Added to the kill list this week so far has been Emalon, Freya, Hodir, Iron Council, and Thorim. Congratulations to Rambridge, Renascent, Kitarha, and Alyae on our first T8 gear!

Hodir in particular went exceedingly smoothly once we figured out that we needed to turn on the Projected Textures in the video settings to be able to see the runes on the floor. We ended up gaining two extra raid-wide achievements on the kill: I have the Coolest Friends, and Cheese the Freeze.

Assembly took a bit more effort, but we held in there and got them down, popping a few more achievements and clearing out the Antechamber.

Well done, all!

As with many others, we had been closely following the development of the 3.1 patch in the hopes that it would give us the chance to step away from the rest of the pack and show what we're capable of. We didn't, however, memorize the fights from the PTR. As a general rule, we'll read over the basics of the fight, but enjoy figuring out the specifics and our own unique way of tackling each fight.

First up was the Flame Leviathan. Blizzard had touted this fight as the first real usage of the vehicle system in a raiding capacity and we'd agree that was the case. It took us a bit to understand the capabilities of each vehicle and how they all worked together, but we picked it up quickly during the trash and our first couple pulls on the Flame Leviathan. We polished our strategy quickly and got our kill on our third pull.

Unfortunately, the usual Patch-Instability boss tied up the vast majority of the first 2 out of our 3 raiding days, locking players in limbo and freezing up instances across the server. It wasn't until Sunday that we were able to continue with our exploration of Ulduar, and really get a taste of the new content it has to offer.

3 bosses in one night, each through its own trial periods of testing, adjustment, and polishing of strategies. The trash was as exciting as the bosses themselves! Great job, team!

One of the few remaining achievements on our "hit list" has been to earn the title of "the Undying", which signifies a complete clear of Naxxramas (within one week) without any deaths during a boss encounter. We've been working on this for a few weeks, but have been hamstrung with a series of freak accidents, usually involving Heigan the Unclean and his notorious "safety dance".

We've kept plugging away at it, though. This week saw an exceptionally clean bit of raiding by a mixture of our raiders and more casual players that really set the stage for us, leaving only Sapphiron and Kel'thuzad left to clear on Wednesday evening. These aren't particularly difficult fights for us, but I'd be lying if I said we didn't feel a bit of anxiety at being that close to achieving our goal.

We can bring it when we need to, though, and both fights were executed in textbook fashion. We did have a one of those heart-stopping moments when our add tank on Kel'thuzad got frost blocked with the two adds banging away on him, but our healers did a great job with some snap heals to keep him alive and secure the title for us. This leaves just a couple more steps on our path to the "Glory of the Raider" achievement!

Great job to all involved! We'll be continuing to push this type of work to get the title for all of our raiders.

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The Sunday previous saw a different kind of guild achievement: Heroic Archavon was downed by 13 of our members. While many are surprised to find that Vortex successfully and easily runs Sarth25 with as few as 9 players, Arachavon25 has a hard enrage timer that keeps most under-manned groups from beating him. In a fit of insanity and a few respecs, we took 2 tanks, 2 healers, and 9 dps, and managed to defeat him in one try within a few seconds of the enrage timer.

It's taken a lot of work and sweat, but we have now downed Sarth + 2 Drakes (Whelps + Twilight Torment). Excellent job, all! This is a major achievement for a purely 10-man guild, as the difficulty is tuned for characters in full Item-Level 213 (heroic 25 man) gear! The only strange thing was that the achievement was marked in the log as 3/09/09; it must not be based on server time.

Alyae recorded the fight, and a movie is available for downloaded viewing here.

This does mean, of course, that we will now begin work on 3-drake Sarth. Fun times!

Back for our second raid night after the holidays, we decided to actually put some legitimate time on Malygos, supposedly the pinnacle of the WotLK entry-level raids. We had spent a bit of time on him one day during the holidays and took him to Phase 2 with 8 people, so we knew the basics and it was only a matter of practice before he hit the floor.

We did have to step out to go practice the Aces High! daily quest to make sure everyone knew how to handle their drakes in Phase 3, but by then we were breezing through the first 2 phases with little difficulty. It wasn't many attempts after that we got our rhythm down and knocked Malygos out of the sky!

That kill earned the majority of our raiders their "Champions of the Frozen Wastes" achivement, so to celebrate we took 12 people to kill the 25-man version of Sartharion. That resulted in an easy one-shot in which we shaved a minute off our old kill time while taking one less person to kill him.

Our next goal: multi-drake Sartharion!