<Fidelity>

We killed Heroic Eye of the Jailer in 18 attempts with 11 raiders and an average iLvl of 223.8. Eye is a fun fight. Raiders are getting dragged by chains to the edge of the platform, you get to grapple across the the back of the whole platform. I didn’t even mind splitting up the group into halves, which is usually just an administrative chore.

Between flex raiding, and gear increases the amount of damage the group can put into the boss varies from night to night. So timing the boss phase transitions could be a little tricky. Fortunately Hagrim is both a Dwarf AND a Paladin, so Assailing Lance and associated bleed? No worries. In the event that we almost got the transition perfect, but it was in fact a disaster, Hagrim could merrily grab the Abductor and the right hand side team could enjoy getting their cleave on.

We killed Heroic Tarragrue in 15 attempts with 15 raiders and an average iLvl of 219.1.

I’ll say it. I haven’t met many gimmicks that I like. The anima powers for Tarragrue is yet another that I don’t like. It is a cute concept, and it is fun to get amazing powers and go HAM on the boss, but here’s my list of issues with it. The amount of trash required to support this gimmick sucks. It’s soooo time consuming. Hats off for putting a big-arse knockback that sends people flying. That has been amusing on occasion.

Then there’s the obvious terrible powers that you have to remind everyone not to pick. I’m looking at you, Lumbering Form (increases your size and knocks back all players within 1.5 yards) and Ten of Towers (yey, DPS increase, but if you die, you stun everyone in proximity).

There’s also powers you HAVE to pick. Well, a power, namely Ever-Beating Heart. It is required to handle the Chains of Eternity mechanic. We have cleared the trash with literally zero people picking this power. That’s not to say is was never offered to anyone, but it certainly wasn’t offered to me, or probably Kal or probably Canaleth. I have a feeling it may have been offered to some DPS, but you didn’t pick it, did you? I almost don’t blame you, but we both know you could have picked it… and I’m watching you.

Then there’s the temptation to re-roll your choices. Any excuse could set someone off. Someone logs on late after we’ve cleared trash. Everyone assumes we’ll wait for them to pull the boss. If I can help it, I don’t want to wait, I just want this boss done… but out of the corner of my eye, I see that someone is off… to do another lap, repicking their powers for the farmiest of all farm bosses. So we might as well get a stone up, summon our dear friend and wait for them to do a lap as well.

Rant over. The best part of this fight is playing ping pong with Hagrim at the end. Don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but Hagrim is a Paladin, so he has all kinds tricks to drop threat. So we can get this lumbering fool to walk backwards and forwards, with our pinnacle of achievement being a fight completion with zero deaths on heroic mode some weeks after our first kill.

Also worth mentioning that we didn’t really push taking the Unstable Form anima power, which is godly at reducing the healing required by dropping the Grasp of Death dot that made up over 60% of the damage taken on that fight. So we four healed in a group of fifteen to push us through.

It was also very nice to have Pixie (Jetamio) along on her hunter from Moon Guard, Trin on her rogue, Veltis on her pally and a blast form the past Esta on his mage, Vaasa. How knew we’d start out the tier with fifteen raiders?!?!

We killed Heroic Sire Denathrius in 95 attempts, with 16 raiders and an average item level of 212.4. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to kill it before the nerf, even with several sub 4% attempts. While it was particularly frustrating to get so close with no kill, a lot of guilds must have been struggling as our ranking on wowprogress jumped by thousands.

Pre nerf, we struggled with our usual changes in group size. Having a group of 16 for the kill was almost a luxury after fielding on average 12 – 14 raiders. We also succumbed to some very silly deaths, including raiders being flung off the platform. With the mirror dancing, battle resurrections were problematic and the odd bug where a dead body was literally out of line of sight, or the body not returning to the middle of the platform did not help matters.

We persisted. We had the first phase down so well, we were at risk of people falling asleep and dying for no good reason, or even sillier, the odd time we didn’t stop DPS and the boss transitioned before everyone had cleared enough stacks.

We struggled to meet the DPS tuning of the encounter, even on the rarest of pulls where weren’t searching for an extra battle res. I think our best attempt pre-nerf was getting a relatively clean transition into the last phase with Denathrius at 42%.

Post nerf, we initially tried to short circuit the first phase in four casts (instead of six) of cleansing pain, until Jorday suggested a method where we could still stagger our burden of sin stacks and get done in five.

Once that was sorted, and we shook off the sillies, we had a pretty clean kill!

GOOOOOOOAAAAAAALLL!!!!

