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 have been able to show you this screenshot earlier!

The finale verdict? Heroic Hagara is a well-tuned, yet frustratingly inconsistent and buggy encounter that we're happy to have behind us. Bring on the (supposed) DPS check in Heroic Ultraxion!

Best. Picture. Ever.

Following the oddity that was our first heroic Morchok kill, we were refreshed and decided to focus on Yor'sahj for our next heroic target. For this fight, Blizzard followed their traditional strategy of piling on more of the same - everything hit harder and instead of dealing with 3 potential abilities each ooze wave, we suddenly had to deal with 4 and the complicated interactions that flowed from that change. Suddenly, what was a pretty easy fight turned into a monster of an encounter as every role was stretched to the limit and we did our best to survive through incredible raid AoE damage and multiple waves of adds. We did all this while facing a boss with nearly 90 million health and a 10 minute enrage timer.


It took two nights of work, but we eventually pulled it off. Our healers are always awesome, but they deserve special credit for this fight for keeping us alive in the face of all that incoming damage. This fight also turned out to be an example of expert tuning by Blizzard - extremely challenging, but doable. We're thankful to see that given the ease of the regular modes of Dragon Soul and we're looking forward to future heroics!.

Due to our focus on Heroic Ragnaros and then the rush of activity in Dragonsoul, we've been remiss in posting about our progression, but we've been plowing along as usual. As our apology, we'll give you an extra long update this time.

First, let's get this out of the way. We cleared the Dragon Soul:


We were quite happy to see new content in the form of the Dragonsoul, which was introduced in Patch 4.3. Firelands, while mostly enjoyable, was certainly getting long in the tooth and we were looking forward to some new challenges. We didn't do much in terms of preparation, but charged in headlong. Sadly, we can best describe our thoughts about the difficulty about vast majority of the regular mode bosses in the form of a comic (drawn after our first night of work):


The Dragonsoul normal modes were, at best, undertuned. We plowed through 6 bosses during our first night and easily cleared out the entire instance in the first week of content. We understand that we're pretty good as raiding guilds go, but with only a few exceptions (Warmaster Blackhorn, Spine of Deathwing and Madness of Deathwing), there was little challenge and multiple one shots of bosses we had never seen before outside of PTR descriptions. On the plus side, we were able to rotate everyone in and out relatively freely and generally had a good time. Hopefully the heroic modes will be that elusive mix of of challenge and conquest that we've been searching for since the Tier 11 content.

Last, but certainly not least, we'd like to show this off:


We had run out of content after our first Madness of Deathwing kill last Sunday, but still had half of our raid night left, so we decided to go back in and work on Heroic Ragnaros. We had heard rumors of stealth nerfs to the fight with the introduction of the 4.3 patch, but wanted to see it for ourselves.

When we got there, it was clear that while the fight had been nerfed (removal of the taxing "Geyser" mechanic in P4 which, ironically, we had gotten quite good at handling), but it was also apparent that some of the balancing changes that came with 4.3 actually made other portions of the fight harder (our Elemental Shaman, Fury Warrior and Warlock all reported significant DPS hits). So, all in all, it was a mixed bag.

As always, though, we adjusted and overcame. A combination of brilliant execution coupled with some beautifully placed Dreadflame patches (some of the RNG inherent in the fight working for us for once!) and we had earned ourselves "Firelord" titles.  It was certainly a busy, but successful night.

Nit-pickers will, of course, note that we killed this after the release of the Dragonsoul Patch and that's true. We worked extremely hard, but the closest we got was a painful 3% wipe prior to the 4.3 patch. While we certainly wanted to get the kill before Dragon Soul was released, that 3% wipe appeared to many of us as the actual kill - proof that we could handle the mechanics and just needed the many RNG aspects of the fight to line up in our favor a bit more cleanly to erase that last 3%

I'm proud to say that Vortex has withstood another extremely demanding fight requiring hundreds of pulls to finish off and come out the other side with a kill and entirely whole, losing nobody in the process. That's a testament to the tenacity of our raiders and a great deal of credit goes to the team for continuing to show up every night, especially those individuals who sat out multiple nights in a row as we stayed with the combination that we felt was our best shot to get the kill in the quickest amount of time possible. We worked as a team and as usual, never gave up.

I gotta say, I prefer the Beth'tilas killshot