What a short, exciting trip it has been!

Erm yes. Sorry in advance, but another post admiring my own progress coming up. My excuse this week shall be ... hmm... solar flares. No wait, that's too easy. Let's pretend it helps me keep track of what I did when - yeah, that sounds much better. And martians. Under the earth.

Anyway.. took us a whole three weeks to get a shiny meta-achievement. We started basically by just doing heroic modes. The difficulty difference between the single encounters is quite interesting: heroic Blood Queen and Saurfang for instance are almost identical to the normal versions. Heroic Sindragosa and Putricide were a little more interesting. Yes. Interesting is the word I want to use.

In the next week we did the achievements. Not heroic - and in retrospect I'm incredibly happy we didn't.

Let me quote the strategy guide we used in the end (and I don't know where it was originally ripped from, sadly). My comments are just added here as well, to make it appear more "self-made". I should so get into science - I can fake own work like anything!

Marrowgar and Boned - Easy - just nuke the crap out of the spikes.


Lady Deathwhisper "Full House" - Hard - There is a guide on tankspot, but in the end it boils down to getting lucky with your add transformations. At the end we had 7 adds up when we finally killed her. The achievement was listed as "hard", same as Sindragosa. Ha!

Lootship and "I'm on a Boat" - Easy - "Just rotate the people who jump and be imba on cannons". That basically summed it up. I would have preferred the tactic with one tank, one healer and all melee dps jumping over and staying permanently - then evade the enraged and unhappy boss by hopping up on his bridge and back down again ... but this was easy.

Saurfang "I've gone and made a mess" - Easy - This is one of the "done it right" achievements. You should get this.

Festergut "Flu Shot shortage" - Easy - First spore people run away, second spore people do their normal thing and first innoculated people run away again. Third spores are distributed as normal.
Rotface "Dances with oozes" - Medium - Start as per normal - once you merge 4 oozes into the 1st big thing - move along to a secondary spawn point sufficiently after the 1st tank who is dragging the ooze in a circle. Have a 2nd kiter - possibly a ranged dps pick up the 2nd big ooze and keep kiting it after the tank - not letting the 2 merge. We used three tanks for this.

Putricide "Nausea, Heartburn, Indigestion..." - Easy - Nuke the crap out of the oozes - as you are not allowed to slow them - normal strategy is fine. This works especially well with a mage casting invisibility on the first tear gas and taking out the orange ooze before it becomes active. Ranged DPS helps but is not technically required.

Princes "The Orb Whisperer" - Easy - Keleseth tank must have five dark balls and empowered flame has to be walked under before it is allowed to reach a person to minimize the incoming damage.

Blood Queen "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" - medium - Stupid achivement that can be given to a few people each weak. Other than that easy enough.

Valithria "Portal Jockey" - Easy - Either have a 4th offspec healer with us to take 3rd portal every go - which would make encounter even faster or have a random dps take the 3rd portal every time. We used the fourth healer.

Sindragosa "All you can eat" - Insane - Basically on the last phase - People have to get behind iceblocks before you can reach 5 stacks of the stacking debuff that is applied by Sindragosa on the last phase "Mystic Buffet" it's called. With some practice doable. This was (luckily) nerfed from the original 4 stacks max. And it's still incredibly hard. We finally did it by keeping two iceblocks up and only killing the older one when the tank shouted "clear". Tank communication was the most important. A close second is the placement of the iceblocks - both need to be as near the head as possible, but obviously avoid trapping anyone else. On our last attempts we tanked Sindragosa in the centre of the grey circle and dropped the iceblocks on the edge (lighter grey) - right distance, but OH BOY did this take practise.
 
Lich King - "Been waiting for a long time for this" - medium - The first plague has to be dispelled "away" from the horrors/ghouls (and the raid, obviously) to make sure you loose it. The second plague goes onto the monsters as normal - and by then enough ghouls and horrors have spawned to stack it to 30. A little bit of DPS control is required to not push the Lich King into the next phase prematurely. He looses his "increased damage" buff in phase 2, so once you got 30 stacks of plague and pushed him into phase 1.5 the rest of the fight works as normal.
 
And what was that all about. Well, the flappy thing, obviously. And because I still remember Tamarind complaining about mounting his dwarf, here are some pictures of the thing as well.
 

Just the "showing off" screenshot here. I have to say, I enjoy the skeletal look. Better than those ridiculous griffins the deathknights get, anyway.

 

And the seating position is quite nice actually. Doesn't look as weird as on the bear or the tiger. Something is wrong with the poor guys snout, though.

Oh yes.. and it's a nice mount. Because I got it from Darion Mograine, not that silly bugger Fordring.