Northrend Beasts (and a bugged XT)

The first fight in the new raid instance is a three phase fight, where you encounter three different beasts.

First off is Gormok the Impaler. He's your ordinary neighbourhood magnataur. And he impales people. But overall, he's not a scary guy. There are basically three things to look out for:

• Staggering Stomp does some AoE damage, so make sure to have ranged people at max range.
• Impale puts a nasty bleed debuff on the tank. It stacks, so at 3 or so stacks, you should switch tanks until the debuff falls off.
• Snobold Vassal is some annoying mob that sit on people's shoulders and stops them from doing anything useful. They need to be killed immediately.

As soon as Gormok goes down, the next phase starts and two big worms enter the arena: Acidmaw and Dreadscale. Acidmaw is greenish and has poison attacks, and Dreadscale is redish and has fire attacks. One of the worms are stationary while the other roams around. Every now and then, they switch places, so that the roaming one is stationary while the other starts moving.
There are two things to look out for:

• They both do a frontal cone attack (fire or poison) so the tank needs to tank them facing away from the raid.
• Acidmaw applies a Paralytic Toxin which makes the target immobile after some time. Only way to get rid of this is to get close to someone who has the fire debuff from the other worm.
  

I was tanking Acidmaw. When he was stationary, it's just full nukage since we wanted to kill him off first (due to the Paralytic Toxin, which we wouldn't be able to get rid of if we killed the other worm first). When he was moving, I kited him around the room, since he leaves behind a Grobbulus-like poison cloud.

Whenever I got the Paralytic Toxin, the two tanks moved closer to eachother, so that the toxin would be neutralized by the fire debuff from the other tank. If I had my bubble off cooldown, I just used that to get rid of the toxin. I love being a paladin :)

And remember that the worms do an aggro reset when they switch. We had some dpsers who learned that the hard way...

When the two worms bite the dust, the third and final phase starts as Icehowl enters the arena. He is a big, hairy, and angry wendigo. There are a couple of things to look out for:

• Ferocious Butt is a hard hit which also stuns for 3 seconds.
• Arctic Breath is a frontal cone attack that freezes the targets and deals damage over time.
• Whirl is an AoE attack with a knockback effect.
• Massive Crash is where the fun starts. He jumps into the air, lands in the middle of the room and, knocks everybody back and stuns them. Then he glares at a raid member and then charges him. The target needs to move out FAST. If Icehowl misses his target he crashes into the wall and is stunned for some time. However, if Icehowl hits his target, that person dies and Icehowl gains the effect next on the list:
  
• Frothing Rage is a damage and attack speed increase of 50%.

We had some trouble with people not moving out of his way when he charged them, which lead to an even angrier wendigo which then slaughtered the poor tank.

Other than that, this fight is not hard. I tanked him with my back against a wall so that his frontal cone attack and knockbacks had little effect. Since there is an early warning on who he will charge, there should be no problem in moving out. Blizzard has even given the target a temporary movement speed buff which makes it even easier.

Northrend Beasts is an easy encounter, at least on 25 man normal mode.

The loot gods where good to me, and I got myself the Chestplate of the Towering Monstrosity and a Tier 9 token (Trophy of the Crusade). Now I just have to figure out how to use it...

When we were finished at the Coliseum, we went to Ulduar, where we got a nasty surprise.

XT is bugged to oblivion. There are MILLIONS of adds coming, and light bombs and gravity bombs being applied even during the Tantrums. A fight that usually takes about three minutes took us close to nine minutes. Since there were so many adds, the dps on XT himself was low, and I noticed on Omen that I had a 60% threat lead on the closest dps. This fight needs to be hotfixed ASAP.

We cleared all the way to Freya before calling it a night.