People will probably be a bit surprised to see us posting about anything to do with Ulduar, but we've never been a guild that goes with the flow. For quite some time now, we've been sporadically working on defeating the last encounter in Ulduar to elude us: Yogg-Saron without the assistance of any Keepers.

The Yogg-Saron fight is a good example of a well-designed encounter by Blizzard. It can range from near-trivial (Yogg+4) to pretty challenging (Yogg+1) to ridiculous (Yogg+0). We've put in an easy 75+ attempts on Yogg+0 and it's remained a challenging fight requiring near-perfect execution.

Alone in the Darkness, (a.k.a. Yogg+0) shifts the focus of the fight from Phase 2 to Phase 3 by forcing players to deal with the Empowering Shadows mechanic that sporadically heals up the Immortal Guardians defending Yogg-Saron. These Guardians do damage based on their total health - the more health they have, the harder they hit.

One of the challenges about being a 10-man guild is that you can't rely on things that a 25-man guild takes for granted. Vortex, for example, has no rogues and the AoE wound poison that would be quite helpful in this fight. A second hunter would also help us trivialize the fight, but we make do with what we can.

We've also tried nearly every strategy imaginable while working on this kill. For our kill we went with a two tank, two and a half (let's hear it for Beacon of Light!) healer strategy. Our tanks alternated taking Immortal Guardian spawns while our DPS chewed into Yogg-Saron. It was close at the end, but we're relieved to finally have it over and done with.

We now return you to your regularly schedule Icecrown Citadel news.

Guild Strats:

• Alone in the Darkness - Dreambound