Heroic Lich King: The Sequel

So Monday, we got our first HLK kill.  It was a really awesome raid week in general last week as we watched our attempts get closer and closer.  We could clearly see ourselves creeping closer and closer to a kill and then on Monday, last night of raiding before the lockout, we ended up killing him with about 3minutes before our raid ends (and yes, we would have quit for the night if we had screwed it that attempt up)

I wanted to post something along the lines of the post Kae made over at Dreambound about their experience progressing toward their first HLK kill or the similar post Vidyala made regarding their progress through the Firefighter encounter but haven’t found the time for it yet.  Incidentally, our biggest “ordeal” fights this expansion were Yogg+1 and HLK I think, mostly because we did Yogg+1 before Firefighter.  Instead, I wanted to briefly share another awesome moment that was our last two nights of raiding.

First, inspired by my recent post on speed runs, we managed to clear all of heroic ICC up to Arthas on Wednesday in just over 2 hours (not including normal mode Marrowgar because some n00b raid leading druid tank forgot to switch it to heroic.)  A flurry of internet boss issues ended up defeating our plans to go for a full heroic clear in one night and we ended up just heading to Naxx for the weekly raid quest.

For last night’s raid, we went and took another stab at the Algalon’s “He feeds on your tears” achievement and failed when the n00b Bear tank came out of the shadow realm too far from the boss and failed to save the big bang soaking shadow priest before the boss had him for a mid-fight snack.  We went on to get the “Supermassive” achievement though so all was not lost.  We were then mainly killing time waiting for our last core raider to get home from work so that we get him in for the HLK kill he missed on Monday.  Once he got home and logged in, we went and very nearly one-shot Arthas right out of the gate, two disconnects during phase3 left us at 13.9% when the last person died.  We went back in though and two attempts later he was dead for the second time.

I was pretty pumped up on a “my guild is awesome” high on Monday night after we killed him the first time after wiping for 4-5 months on him, but I think in a lot of ways I am even more proud of last night’s kill. It proves that it wasn’t just a fluke, we didn’t just happen to get lucky, and like I told the raid last night, and tell them every time one of them asks me why I always make them learn boss fights “the hard way”, repeatability is one of the core components to our success as a raiding guild over the last year and a half we have been doing 10mans. When we learn a boss fight, we genuinely *learn* the boss fight. We make sure that by the time the boss dies, everyone understands how the boss fight works, what is *supposed* to happen, how to react when it doesn’t happen that way, and most importantly, how to carry that knowledge over into the next time we see a similar boss mechanic.