Now with 10% fewer hairballs!

As a Raid Leader, part of my job is to decide what bosses we’re going to kill on any particular night. I have to draw on my personal knowledge of the encounter, estimate how much experience everyone else has, their performance, and how much time each boss and its assigned trash is going to take.

When we first started Ulduar 25 in earnest, we got about as far as Kologarn, leaving Auriaya up after a wipe or two and calling it a night. That was after easy-modeing Flame Leviathan, and going straight to XT. We skipped Razorscale, Ignis, and the Iron Council for quite a while.

Then, once we got a handle on XT, Kologarn, and Auriaya and had started working on keepers we inserted those other bosses in at the end of raids.

Then came this week.

And yesterday.

We’ve finally hit that sweet spot. Last night we dove straight through Flame Leviathan, did XT, then Kologarn, and finally Auriaya. She died at 8:15. Our raid time starts at 7, and we raid until 10. So, that was a little less than half our raid to get to the keepers.

Unfortunately for me, I hadn’t guessed in my wildest dreams that we’d be able to steamroll through the required bosses that quickly. The keepers (mostly) require a good amount of set-up (see below) before we tackle them.

Tonight's Roster, Lookit that beast!

plus bunny ^_^

Anyhoo, this is the set-up for all four keepers. Two we’ve killed before (Freya and Hodir), one we’re so damn close we can taste his defeat (Thorim) and another we’ve never seen on 25-man, and never beaten at all (Mimiron).

Last week I was completely floored when our guild managed to 1-shot Freya and we 2-shot Hodir. We had 6 attempts on Thorim with the last one ending in a wipe at 15% or so and the only outstanding problem was the lack of a set tank taunt order. This is now fixed, and I have every confidence we’ll see him dead tonight.

The real kicker is, we raid for three hours a night, three nights a week. It’s a relatively short raid night in a relatively short raid week. When we first started working on Ulduar I knew Yogg-Saron was a long ways away, and (after our previous failure to down Sartharion 3D before 3.2) I never thought we’d get to see Algalon.

14 bosses in 9 hours? Surely it’s not possible.

Oh, sure, there’s speed runs of all of Naxx completed in 2-3 hours, and that’s 15 bosses. But, you see, Naxx was easy. Ulduar is… well… not so much.

I wasn’t sure if we’d ever have the time and ability to blaze through these bosses and get deeper into Ulduar.

Last night, my guild showed me how very wrong I’d been.

Now, tonight we’ll kill three keepers, of this I have no doubt, and then we’ll start working on one of the most difficult fights in the entire instance, Mimiron.

I don’t think we’ll kill him tonight, and I would be surprised if we killed him tomorrow night, but if the raiders of Unemployed bring the kind of focus and skill they’ve shown thus far, I could definitely see us… what was that term the dear Panzercow used? Oh yes…

Next week, we’ll definitely manage to beat the Yoggy out of him.