Heroic Valithria healed up (25-player) + recruitment info

[maky]

Been a while since I written any news post, main reason is that we didn`t kill anything in 25s lately; and I`m too lazy to make posts for the 10-mans. Anyways, we`re back in business! Seeing as there isn`t much to say about actual kills though, I`ll add a mini-article at the end about ICC hardmodes.

Valithria Dreamwalker (25 heroic) rescued by Prophecy!

After struggling for 1.5 weeks with raid setups (more on this later), we finally managed to have the whole healing team available. After adjusting the fine details of the fight and waiting to have 25 people online, we got her "up" pretty quick. We had a really really clean win, I think it`s the best try we ever had (that is including normal mode), everyone alive and she was at 100% before the 5-min mark. This is quite a performance actually, we got the same fight length as a US top 10 guild! And we can still do better!
Valithria is a fun fight to "develop" (strategy, timings, tricks etc) or if you`re a healer. Maybe as a tank too! However, as a DPS it`s pretty annoying, especially for mana-users. You just stand there and kill random stuff till you get overrun or you win.
Sadly, no photo, we were lazy.

Progressing through ICC hardmodes

Now, some further rambling about ICC hardmodes and our progress. Turns out they`re pretty bad to be honest. The fights change very very little, with a few exceptions (Lady Deathwhisper, Putricide, Sindragosa, Blood Princes a bit). We fought the same bosses when mainly in 245 gear, and they were tunned for that gear level (along with a rather high margin for errors); now we fight the same bosses. They get cheat codes! (% increase in HP, damage), and a very small gimmick; we have 264 gear now though. Of course, the margin of error is lower, but all in all it`s the same fight and we`ve learned it already; it feels repetitive.
The "stupid boss of the season" award however must go to Blood Queen Lana`thel (maybe I`ll change my mind but doubt it). It was a fun fight at first, and the idea was nice; but the fight quickly became boring (due to the very static nature of it). In heroic, it`s the same fight! Of course, she has more HP and deals more damage, and that`s about it. We didn`t change absolutely anything in the base tactic we had for normal mode, and we were quite successful. We had at least 5 wipes at 2% in the past weeks, so hopefully we`ll have her down soon. However, I don`t think there will be a major "HELL YEAH!" moment at the end, at least speaking from my own point of view.

When it comes to design, I understand that there isn`t much to be done. I did a "brainstorming exercise" on how to make the bosses more interesting without making them retarded, and I couldn`t come up with anything good. Actually, I believe the issue isn`t in the abilities themselves but on gear and the impact that the gating had on the whole progression.
We`ve had 2 months between the release of ICC and LK finally being available; that is very long in my opinion. This way, by the time you reach LK, you`re already having enough 264 pieces available; so it has to be tuned around that gear level, meaning that heroics must be tuned really tight. Sadly, this creates a cycle of "beat bosses so you can farm gear to beat them on their heroic version" which gets boring pretty quick.
I`ll stop with the whinings here; it`s not as bad as I`m making it seem, just that we were expecting something "different".

Recruiting: Warrior, Shaman, Hunter

We`ve decided to open recruitment for the spots above. On DMF`s realm forum, Sini posted a pretty accurate topic about us, how we raid and what we expect. Check it out!