Halion 10-man heroic down. Glory of the Icecrown Raider 25 completed!

[maky]

Two news, one post! Okay, not so funny.

Glory of the Icecrown Raider 25-man is done!

New mounts! After taking it really, really slow with these achievements, we finally completed all of them and got ourselves some nice frostwyrms!
Here is a nice photo we made after the raid ([click here] for full size image)



The ICC glory meta achievement system was terrible. In Naxx and Ulduar it was okay (Ulduar was the best in my opinion, of course without Iron Dwarf). In ICC, it`s just VERY annoying because some of the achievements are so bad (Sindragosa, of course), but also because heroic+achievement isn`t compatible anymore, and this has direct implications on loot progression, heroic LK availability and so on. Basically, to get an achievement, you have to screw the heroic mode for that boss, which sucks.
While the idea in itself seems nice (to have to do heroic mode and some other "fun" stuff for each boss), the final implementation was just bad; also showing lack of far-sight-ness.

<Prophecy> defeats Halion in 10-player heroic mode!

This is the better part of the news post. New content, new fun! The 3.3.5 patch was released last Wednesday. A few of us tried to get prepared for the patch already, sitting around on Teamspeak from around 12.00 and waiting to try the new raid. After some awesome extended maintenance (and much, much rage), servers finally came up at a whooping 19.00 (YAY), but the more fun part was that our battlegroup didn`t have the instance servers working. So yeah, let`s login and try the raid.........oh wait, your character gets stuck 20 min at a loading screen afterwards.
After a very dissapointing Wednesday evening in which we just stood and wait for the instance servers to get fixed (and they didn`t), we tried to regroup on Thursday morning. We were prepared already from around 11.00, and fortunately the raids were working this time.
The new boss - Halion - was fun. I`m sure all of us enjoyed raiding something that isn`t ICC. We wanted to push for an early heroic kill, so we pulled it straight on heroic. It`s a fun fight, from a 10-man point of view, it tests the awareness and coordination of the raid. It was a very much welcomed break from the ICC "numbers" model type of hardmodes. In fact, numbers matter very little in this fight (although healing is rather intense). It`s all about playing it right and people paying attention to the many fires that are around, but all in all it was a nice challenge.
After a few hours (one of which consisted entirely of 9-man attempts because people had to go), the boss fell down. Happy moment! But us nerds were actually interested to see wowprogress! Seeing as it was a very early kill, and only 35 kills were registered on wowprogress before us, we quickly went to update...
...And good news everyone! We scored a World #36, EU #20 kill! This is a big record, by far (and I doubt we`ll beat it any time soon). It was a very good feeling that we managed to play good and be "quick" in content!
The boss didn`t take us that much in fact. Sure, not at Premo level to kill it in 6 pulls, was more like 20 or so. Could be a few more because my combatlog wasn`t working very good, but we had some "let`s see how long the enrage is"  type of pulls, many 9-man pulls and some pulls with people afk just to see better ability X (top guilds have PTR for this).
Oh and no shaman in the raid! No grounding totem (I know it was just a fake rumor, but it was still fun to mention).
This kill wouldn`t have been possible without the efforts of many people (more than the 10 who scored the kill in the end), so thanks to everyone who was present on Thursday morning+afternoon, especially Darth, Adibjan, Skraa and Rigash for being there!
Here is a photo ([click here] for full-size image):



Now, seeing as we scored a very good kill (ranking-wise), we have to brag a bit more about it, no? This is a screenshot from wowprogress taken on Thursday evening :

[Kaasrasp]

CURIOUS, WHERE IS HEROBEAR IN THAT PICTURE.

I SENSE PHOTOSHOP :D

[Monascha]

CURIOUS, WHERE IS HEROBEAR IN THAT PICTURE.

I SENSE PHOTOSHOP :D

Nah, i was in Dalaran at that time 

[maky]

I have fixed it m8
Finding the proper screenshot and uploading it is hard work troloolol