LK25 Down!

Well, that is a messy screenshot but we were all quite excited after the kill and standing still for a picture is hard when you are in that mood. I'm missing half the raid in that picture. I hope somebody got a better one made.

Last week we got to phase 3 for the first time. I guess the 10% buff finally pushed us into the last phase, which turned out to be the least challenging. With only the practise from the 10-man fight, we killed the Lich King only the second time we really got into the last phase.

I had the job of tanking the Lich King himself during the fight. That job mostly consists of positioning and surviving Soul Reaper. We had our warrior tank spec Safeguard to give an external damage reduction cooldown for me for every Soul Reaper.

As soon as we got the defile / val'kyr combination under control, the fight went a lot smoother.

After the kill we went to Vault of Archavon where we did the Earth, Wind & Fire achievement just for fun.

It was a great raid night.

Achievements

I recently reached 5500 achievement points on my paladin. I know this isn't very much (I'm not even top-10 in my guild), but it's a lot more than I have on my alts, who sit on around 1500 achievement points.

When the achievement system was introduced I thought it was nonsense, and vowed not to give a rat's ass about it. But I think we all get hooked sooner or later. For me, it was when Naxx started to get dull, and the only challenge left was to do the achievements in there.

Achievements have changed the way we play the game.

First of all it's the obvious e-peen of having loads of achievement points.

Second, achievements are now being used as a "proof" that you are capable of something. How often do we not see the "LFM VoA-25, link achievement"? Achievements are of course not a good measure at all of anyone's capability, but it will at least give a hint that the player knows what it is all about.

Third, achievements force players to stay at the current content longer. First you have to down the boss. Then you have to down him with less raid members. Then you have to down him while constantly jumping or running in circles. Then you have to down him while closing your eyes, standing on one leg, and reciting the Holy Bible.... backwards. It's an ingenious way of Blizzard to make content last longer, even for hardcore players. And by looking at the number of achievements added every patch, they are well aware of it.

Fourth, it gives the hardcore players a shot at fame and glory by giving them titles and mounts to strout around in Dalaran with. Everybody will get the epics in the end, but only the hardcore will have the titles and mounts.

And last, but not least, it makes the players' ties to their character stronger than ever. Do you think that holy paladin with 10k achievement points are willing to reroll anytime soon? For every patch, the amount of achievement points are getting higher and the hill to climb to "catch up" with a reroll is getting steeper. As I mentioned at the start of this post: My alts are about 4000 achievement points behind my main. Dropping my main for any of those will seriously hurt my achievement e-peen.

So, are achievements good or bad?

Well, the good thing is that they have introduced an entire new dimension in playing. Now the goal is not just shiny epics, but also shiny achievements, titles, and mounts. More incentives make more people play more (TM).

People are a lot less likely to reroll, since they just cannot stand to face redoing all those achievements again on a new character. This would mean fewer "Flavor of the Month" characters, but also stronger feelings for one's main character.

But there are of course bad sides as well. How fun is it really to kill the same boss in eight different ways? Or wipe an entire night on a farmable boss because you have to do it another way to get an achievement? Or having a single mistake by a single player ruin the entire achievement for everyone for another week (e.g. The Immortal). Or having to pick another 249 pink eggs to get a chance to get a drop which you will need to get another achievement?

Personally, I think achievements are good. They add a flavor to the game, and make some boring aspects of it more meaningful.

Heroic Heartbreaker

After (finally) killing Yogg-Saron, we could start concentrating on the hard modes in Ulduar.
First on the list was Heartbreaker. I've already made a post on this for when we did it on 10 man, and XT has the same extra abilities on 25-man. He just hits harder and has more health.

I was tanking XT against one of the walls, so that adds wouldn't spawn from the junk piles on that wall. The other tank took care of Pummelers until hard mode was engaged, and after that he was picking up Life Sparks. Since I was tanking the boss against a wall, all I could see was a pair of giant robot legs.

We had a few wipes due to lack of moving when people got the bombs, or people getting killed by XT's tantrum. The healers really have their work cut out for them, and to ease their job, we made one of the shadow priests respec holy.

Eventually, XT was downed and our first hard mode loot was given to our hunter GM. That darn robot didn't drop the sweet tanking mace this time, and since Flame Leviathan refuses to drop Titanguard, I'm still stuck with Last Laugh.

On our Hodir kill for the night, I solo-tanked him without any frost resistance gear for the first time. I didn't really notice any difference in damage intake, but I loved to see my threat look better than with all that resistance gear.

Heartbreaker

Some of us put together an ad hoc 10-man group yesterday to try some hardmodes. Before one of our healers disconnected on Iron Council, we did the XT-002 hard mode kill.

The idea is to kill the heart on the first heart phase, which then starts the hard mode. Gravity Bombs will now leave nasty void zones on the ground, and Light Bombs will leave Life Sparks that deal nasty damage and needs to be nuked fast.

After some tries we realized that there were no more adds coming after hard mode had been engaged, which meant we didn't really need two tanks. I switched to retri, but kept my shield on at the beginning, so that I could tank adds at the start.

As soon as hard mode was started, we quickly nuked the remaining adds and I equipped my two-hander to help out with the dps. With an extra dps and the extra damage reduction provided by my Divine Sacrifice (which can't really be used while tanking adds), the girlish robot went down and we got our achievement.