Between multiple projects in real life and progression raiding through hard mode encounters, I've forgotten all about my blog. I've sorely missed re-evaluating my WoW experience from a different perspective. Well, let's do a little catching up..

Ulduar is a lot of fun. Most of the hard modes are so daunting at first, but when you finally get the kill, it's a very good feeling. Almost as good as killing Sunwell bosses... almost.

Thorim hard mode was the first hard mode Encore accomplished. It was the encounter that demoralized our guild as a whole and made some of us realize that this realy isn't Naxx anymore. Months of farming easy instances have made some of us expect even hard modes to go down within a night or two. Granted, this is true for some hard modes (Hodir and XT come to mind), but some of us were going into these encounters with the wrong mentality, leading to sandy vaginas and negative attitudes. I think we ended up spending a grand total of 4 raid nights on Thorim hard mode, and only until the 3rd raid night did we realize our strat was terribly inefficient. Due to the 10-man equivalent being a complete joke, we brought the same strategy into the 25-man version, i.e. stand in random areas and dodge everything. This resulted in 3 nights of failure, and finally when we examined other guilds' videos of the kill, we realized that this fight is all about positioning. One night of proper positioning finally granted us a kill.

Our next hard mode achievement was Hodir. Overall, a very simple strat lead to a very simple kill. We're now able to one shot this achievement every week, which is always a morale booster. This fight also made me bring my Sundial again due to haste procs being useless. Glad I kept it.

Steelbreaker was more of a ballbreaker. We went into this encounter with a better mentality and attitude, researching thoroughly on positioning and whatnot. Regardless, our strategy developed from a 3-tank strategy to a 4-tank strategy, as well as a random spread around Steelbreaker into the raid stacking right on top of him, with our tanks/hunters soaking the balls of lightning. Our dps is really tested in this fight, and so far we've only done it once (a bunch of 1% and 2% wipes). A lack of pure dps classes on the bench has really lowered our raid dps in Ulduar (we would have 2 moonkins, 2 ele shammies often). I'm the only capable raiding warlock in the guild, and it's weird since in BC, the warlock core of Encore was one of the strongest. Recruiting warlocks if you know any.

Another fight where another good warlock would be useful is XT. Our strat makes use of 2 hunters, our elemental shaman, and myself to handle the life sparks, and due to 13/58's mana efficiency, my damage on life sparks completely dominate the fight. If we brought in another destro lock, we could probably drop down to 2 warlocks and elemental shaman on the life sparks, putting another dps on the boss. Realistically, this would only make our life easier, since we were still able to get the kill with this strat. XT hard mode surprisingly only took us 1 1/2 raid nights to accomplish, which is pretty good for a guild with attendance issues.

This week, I'm pretty sure we'll work on Freya+2 and maybe get a Yogg-1 kill. It's been kind of frustrating lately because many of us are looking at other guilds' progressions and try to do too much in a single raid week. I keep telling our leadership to only focus on 1 hard mode per week (2 if we beat it). We would have weeks when we'd spend a night on FL+4T, then spend half an hour trying to do this stupid worthless achievement on Kologarn, and finally get back to work on a hard mode we were working on the previous week. I swear, some people get way too optimistic when it comes to hard modes that it's hurting us more. Our weekly schedule consists of 4 25-man raid nights and 1 raid night dedicated to 10-mans, so losing more than 1 night on hard mode progression puts unnecessary pressure to finish the instance (we still do the hard modes we've previously done).

Hard mode progression is all about picking your poison.