10 < 25

I logged on early again last night, found I was still in the raid from Tuesday and zoned right in to Ulduar with no trouble. Talked to the NPCs, aggroed some mobs and ran out. So I was feeling pretty optimistic about our raiding chances as I went afk for a few minutes to take out my contacts and settle the rest of the regular evening stuff.

When I got back in, there were 3 of us in Ulduar (me, Kyoka and Sherider) but apparently everything was broken again and nobody else could get in. After yet another frustrating hour of standing around, we gave up on running 25 at 12:30 once more.

A bunch of people logged off to sleep and I was going to, but didn't right away. And then about 30m later, suddenly I hear some excited voices on vent -- "hey, I'm in. It's working." So we decided to pull together a 10 and at least see the mechanics of the first boss vehicle battle.

So we start randomly jumping in vehicles and driving around blowing stuff up, gradually working out the abilities, mechanics and goals as we went. There are a whole bunch of towers that spawn guys that need to be destroyed and 4 key towers that are marked with glowing spheres. Mandie told us that not killing those makes the fight harder in a Sarth + drakes style. We'll have to check that out someday.

I got my vehicle blown up by being a little too aggressive and spent most of this phase of the fight riding as a sidekick in Wiseman's motorcycle with no buttons to press. Which was annoying at first, but let me concentrate on figuring out the mechanics and positioning for that fight. It took awhile, but we actually ground our way through the whole gauntlet on the first real try. And then we found the boss, pulled and died.

We took another couple of cracks at it while working out the roles for the 3 vehicle types and when/how to catapult people onto the Flame Leviathan. We decided to catapult Sirtank and Hawksy right away (one dps and one healer to keep him alive). But we missed with Hawksy and ST was only able to kill 2 of the 4 things to kill up there. That problem persisted through a couple of attempts even as we got better at dpsing the boss.

We actually never figured out the catapult thing properly but somehow managed to scramble to a nearly-all-dead win on about the 4th try. We got a bonus for failing though when we all procced an achievement for winning the fight without dealing with the catapult/turrets properly, heh.

We pushed on a little bit after even though it was late. We wiped some on the trash to Ignis -- I think 2 tanks would have been better than 1 (just me) and we will need some practice on avoiding the flame cyclones. Then we pulled another boss (Incapacitator?) that had no trash and was pretty amusing -- it's a gigantic toddler robot boss. Again, >1 tank would probably be helpful for summons management, but it was nice to pull and see it.

With a little luck, we'll have a full 25 able to zone in tonight and do it again in real, Heroic mode. That should be even more fun.