Ulduar, 10-player, 13 May 2010

It's Thursday and time for the weekly raid quest, in this case Razorscale. Easy peasy so I decide to give Toxicity an outing. From time to time I enjoy being able to heal while moving, even though the price is no chance of Acuity's 25k+ crit heals. We invite every L80 that's online, then start counting heads to see how many pugs we need. Zero? I double-check: Yes, ten guildies in raid! First-ever full guild run! Yay!

Raid composition is a different matter. Turns out that out of ten people, three are geared healers -- excellent for ICC but we surely don't need three healers for Ulduar. I decide to take Tox as dps. I mean, she hasn't done a raid as dps in ages but hey, all dps do is press some buttons to go pew-pew so how hard can it be. Right?

We zone into Ulduar, and the raid leadership takes great care to start the event in normal mode. We want a fun run for extra badges, not any actual work. A hitch develops almost immediately when it turns out that someone who shall remain nameless needs guidance to find their way from the summoning stone to the instance, having ended up accidentally in the Halls of Stone. Memo to self: We need a geared 'lock in the guild, a) to tank Prince Keleseth and b) to summon people directly to an instance.

The errant guildie rescued we start on the trash. It falls over like trash does that was designed to be a challenge for toons with an average iLevel of 213, not 251. A minor setback: Shamaee has to leave with profuse apologies -- RL intervenes. We continue anyway without looking for a pug as replacement -- it's "only" Ulduar and we can probably nine-man it.

Having arrived at FL's little corral barely needing the repair platform the usual instruction goes out to shoot down pyrite and do not pull the last trash until we're ready. The usual thing happens in that somebody pulls the last trash before we're ready. Hey-ho, out comes FL, pursues somebody, and barely survives long enough to change targets twice. Piece of cake. It occurs to me that next time we're in there we should go for the Unbroken achievement but we didn't think of it at the time.

On to today's object of our desire, Razorscale. Volunteers are selected (coerced) for harpoons, trash comes out of the mole machines, pew-pew.... and we stand around waiting for more trash. I examine the dps meter. Not good -- I'm having trouble staying above the off-tank. I hastily shapeshift into lazerchicken mode. There. And didn't I have an AoE spell? Ah yes, Hurricane. Button 5. Down comes Razorscale, gets kited out of the fire by tanks, dps inflict major injuries, up she goes. Rinse and repeat one more time. Quest complete.

Since we're having such a good time we go on to XT. Light bombs, Gravity Wells and Tympanic Tantrums abound. The sudden flood of purple on my healbot frames goes straight to my healer's brain, bypassing all reason, and I automatically cast some heals, before I remember myself and go pew-pew again, even (eventually) remembering to shapeshift back again. Quite a few of the little adds reach XT and a couple of bombots explode (brez, please) but XT doesn't stand a chance against our firepower and succumbs.

(Please please nobody suggest we do Ignis...)

Might as well do Kologarn. (Phew!) The trash on the way is worse than the boss. Rezzes needed. The Stone Guardians disposed of we sneak up the stairs. At least, eight of us did. One prox-pulled some trash, with fatal consequences. Back we go to help dispose of the remainder.

Kologarn instructions. Right arm > elemental trash > body. He goes down like a sack of the proverbial, and I didn't notice a single eye-beam. We trudge over the bridge conveniently created by Kologarn's dead body towards the trash leading up to Auriaya. I get the responsible role of rooting the sparks. One makes it across anyway, since I'm out of practice on quick target changes. And one half of the pair dies significantly before the other. By rights this should've been a wipe but wasn't.

Auriaya and her fearsome tabbies try to turn us into mincemeat but to no avail. Horrifying Screech is no match for a tremor totem, one void zone falls since a Feral Defender dies just from splash damage and even though nobody is properly stacked it's feeding time over for Auriaya's little zoo.

We called it at that point -- always finish on a high note. And Ulduar has lost much of its fears, but none of its beauty.

Key Facts

• Number of pugs in raid: 0
• Useful loot items: 0
• Number of wipes we would have had in instance-appropriate gear: at least 6, at least two of them on trash.
• Number of wipes we actually had: 0
• Number of healers with improved respect for dps: 1
• Time wasted working out how to type special characters into Emacs: Too long
• Resolution: Exìle henceforth to be referred to simply as Exile, to reduce scribe's likelihood of throwing keyboard out of the window.

ICC10 continuation on Monday; see you there!