Uldaur Week 2

I'm half way through the guild's raiding week, the second spent in Uldaur. And I've got a few impressions.

Week 1 was pretty difficult. The guild managed to kill Flame Leviathan (yawn), Razorgore, Deconstructor, Iron Council, and Thorogrim (forgot his name already), and Ignis. 6/14. Of those, we managed to kill Razorgore, and Deconstructor before they were severely nerfed. And Ignis only after he was patched to not insta-gib the tanks.

Since that time, most of those bossess have had minor-to-major nerfs handed out to them. And this has certainly changed the flavor of those encounters. Our week 2 has certainly been easier...we killed all of the bosses we killed the first week on the first day, plus Aurilya (sp?)...and spent all of last night on Hodir (didn't get him), Freya (got her, but that fight is assy), and Thorim (we just had time for 3 pulls, and didn't really get to see the real encounter).

I have to say, after having gone farther into the instance...so far this is the best instance that Blizzard has released so far. The instance has a fairly cool atmosphere, and the trash/encounters really feel different from one another. And with the exception of Freya, most of the trash just isn't that long...assy maybe, but none of it takes very long to go through. And well spaced teleporters allow for getting through what is otherwise a massive area fairly quickly.

What I don't like is that most of the gear seems a bit...underwhelming so far. I don't like going into a new raid instance and DEing 70% of what was dropping...but this is exactly what was happening to us. I'm guessing that standard-mode gear is mostly 226, 226 gear which is at best mostly side-grades or not as well itimized. It's pretty annoying.

Flame Leviathan.
The first time we were in Uldaur, we 1-shotted FL. And that was with 3 vehicles locked out due to accidently starting the encounter early, and no one on a motorcycle understanding that they were supposed to be picking up the people that get lobbed onto the leviathan after taking out the turrets. On normal difficulty, this boss is a joke in every way. But, he's also a lot of fun.

Ignis the Igniter
This boss was a complete broken ass when he came out. Bugged to hell. Killing his adds didn't properly remove his damage buff. He had a tendency to melee attack the people we put into the slagpot. And he would randomly double-attack the tank, killing him instantly.

I'm not sure how some guilds got past that (though I know a few obviously did). But, Blizzard was pretty quick to fix some of this stuff. Plus they nerfed him to boot. We did not kill him the first night...our first kill on him came Monday before the reset and after most of the fixes/nerfs.

Now the encounter is pretty simple and no longer quite as punishing on the healers. I wouldn't say it's trivial, but it's nothing like it was.

Razorgore
This boss has a pretty simple, fun design. And when Uldaur origionally came out...a punishing enrage timer. We managed to beat him (barely), our second boss kill...but wow, it was by the skin of our teeth. By this point I had decided that Blizzard's description of difficulty was WAY off...Uldaur didn't feel like a step up in difficulty...it felt like 3 or 4. The encounter difficulty was really feeling more like the second half of black temple...IE not sunwell hard, but not easy either.

Of course, then they nerfed him by extending his enrage timer (which was honestly the only thing that made him difficult). They also reduced the spawning range of the drills, which is a nerf but a more welcome one. Those things were quite annoying spawning all over the place.

Deconstructor
At this point, my idea of what Uldaur was going to be had changed quite a bit. So I wasn't surprised that XT turned out to be as hard as he ended up being. Again, the encounter itself wasn't all that complex. DPS, DPS-heart, then AOE adds before they get to him. And run out when you get the nasty debuff. But his 6-minute enrage timer made this fight much harder than it would have been otherwise. With a 6-minute enrage timer, you had to execute it perfectly while stacking DPS.

This boss gave us the most trouble of the first four...I think we wiped 44 times to him over the course of a single night (our second night in Uldaur). But we got him...and then they nerfed the hell out of him the next day. The changes made to him, again, don't make the encounter trivial, but certainly provides a LOT more latitude on executing the encounter.

Iron Council
Hmmm...after some fairly difficult first bosses, the encounter difficulty in Uldaur dropped significantly with Iron Council. We one-shotted him, and didn't have much trouble doing it either. I don't think he was nerfed that much either before we got to him, so I was a bit surprised on how quick this guy went down.

Kologarm (or whatever his name is, I cannot remember)
The first time we fought this guy, we got him to 6%. Though in the end it took 5 kills to actually kill him. Honestly I like this encounter. It's one of the least complicated and easy to execute fights in Uldaur. The only thing that makes this fight difficult is the lack of room to manuever when dealing with eyebeam...especially in the 25 man version where you don't want to run it through the middle of everyone.

Again, this guy was nerfed. Not sure why because he was already pretty easy. Now he's even easier.

Auyrelia (or whatever else I can do to butcher her name)
We didn't get to do much with her the first week. The hardest part of this fight looks to be the pull...man she can wipe a raid FAST. Otherwise it's a fairly simple fight that tries to make it seem more hectic than it really is.

Tactics are simple. Stay together. After the fear group back together fast. Stay out of the black stuff. And kill the adds she spawns on a regular basis.

Hodir
Tried him last night. We weren't really set up for him, though we did manage to get him to 16% before went on to another boss. Our DPS was a LITTLE low on him, and unfortunately the healers were having a hard time keeping the boss alive.

Mostly I like this fight. And the animations in this fight are pretty cool. I would consider this a moderately difficult fight. Nothing too severe, but 36 million HP is a lot of health to burn through in 9 minutes (or 8?, I don't remember now).

Freya
Holy shit that's a lot of trash. And the actual fight itself is somewhat annoying. This is the first boss I don't really like in Uldaur. And I can't imagine how hectic it is going to be to do her in full hard mode. On the plus side, she did give me a nice pair of T8.5 legs...which I got!

Thorim
Didn't get to see much of this fight...just a little of the gauntlet. We'll be working on him and Hodir on Sunday...hopefully we'll get both of them down.