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L8raid went back to Mt Hyjal last night. About a month ago, when we were 3/4 in TK and 4/6 in SSC we decided to take advantage of Blizzard's removal of the attunement requirements for the T6 instances -- Mt Hyjal and Black Temple. So, we decided to try Mt Hyjal for kicks. It's supposed to be a little easier and depend mostly on having a prot-spec Pally tank with decent gear and, well, we have one of those (/wave, /flex).

On our first visit, we got Rage Winterchill down. The first boss was rumored to be easy and it seemed to be true. We practiced on the second boss for a few weeks and got the big demon Anatheron down, too. Last week we started working on the third boss, Kaz'rogal and immediately came away with the impression that he's more challenging.

Last Saturday we wiped pretty ineffectively on the waves of "trash" mobs you have to kill during that encounter before you get to the big boss himself. It seemed like either (a) we aren't quite tight enough as a team to get him yet; (b) we weren't playing particularly well that night; or (c) playing the drinking game "everybody does a shot when the dps warrior dies" isn't actually good for progression.

Come to think of it, I guess those aren't really mutually exclusive...

Last night was a fresh instance, so first we had to kill the first two bosses again.

Rage Winterchill's trash seems like such weaksauce compared with the Kaz'rogal trash, it was almost laughable. I guess it was easy from the beginning since I think we got through it on the second try or something. Rage kills a lot of l8raiders, though. We just can't seem to get the hang of reacting fast enough to the Ice Bolt. We do seem to be getting the hang of scrambling from 50% on with half the raid dead. Get Jaina Proudmoore involved from there and we have been able to eke out the wins.

Anatheron's trash is only marginally harder. But we've got the boss totally under control. I've got the hang of grabbing the infernals with or without an MD and everybody else is doing a great job adjusting -- running towards me if you are getting the Infernal, clearing out of the way, Barantir steps up to heal me in-bound while Mandie hangs back to heal while he moves, the ranged dps switches quickly and vaporizes it.

After, we collected some more epic gems and spent some time discussing the trash and boss before we pulled Kaz'rogal. We did some experimenting with CC approaches during the first 2 bosses and between that, having some practice and having a fairly strong group of non-drunk players, we had the trash nicely in hand.

This gave us only our second real attempt on the actual boss. We knew the basic deal -- get the NPCs involved, dps like crazy, chug mana pots & run away to blow up when the AoE mana burn takes you down to oom.

It was super smooth to 20% when we experienced a case of "sudden tank death syndrome" likely due to some combination of war stomp stun and/or too many healers switching to raid healing on the fly at a bad time. So Bloc's dead and Kaz'rogal is running around pwning the raid. Ragonbadger picked him up for a little bit, then died, so we all just backed up and waited for Thrall to get aggro.

We tried to add a little more dps to the NPCs at that point, but upon noticing that almost everybody was dead, went for the desperate scramble option -- use rezzes one at a time to try to make sure at least on player is alive and hope Thrall could finish off the last 5%. We had the shamans chain ankh one after another. I called out on vent for a SS, which reminded Islowlykill (warlock) that nobody had a SS, so he put it on himself.

When the last shaman died at 1%, Islowlykill popped his SS and desperately tried to lifetap his mana up to surviveability. The last 1% of hp went sooo slooowly, but Thrall did the job for us with just Islowlykill standing (and with around 20% hp and mana too, lol).

We hear a lot of groups get their first Kaz'rogal kill this way, even though the opinion was voiced that it would be more satisfying if >1 person was alive at the kill and/or an actual raid member got the killing blow. FWIW, that opinion was generally met with "shut up!" and "if we get epix off the mob, we gotz a kill."

The loot was meh. The flip side of Blizzard's adding all the badge gear to help groups like ours is that we shard a lot of stuff even on first kills. Oh well, it's still a pretty nice feeling to take down a new hard boss.

It didn't actually take that long to beat all 3 bosses, but after a few moments contemplating the horrors of the waves of trash mobs for Az'galor, the next Mt Hyjal boss, we decided to celebrate by leaving the instance and setting our first l8raid feets in the Black Temple instead. We cleared to and got a few good wipes in on the first boss there, High Warlord Naj'entus. A pretty nice night of raiding all around.

Yes, this post should have some screenshots. Sadly, I'm currently not at the comp with the SSs on it. Editing later, ftw?

P.S. At the end of the raid, I remembered that at the very beginning I had been feeling impatient waiting for the first pull in Mt Hyjal. I said something like, "lets get this going, I had a crappy day at work and I want to raid." Crappy day at work was long in the rearview mirror even before Kaz'galor was toast.

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