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Heroic Gul’dan

Heroic Guldan Fidelity

We killed Gul’dan with 15 characters and an average iLvl of 896.6. Now, the publish date as always is the time of the kill… but I’m writing this in August, while the guild is doing battle against heroic Kil’Jaeden. I wonder how much of this I will remember. Oh, yey, the email to Jondy for the screenshot has some notes. UGH. The eyes! The eyes!

Gul’dan was killed in 80 attempts. The mechanic that caused the most problems was the empowered eyes. Looking back through the forum, we had a lot of discussion about getting people straight into those throughout the fight. We used potions for the first eye in phase three, heroism for the next two… and by the time we got comfortable with the phase, Gul’dan was dead.

For tanking, Esta did the bulk of tanking Gul’dan and I picked up the Dreadlords in phase two. By the umpteenth attempt, we had our interrupt rotation down pat, and Esta and I were doing a Fel Sythe / Empowered Bonds of Fel dance as a delightful duet. There’s nothing quite like watching Esta get flung across the room, only to roll back, shrugging off the bonds like nothing just happened. Except for when I forgot to taunt, and it was ever so politely and gently pointed out in the guild forums.

Dazzler did a great job (and Tam too on occasion) in managing the stack / spread and movement of the ranged group for the empowered liquid hellfire and empowered bonds of fel dance. Overall we were a little slow in getting the whole group to participate in breaking people out of bonds in a timely fashion… but we did get there in the end.

As usual, Desu was active in the forums with analysis… which may have tired him out enough by the time we got the kill, when contemplating what to do next (Mythic bosses with a sub-20 roster vs. previous tier Mythic bosses) we got this gem:

My suggestion is we perform an 80:20 analysis, go for the low hanging fruit, and leverage our synergies to 10x the value of our time and attention.

A couple of quick mentions, since the boss kill screenshots record the people physically in the photo… Obzen was unwell and retired early, and Silence and Sarky both missed out on the LAST PULL OF THE NIGHT due to a disconnection.

Which leads me into some of the things that sucked about Heroic Gul’dan. The scaling on this fight was appalling. The difference extra characters in the fight was pretty extreme, and throughout our 80 attempts many were made much more difficult to achieve the required DPS by having less total people in the raid. We all understand that it can’t be harder when you invite more friends to join in… but I’m not sure why Blizzard has such a difficult time getting scaling right at smaller raid sizes.

Finally, we had a raid night spoiled by a bugged Elisande that wouldn’t let us progress to Gul’dan. In the scheme of things, it now seems like a small note, but we really weren’t impressed at the time!

Hopefully I’ve done Gul’dan justice, and now I can focus on at least getting up some pretty pictures and stats for all the bosses we’ve killed since!