What a month it’s been, with frustrating little time on progression bosses, but finally the wait is over. Heroic Ultraxion went down a little too easily just after the nerf increased to 10%, making us wish for a full roster in the last few weeks.
Heroic Ultraxion is very mechanically similary to normal. The biggest change, particularly for a 10 man guild, is the number of people who need to soak Hour of Twilight. You need to have two players soak each one, and they get a debuff that doesn’t allow them to soak another for 2 minutes. What this boils down to, is that you need to have 60% of your raid soak the Hour of Twilight.
The obvious solution is just make Kalus (Disc. Priest) go Shadow! So our rotation looks a little something like this:
- Prot Warrior, Shadow Priest
- Prot Paladin, Holy Paladin (Rallying Cry + Divine Protection + [Glyph of Divine Protection])
- Rogue, Mage (Ice Block)
- Prot Warrior, Shadow Priest
- Prot Paladin, Holy Paladin (Divine Shield)
- Rogue, [Fire] Mage (Cauterize)
We two healed the encounter, leaving only our Restoration Druid, Enhancement Shaman, Affliction Warlock and Elemental Shaman free from soaking duties. Noondez did manage to survive at least one Hour of Twilight with a glyphed Divine Protection alone, but it was a little too close for comfort without Rallying Cry. Bioderm is at the mercy of our healers after using Cauterize to soak, which is a great impetus to keep in their good graces.
The increased number of soakers, and the aditional Fading Light debuff makes the encounter reasonably unforgiving for basic errors with fight mechanics. Unfortunately, at the 10% nerf mark Ultraxion has lost much of the bite that it had in the DPS and healing check areas and it was unfortunate we couldn’t push him over a week or two sooner.
I over allocated the amount of time for Heroic Ultraxion, and after knocking it over, we still had half of our raid week remaining. Much to Noondez’s delight (herald of all things both shiny and achievement oriented) we set to work on the remaining achievements for the raid.
We were happy to get the realm 6th Deck Defender on our first attempt for the week. Although this does require some coordination, any nerfing lets you get away with a lot fewer players soaking the large barrages.
Next up, after the encounter started, Whipshamzin asked if we were doing the Maybe He’ll Get Dizzy… achievement. Naturally we obliged, only to find out that it had already been completed by everyone in the raid. The achievement isn’t a bad way to go for normal in any case, since you need to sit around and wait for enough bloods to spawn before you can rip into the amalgamation. You might as well do a couple of rolls straight up.
Finally, we had come to our last platform (Kalecgos) for the Chromatic Champion achievement. The achievement requires at least 3 weeks of work after the first Madness kill to obtain, since you need to knock off a single platform at a time [yup, Whip, we’ll be doing the ones you’ve (actually) missed again]. The 20% extra damage is somewhat offset by the 10% nerf the raid has received, but missing spellweave did make an appreciable difference to how quickly the Regenerative Bloods went down. Fortunately we have some nice burst AoE, and my habit of maximizing the number of sources of damage into the bloods (Rend, Deep Wounds, Bladestorm, Sweeping Stikes) for psychotic Spellweave numbers did serve to rip them to bits without it. We were rewarded with a Realm 3rd for Chromatic Champion and an early night to boot.
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