Hey!

The wait is finally over. Icecrown Citadel is finally completely available, with the opening of the Frostwing Lair, and by that, having the path to the Lich King in our reach.

Before we ventured forth to the Frostwing Lair, we were asked by the Ashen Verdict to find and rescue Darnavan, an infiltrated member on the evil Cult of the Damned that seemed to be missing... We eventually ran into him while confronting Lady Deathwhisper - he seemed to be brainwash and couldn't distinguish friend from foe, so we had to deal with him aswell. The new ICC raid quests are a nice twist to already fun events, and we're looking forward for the next ones we face.

After saving Darnavan and being rewarded with some extra emblems of frost, a couple of epic gems, and the chance for a random epic BoE from the trash table (which we didn't get any!), we continued our march to the Frostwing Lair, eager to face Sindragosa... Before we could do so, we ran into a trapped dragon - Valithria Dreamwalker, from the Green Dragonflight, and we just couldn't leave an allied dragon behind, so we decided to step in!

The fight itself is rather original, with the whole "heal the mob to 100%" instead of just burning a <random foe>, and i really think our healers had a hell of a time with it, specially due to the fact that they get some uber power ups to make them heal even more, that was just crazy! While the healers had their fun, flying around, grabbing buffs and dishing out huge heals on VDW, the rest of the raid just laid back, controlling the waves of <piss easy> adds that came rushing towards us, trying to stop us from saving her, but, despite the originality and various types of mobs, it just isn't challenging enough... and we ended up rescuing Valithria real quick, oh well.

Howdy Ho!

It's curious how vampires turned out to be a 'cool' thing recently, after years of pure indiference where no one would give a crap about them. Then came Blade kicking their ass, Twilight reaching out for those hysterical teens and more recently the huge amount of crappy vampire tv shows (Vampire Diaries, True Blood, and even 2 (two!) original* (lol) portuguese vampire shows - which are plain absurd)... and finally it got to World of Warcraft... the only good thing about it is that... its really fucking cool! haha. Vampires, double damage, no threat, biting, what's not to love! I just wished Blade would pop up with his samurai sword and slice Morgas down while he was a vampire! Put us out of our misery haha!

Anyway, we got to the Blood Queen last week, and exhausted all our attempts on the release day with a series of attempts trying to work out the bite sequence possibilities to avoid the soft enrage, or at least merge it with the hard enrage. We rearranged the healer setup, tried the sacrifice technique to bypass the soft enrage, and even tried a couple of original alternatives... but unfortunetly we couldn't do it, having a couple of low %s wipes which were really frustrating. Most of it was our fault with basic mistakes, but the fight itself wasn't well tuned on 25man, so we had our issues. The following night, Blizzard announced the changes (hotfix) to the fight, increasing the vampyr buff timer a bit more, so the soft and hard enrage were tied together, making the fight 100x easier then it was when we originally went there... And that was just retarded. The change should have been applied during week resets to make it fair on everybody. We eventually got penalized for trying to defeat her on her release day, when we should have just waited a couple of days, let people test her out, and then defeat the "fixed" version after... limited attempts are a challenge, but it has to be fair.

Anyway, after that change, we were confident our setup was perfect and ready for the event. The first tries were solid altough some issues arised due to the change of timings between bites and event occurences, but after a near-kill on the 3rd attempt of the week we knew we had it, and killed it the following attempt with a near-perfect try. Healing was solid, DPS wasn't as good as we had hoped but was enough for the boss and no random occurences threw it off, and so, Blood Queen Lana'Thel was defeated by Corruption.

Hey hey!

Well, if you're an usual reader of our progress related news, you'll know by now that bosses that offer no challenge and are defeated easily usually get 'posted about' a bit late, because, to be honest, they weren't that special to deserve a "omg wtf we did it" post, like a few of our recent milestones, but any progress is progress nonetheless.

Crimson Halls were released last week, and we eagerly stepped in, excited for the new events and boss fights, as most of Icecrown Citadel so far has been very exciting, despite the various difficulties. Our first challenge were the Blood Princes, brought back by the Blood Queen to stand in our way. Keleseth the Shadow Lancer, Valanar the Shock Boy and Taldaram the Fire Juggler. The fight is simple enough, altough minor mistakes can be highly punished with deaths, and to be entirely honest, we had a very sloppy first kill, with lots of casualties, which only made the fight easier :|, and resulted on a steady kill, despite the high amount of dead bodies lying around.

Hey everyone!

Well, first of all i have to say we were very disappointed by not being able to kill Professor Putricide on his first available timer, but the truth is, we were ill prepared for it, and we made a lot of shocking mistakes costing us the progression we expected, so, we had to wait for the new lockout period to kill him. The fight itself 'feels' a bit easier, not sure if its a matter of hitpoints, less dmg on his abilities, or simply put, people knowing how to perform at higher standards, but the fight was a walk in the park comparing to last week's attempts. We changed the strat a bit to match some changes that were made on p3 of the event, and after a 6% and 7% wipes with transition issues, we took him down at our 3rd attempt of the timer, adding to our disappointment of not being able to raid him earlier in the week. So, the Professor was taken down easily.

BAM!

This is a news we are all very proud of. Just a few days ago, we accomplished A Tribute to Mad Skill, and we were quite happy about it, but few of us expected an improvement on it so fast... And in such an unexpected manner!

We started the night with our usual wednesday Icecrown Citadel raid, but unfortunetly, the servers seem to crack up a bit with the strain of guilds raiding Icecrown Citadel for the loot-fest on the first bosses, and the lag and delay was impossible to endure, so we decided to leave it for a later day, and we checked regular ToC25 to see if it was lagging aswell, giving a 'test run' on a couple of our new raiders, and it seemed ok. So, instead of returning to ICC, we decided to go for a couple of bosses on ToGC25 and see how it went! We had a couple of minor mistakes and a very big scare on our way to Anub'Arak, that could very easily have ended our Insanity run, but we managed to pull it together repeatedly, which was awsome, and there we were, face to face with Anub, with 50 attempts left, and the hope that no one would DC at a horrible time, or even that no one would make one horrible mistake to cause us the attempt...

Apart from a couple of scares on the fight, like Orangeyes failing to check the Emerge timer and getting ravaged by the impale a few secs till the end of phase... or Repi getting unusual amounts of damage with his avoid gear, things actually went well, and we had a very fast and clean phase3 where we even managed to control the Penetrating Colds! w00t! Here it was. Another NOTEWORTHY Realm First, another step in the progression ladder, and another proud moment in Corruption history, of which i'm proud of being a part of.