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Given that Heroic Ultraxion was a bit of a disappointment, we were looking forward to the next set of bosses in Heroic Dragon Soul. By all accounts, Heroic Blackhorn, Spine and Madness are far and away the toughest fights in the instance (as they should be) and so we were ready for the solid challenge we got in Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn.


In the normal version of the encounter, the ship health really isn't an issue. As long as everyone stands in Twilight Onslaughts, you're not going to have any real problems with the health of the ship. In the Heroic, however, these things *hurt* and it's very easy to see the ship destroyed and you sent spinning to your death. There's also a new mechanic that spawns deck fires relative to the amount of damage that the ship has taken. These fires compound the problem because the more damage you take, the more fire there is and the harder it is to ...

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Following our defeat of Heroic Hagara, we set out for the next target in heroic progression: Ultraxion.

We had heard that it was a massive DPS check, but in our experience, it was more of an execution fight. It was fun to see a fight where you effectively had to "look into the future" in the case of intersecting Fading Light and Hour of Twilight timers. We were well on our way to killing it before the introduction of the slowly increasing Dragon Soul nerf, but with that nerf affecting both boss health and damage, this fight really wasn't much of a challenge. Without further ado, here's our screenshot!

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I mentioned this in a previous post (ok, lots of previous posts), but here at Vortex, we like doing things our own way. For example, our next kill:


Looking over some other progression reports, it's obvious that most other guilds take a progression path that we have (prioritizing Heroic Ultraxion over Heroic Hagara, for example). We do things a little differently here (which is no surprise to those who've been following us for a while).

Heroic Hagara represents the natural progression of the regular mode of the fight. As usual, everything hits harder and is more complex to navigate (that complexity also led to this fight being one of the more buggy (and exploited!) encounters in the tier), but there aren't any major new mechanics to adapt to (aside from the aforementioned bugs!), but chaining together clean execution of those phases repeatedly is a nasty business or we'd h...