seems we've hit a wall with Yogg Saron. We can't seem to make it through phase 2. Not enough DPS on the brain, too many tentacles in the raid... It's a rough fight for us at the moment. Hopefully we bring him down in the coming weeks, but we might need to overhaul our strategy.

TREE!

Here's last night's Freya fight. We cleared all Keepers on night one, and a quick Vezax kill tonight should allow us plenty of time to master the Yogg-Saron fight.
I've got some sound files on a few macros you can see in this latest video. Enjoy!

It's Very Cold.

Here's Hodir doing his thing, and us doing ours.

Scream for Me

I finally started adding sound files to my macros. It's made my fights more exciting. I hope to have a video up soon to show off what I've done. For now, enjoy this dirty sloppy messy Auriaya kill.

NEW TOYS???!

Got my 4th piece of tier 8.5 last night off of Thorim. Consistently breaking 5k dps now. Got a few videos to post as well. For now, here's our XT-002 strategy.

Burn in the Makers Fire

Quick video of our brute force strategy on Ignis, The Furnace Man.


No new loot this week, but Marksman spec is my new favorite spec. Very fun, very easy. Tonight, the only boss left in Ulduar is Yogg-Saron, and we're taking that big mouth down.

Ding Ding Ding

Three new pets hit level 80 this weekend. Kargath, Oneqwah, and Freewind II.
I've also amassed over 11000g. It was a good weekend.

I've hurt worse.

Looks like this week has been a little rough. We've only downed Thorim, Freya and Hodir so far. Short on people I guess. Nothing new dropped for me, but I'm going to be testing out a Marksman build tonight, so that should be fun. Also finally dropped my Hyena and picked up a wolf. He barks, and howls, and is generally awesome.
Here's a video I made of our Kologarn kill this week. Enjoy!

General Vezax (Zoidberg)... More Like General KilledbySubterfuge.

General died last night in 3 attempts. Pretty easy fight once everybody starts paying attention. Spent an hour working on Yogg-Saron but could only get him into phase 2 twice, and only for a few seconds before we all died. Going to try again on Sunday it seems.
Hunter week continued as Brakthor came away with Lotrafen, the pole-arm equivalent to Twisted Visage. It's powerful, but kind of plain-looking. Physx was disappointed, but I'm quite sure we'll have no problems downing this guy again next week.

Screenshot from exactly one year ago:

Lilt has come a long way.

Also, made a video of our last Mimiron fight. We have him down with no problems these days.

Lootz

We never managed to bring Vezax below 50% last week. So begins a new week of raiding. I arrived late last night, but it would seem to be Hunter week in Ulduar. I came away with a new tier 8.5 chest and the Twisted Visage staff, Physx got himself the Wrathstone, and Brakthorn got a new pair of gloves.
When going through my screenshot repository lately, I've enjoyed comparing screenshots that are approximately a year apart. It's interesting to see the progress I've made.

Dynatherms Connected! Megathrusters are Go!

Most satisfying win I've had in a long time. Click the pic to get a better look.
Took us 90 minutes of wipes, but when we all got on task, we got our first win against Mimiron and his V-07-tr-ON force. Only 3 dead in the end as well. We were all cheering at our keyboards. No hunter loot, as usual, but I've come to expect that from Ulduar.
Only the General stands between us and the Death God now.

The fight is very frustrating for me as a hunter. So much depends on the healers. In most fights, my survival greatly depends on my situational awareness and my ability to avoid shiny crap that kills me. But phase 2 of this fight is such a clusterfrak that there is very little I can do besides pray to the Earthmother that the healers are on point and keep me alive. I was getting a little upset after the first hour of wipes, but in the end, Subterfuge's magnificent healers came through. Grats to all.

Oh and yes, I did bring an underleveled pet to raid. At first I was using my giant wasp for DPS, but this fight is so brutal on hunter pets that I just decided I wouldn't have him fight anymore. At that point I decided it was better just to bring in my underleveled cunning pet for Roar of Recovery. It helps me hit full mana between each phase of the fight. As a reward for helping us down Mimiron, I went out and leveled him to 77. Good old Freewind II.

I Hate Shamans

Lost out on another t8.5 helm last night to another healer Shaman. /sigh
Still had a lot of fun. Downed Ignis, Iron Council, and Thorim. Then we wiped few times on Mimiron before calling it a night. Our new hunter is still struggling to keep up with Physx and I, but that's okay. He's still learning to cope with Survival spec.
We're going to put a few hours in tonight to try to finally get our first Mimiron win. Might even spend some time leveling my new pet parrot as well.
Still hoping to get a new piece of t8.5 to allow me to use my Wrathstone trinket. At this point, I would lose way too much hit rating.

Mimiron dies tonight. Wish us luck.