We killed Heroic Dark Inquisitor in 12 attempts, 13 raiders and an average item level of 453.8.

We ended up with 3 kicking teams, which with a substitution part way through the fight involved 10 people on football duty. Fortunately, the fight on heroic is almost completely about kicking goals. There are no other punishing mechanics and the enrage timer might as well read: forever. It is nice that you can get a failure with the ball and the raid survive, as it gives the team a good opportunity to rotate kicking teams and get practise in before you wipe.

The Dark Inquisitor has definitely been the fight so far that has provoked the most conversation on discord, both curses for failed kicks and appreciation of threading the ball through the maze of obelisks.

We killed Heroic Maut in 18 attempts with an average item level of 449.5. We had 13 raiders on the kill.

As a tank, dragging adds (even if they move freely while casting) into puddles and back out again is a giant pain. Being in the puddle with 3 or 4 stacks Shadow Wounds is pretty dangerous, and when the add is in the puddle, no one can actually damage it. Having said that, we also had a surprising number of people flat out die to not being in the puddle when Stygian Annihilation when off.

During the second phase, it was fun to see how quickly people could nuke themselves to death. It seemed quite insurmountable at times, however, if everyone was happy and healthy going into the phase, we could drain Maut of mana with time to spare.

On the kill we went into the first Obsidian Statue phase at 60% which is a good benchmark while using heroism at the start of the pull. We had the boss quite low before a 3rd Obsidian Statue phase, and with better execution and more gear, we should be able to shave off that phase.

Thanks to Lahcim (Tam) for tanking!

** Jondy has handed over the photoshopping to Borg (guild overlay and design hers, screen grab of this boss’s pet… manipulated by me (clearly)). Reminder: I shouldn’t loot the boss until we’ve got the screenshot.

One shot. Enough said.

Average iLvl: 449.6 and 17 raiders.

We killed Heroic Wrathion in 10 attempts with an average iLvl of 431.6. As the very first raid in patch 8.3 for the Ny’alotha raid we had, for us, a massive group. Nineteen raiders. Nineteen! Our shiny new cloaks ranged from, “I have one! /fistpump”, to “there’s a legendary cloak?”, to “Level 5, /flex”.

It took us a few tries to get the hang of where it was safe to stand during Burning Cataclysm. There was an awful lot of life gripping going on. I’m still not sure if people really believe that Incineration does drop off damage (i.e., the further away from fellow raiders you get the better). In the second phase, we adjusted from killing the assassins to letting them be and focusing the remaining shards. Once we could clear all the shards during the phase, we secured a kill.

The ephemeral dragon wings from [Humming Black Dragonscale] look pretty awesome.

If you have been hitting refresh at fidelityguild.com/blog/ since September 2017, today is your lucky day! While the guild has been kicking ass and taking names, and killing all the heroic bosses while being forever at the 15 (+/- 3) mark for raiders each raid night… the blog has been deathly silent. We still have an active members forum, and our discord has a video of a corgi pulling a giant inflatable corgi in a pool… but no blog posts. Now that I think of it, the fact that everyone still lines up after a new heroic boss kill to take a photo is pretty fucking awesome. I love you guys. <3

The plan is to upload all the previous boss kill photos, but the amount of text that accompanies them will approach zero as we go back in time towards 2017. Guildies, please feel free to write comments, or hit me up with stories from those times so I can add that to the copy for that boss!

Heroic Un’nat. Crucible of Storms is one of Blizzard’s unanimously unpopular “little raids”, consisting of only two bosses. A myriad of visual effects, and an extra action button for each of the roles (Tanks, Damage, Heals) does not a fun raid make. The place was so uninspiring for us that we killed Heroic Restless Cabal on 18th April 2019, had a look at Heroic Un’nat on the 21st and then decided to leave Un’nat until… 26th May before looking at him again.

All in all we had 54 attempts with our kill clocking in a 7:15 with average iLvl 404.7 (Max: 410, Min: 395) with 15 raiders.

Our strategy with the trident (bubble), tempest caller (storm) and void stone (healer thing) ended up pretty straightforward compared to all the encounter ability interactions and synergies. We used bubble and storm together always. Once at end of phase one to kill two Undying Guardians and once toward the end of phase 2 to kill three. Important to note that for our kill we were down to only two Guardians being spawned in phase two before transition. The healer thing was always handled 1st and 3rd time by Jiarntok, and second by whichever other healer we had that wasn’t Jondy. She owes her thanks to all of Teacurtsed, Shakers and Promight. That’s it. The rest was down to practising the execution and dealing with a particularly punishing soft enrage in the last phase.

