Week in hell: First week of Firelands heroic modes

First week of heroic mode progress in Firelands is finally over, and it's time to look back at the events of the past week. Here's what my memory weakened by sleep deprivation and stress can come up with:

Judging from how fast the US guilds had killed the first bosses, we figured they'd be quite easy and not worth racing for EU firsts on, and instead started with some Baradin Hold action to gear up for the upcoming fights. Unfortunately the loot gods were not on our side this time and we barely got any useful PvE loot at all.

After gathering the whole bunch of us at the entrance to Firelands we went to see if Shannox and the dogs would play with us, but he turned out to be almost easier than on normal mode and just gave up after a couple of pulls.

 

Because the dogs weren't that much fun to play with, we went to check out if the spiders at Beth'tilac would be more fun, but after getting the tactics fixed the fight turned out to be rather nondescript and boring and to be honest I cannot really remember much of it besides some explosions and spider guts all around...

 

Next up was Lord Ryolith, but he turned out to be quite simple also once Rakez learned how to drive. It probably says something about how much of an achievement the kill felt that almost no one stayed behind to take a proper kill shot of it...

Alysrazor was a little more exciting, and it turned out that some people *may* have cheated on their pilot's license tests... That was sorted out rather quickly though, and once a couple of guys learned how to dance with the big vortex of fire (including myself, having only seen the fight once before...) it all went down in flames and the loot was collected.

 

 

Now we were actually up to a challenge, as Baleroc seemed to deserve his title as the "Gatekeeper", having stopped the US guilds even with their head start. It only took a few hours to get to really low percent wipes in enrage, but the dps requirement seemed preetty massive. Using the usual "if in doubt, drop a healer, if it seems impossible, drop two" strategy the fight started looking quite doable, but the kill eluded us. Meanwhile Method was pushing hard and snatched the world first from us. It took us something in the vicinity of 16 hours of raiding to go from sub-5% wipe to the actual kill, world second.

 

After crossing the bridge and killing some "equally interesting non-boss monsters" we were in front of Majordomo Staghelm. This guy had only just before received a 10% buff to his hp and seemed like he might pose quite a challenge. We tried out a couple of tactics, one including every rogue we could muster, but the solution turned out to be much simpler and we got to enrage relatively early on, however it took a few more hours to learn how to do that with everyone alive instead of having a critical person burninated to death by the fiery orbs or ganked by a flaming cat jumping around. Once everything was in control the boss went down relatively "easily" and netted us a world first by a 50 minute margin.

 

Next up, Ragnaros, lord of the Firelands himself. The exact details of what happened are still classified, but here's a couple of screenshots showing him climbing out of his pit and showing those sexy legs. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get some sleep interrupted by nightmares about flames, meteors and fire elementals all over the place...