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Horridon 10 Man Heroic

Horridon 10 Man Heroic Fidelity

We left attempting Heroic Horridon until our 5th heroic boss, and while it’s hard to tell with the gear differential and the number of different characters we’ve raided with over the last few weeks, it was probably a little easier than heroic Iron Qon or heroic Tortos, despite single tanking both of those encounters.

The joy of tanking Horridon for heroic is that virtually nothing changes since you get your ‘Pink Elephant’ very last. It was a lot of fun to watch the DPS numbers change in relation to the order DPSers were inflicted with their bright pink companion.

Learning the fight on heroic is much like the experience on normal. As you master each gate, you get to the next gate in much better shape and have better chance of getting through it intact. Particularly between the third and fourth gates, early attempts degraded into a mess of left over frosty adds, frozen orbs littered everywhere, some nasty bear-mounted shamans and pink elephants advancing in a menacing fashion. Later attempts were a little more like clockwork, with people cheekily taunting their pink buddies as they waltzed around them, preparing for the final zerg.

Once Jalak is out, the damage into the raid between Bestial Cry and Dire Call gets reasonably intense, and once Jalak is dead, Horridon starts to hit pretty hard (360k+ on plate, with Triple Puncture getting huge at high stacks). It is definitely worth disarming Jalak if you forgot that you used to on normal mode.

While the damage and healing requirement is much higher than normal, and the ‘Pink Elephant’ factor is significant, it pays to be extra vigilant with the mechanics from normal. You definitely want to avoid being hit by Double Swipe, which should be completely avoidable. For our first kill we used Time Warp (yey for Mages!*) on the third gate to burn down the Frozen Warlords for a cleaner transition into the fourth and final gate.

We will also manage to one shot the boss next week. Our shadow priest, Alrius, will have multi-dots going off like a frog in a sock. Good times.

* this is in no way to make up for the hilarious joke made about Treasures of the Thunder King and what useful items they may contain.

Tortos 10 Man Heroic

A month to the day from our last heroic progression kill, Tortos finally crumbled. We have had a lot going on in the lives of our guildies, from babies to moving house, somersaulting from really high places to being surprised with a semesters worth of lectures scheduled on raid nights or stepping away from raiding due to work and family commitments. I’ve even tried playing from a hotel room while entertaining Jondy (whose laptop I’ve commandeered) with homemade hummus, sourdough bread and gorgonzola. We’ve had people make a great deal of effort to get to raids, but in a small guild timing can conspire to make progression raiding extra challenging.

Last night we were fortunate enough to have Praka join us on his holy priest, and recently had Mist (aka Idsapthat, aka Widget, aka Maanu) rejoin the guild on his windwalker monk alt. With a full cast, and Hagrim at the helm (Protection Paladin FTW) we set out to destroy the turtle so we could get through to progression bosses… in the opposite direction, having skipped over Horridon and Council before now.

Alrius (shadow priest) did a fantastic job on kicking duty, with Bioderm (fire mage) as a back up, and kicking for DPS. We had Hagrim as our solo tank, and Velletara used misdirect to assist in picking the bats up. While on normal, the healing threat from some insane self (and group) healing makes Hagrim the equivalent of Batnip, it doesn’t work nearly as well on heroic. Our current theory is that the Crystal Shell mechanic messes with threat generated by healing enough that healers become fair game again.

With three melee and one tank, we were able to just wreck the bats. It is a little sobering looking at the logs for the kill, where it shows Hagrim as the wreckingest, with over 40% of the damage done to the bats. Esta (frost DK), Borg (2H Fury) and Mist almost did as much combined.

The major change for heroic is Crystal Shell, which allows healers to stack up a shield for up to 75% of your maximum health. Stomp does a full 100% of your maximum health in damage, so it’s a cycle of building up the shield, surviving the stomp and subsequent rockfall damage before building up the shield again. The whirl turtles hit really, really hard which can mess with that cycle. Killing the whirl turtles quickly, with AoE and single target slows makes the whole process a lot smoother. It is important to note that when you apply Crystal Shell by hitting one of the Humming Crystals around the room, it freezes your current health so allowing the healers to top you off before you grab the shell is important.

We waited until the first stomp after Tortos was at 25% health and we burned time warp and plowed through the rest of Tortos with whirl turtles flying everywhere. The first time we got to this point, we scored our kill.

Over the last few weeks we’ve tried the fight a variety of ways. I got to try tanking both Tortos and the bats at different times, while two tanking and Esta saw some tanking action as well. Mostly, aside from introducing people new to the heroic mode (or any heroic mode), we just lacked the overall oomph and it was gratifying to be able to kill heroic Tortos on the last pull of the night.