17th April 2019 2033

Kill Time: 10:14
Total Pulls: 45
Average iLvl: 402.1  (Max: 411, Min: 397)
Raiders: 16

OK, so coming back to this post at the end of 2021. Why aren’t you published yet? Well… you are now. Jaina… sorted.

We killed Kil’Jaeden on the 151st attempt. The One Hundred and Fifty First attempt. For reference (spoiler alert: haven’t written that post yet) we killed Heroic Fallen Avatar in 17 attempts. Should an end boss really be almost an order of magnitude harder than the previous boss? I’m not sure that’s good balance… we’d love to hear your take in the comments.

For our kill, we had all of our active core members there, for a total of 17 raiders with an average item level of 926.1. For those super concerned early on (I think that’s all of us?) about the enrage timer, we came in at 9:21, a good 39 seconds before the enrage timer. With a group of 17, we had 4 healers, which made the ratio of healing to DPS required pretty comfortable, and even allowed for some heroic healing to recover from a missed Armageddon soak. A huge thanks to Kal (Hydona) in particular for kicking butt as an elemental Shaman for the fight instead of his first love, healing, to give us some extra AOE oomph and great damage.

After 87 attempts, we hadn’t gotten the second transition phase. We had gotten close, with a couple of sub 45% attempts… but after 88 attempts, we got there, in 7 minutes. It looked like the enrage timer was going to be tight.

With two tanks, we had Esta (Brewmaster) soak all the big red swirls in phase one. That left, Bioderm (Mage), Dazzler (Mage), Wickedsfoe (Ret Paladin) and Mef (Hunter) to soak the remaining 4 in phase 2. It made a big difference when at various points, 4 out of 5 soakers might be away for a night… but on our kill, we had everyone there! On one such night, the notion of even attempting Heroic Kil’Jaeden was laughable, so we wondered if normal might be a little easier. Easier it was, with every conceivable spec jumping into a big swirl, delighted that even the most meagre cooldowns would provide the protection they required.

At one point, we ran three tanks, with Wickedsfoe (Paladin) to soak and tank the tank add. Having the redundancy, and simplicity of strategy saw us get through to phase 3 a number of times, but in the end wasn’t required to get the kill.

At 134 pulls, it was more frustrating than I’d like to admit that we had yet another maintenance shutdown in peak Oceanic raid times. However, things were coming together, despite the almost mind numbing, soul crushing miss of another Armageddon swirl being our most consistent downfall.

Some of our challenges during the fight:

DPS into adds. We solved this pretty quickly, with focused DPS and people being sensitive to how many shamans we were rocking and changing up gear and talents. For phase two, our often ignored strategy was to stack the first set of adds, and nuke them with heroism, and split one add off from then on to reduce the urgency to kill them before their stacks became overwhelming (particularly while dealing with other mechanics).

People getting knocked off the platform. Before the fight even started, Ash would often fall off the translucent platform just getting to the boss, and his exclamations over discord never failed to lighten the mood and cheer us up. We had some people get knocked off when the singularity was in the centre, but that got tightened up quickly. Then some people got knocked off when dealing with other mechanics or just being absent minded during the fight. Finally, I failed spectacularly a few times with heroic leap.

Armageddon. Where to start? The RNG on where they spawn, and the amount of time you get to respond can be pretty cruel. Aside from that, soaking the big swirl went pretty well. The little ones were a nightmare. I saw someone with a giant green triangle on their head standing right in the middle of a swirl (it was you Mef, nice job) only to have a fellow raider run head long at him, and belligerently stand there while they both got a stack of the dot from soaking. We had some missed from quite understandable indecisiveness, where a raider seemed to say, “After you.” “No, I insist, after you.” “Oops, never mind dear chap, we’re all dead.” We had people over reluctant to soak twice in a row (the dot stacks, refreshes and really hurts), and people that seemed to have a death wish. With perseverance, and some quick communication we improved and improved until only the worst RNG or brain fart would see us miss. On the night of our kill I saw some heroic sprints and amazing heroic leaps (yeah, that’s right) forsome amazing coverage.

Tank deaths. Kil’Jaeden hits pretty damn hard (unmitigated will 2 shot a tank), but also requires significant active mitigation / cooldowns for Felclaws. There were times when I was certain I had Felclaws covered, but still went splat.

The second interim phase didn’t bother us too much, and it was nice to hang out with Illidan. Wicked, Dazzler, and Bio did a great job kiting the fire ball in the last phase… and once people get their head around the Obelisks, it was a matter of getting to the phase healthy and not losing people early that lead to our kill.