3.2 was still taking its slow steps upon the server as Vortex gathered outside of the freshly completed Coliseum. Server lag, broken addons, graphics not loading for all players, new specs, and changed class mechanics were quite a hurdle to climb, but we overcame it and successfully took out Icehowl and his friends!

In the process of learning the fight through trial and error, we also earned the achievement Not One, But Two Jormungars! Well done, all.

We've spent the time since our first Yogg kill working tirelessly on the hardmodes. We've collected quite a few, though some still elude us.

Heartbreaker -- June 10
With Open Arms -- June 10
Crazy Cat Lady -- June 10
I Could Say this Cache was Rare -- June 10
I Choose You: Molgeim -- June 15
Unbroken -- June 16
Knock, Knock on Wood -- June 18
Stokin' the Furnace -- July 9 (we kept shortmanning him before)
I Choose You: Steelbreaker -- July 9
I Love the Smell of Saronite -- July 19
3 Lights in the Dark -- July 19
Nuked from Orbit (FL + 3) -- July 21
Lose your Illusion -- July 21
Knock Knock Knock on Wood -- July 26
Two Lights in the Darkness -- August 2
Orbituary -- August 5

Our current focus is now leveled on Mimiron and Yogg hardmodes; we strive to get ourselves the protodrake before it is removed like was done with the previous Naxx drakes. Great work, Vortex, and let's keep this ball rolling!

Late to the front page; apologies on that!

Nearly 8 full weeks of going into Ulduar and perfecting our individual skills and honing our team's coordination have passed. Having met challenges and bested them we found ourselves at the door to the master of all the chaos we had been fighting... Yogg-Saron. An Old God with an agenda.

We, Vortex, are not without our own plans. We step up and fight. Look into the eyes of our rivals and blow them a kiss goodbye.

After some weeks of brave fighting we were able to claim Ulduar, and dismiss it's evil residents. Now we must save all of Azeroth from destruction once more and not let Algalon transmit his message of cleansing to his Titan masters.

Since the time of the kill, we have begun work on many of the hardmodes, earning achievements as we seek to unlock Algalon and, if all goes well, earn the Glory of the Ulduar Raider achievement!

In our last update, we mentioned that General Vezax looked like he'd be a real challenge. We were wrong.

Don't get us wrong, he's certainly not a pushover. Vezax combines a fair amount of basic mechanics (interrupts, movement, cooldown usage, etc.) into a pretty hard-hitting package. We had a couple of pulls on him late in the raid nights on last Sunday and again on the previous Wednesday, but we took him down on our 3rd pull this Sunday (May 10) in a perfectly clean kill, making it look easy.

We've got other goals to work towards, though, so we're not going to cry about bosses that are "too easy". General Vezax's defeat allowed us to take our first look at Yogg-Saron, the Old God of Death imprisoned in Ulduar.

Yogg will definitely be a challenge. We'll have some news on him hopefully soon though!

This week started down a few raiders due to unfortunate work schedules, but we jumped in and successfully 8-manned Flame Leviathan, and then decided we should finally take a look at Ignis and Razorscale as we filled in the 2 remaining slots. Within short order, both were tail-up and handing us purple pixels. Continuing on, we 1-shot Kologarn with no deaths (go go Champion of Ulduar achievement progress!), and even killed Auriaya before calling it a night. 6 bosses in about 3 hours' raid time partially undermanned, excellent work!

On Sunday, we also killed Mimiron after much steady progress in learning the careful dancing around laser barrages, rockets, and land mines. It was a wonderfully fun fight to learn and complete, and his destruction brought us to the doorstep of General Vezax!

Mimiron has the distinction of being the first real challenge that we've faced in Ulduar. For those not familiar with Mimiron, he's a 4 phase fight in which you fight various combat vehicles that Mimiron has divised for "testing" against live subjects. In the final phase, Mimiron repairs the vehicles that you've previously destroyed and combines them into a giant robot entity by the name of "V-07-TR-0N" and you're forced to kill the 3 portions forming the robot within 15 seconds of each other or they repair themselves.

It's hectic, stressful and generally all around great fun. Kudos to Blizzard on a (very) well-designed encounter.

After Mimiron, we had the opportunity to take some shots at General Vezax, the final roadblock on our path to Yogg-Saron.