Rest in Peace, Yogg Saron

I had a terrific day today.

It started with a pot of coffee and WoW, I ran around getting tournament badges and feeding my baby ravasaur, which will grow up into a ravasaur mount in only 18 more dailies.

Then I went shopping with my friend and got a bunch of housewares type stuff, and had an absolutely sublime lunch at this Burmese place (samusas, tea leaf salad and a kind of chicken curry dish, with brown rice). I even had a glass of sangria without getting an insta-headache, a rare occurrence. It was a beautiful summer day, so beautiful that most of my neighbors were out doing something more interesting than standing in line ahead of me.

I came home, logged back into WoW, as expected, we did not have 25 organized people online at raid time.

So I got my red and yellow epic gems, paying for them with honor from battlegrounds. I was capped, and now I have none left – which means I can do more battlegrounds. Hooray. I hate doing things when no points are involved. The verdict is still out on blue epic gems.

Some of my guildies went to run the new heroic on 10, then when I asked where my invitation was ten minutes later, said they were already inside and the group was full, oops. I hate 10s.

I got mad and alt-F4’d in a fit of pique – then logged back in and checked my bank alt, and came back to my raid character. The real leader took over, and we proceeded to pwn the new 25 raid in one shot. I think it was a server first, I’m not sure.

We weren’t sure about our Yogg capabilities with our particular group. We had some disconnectors, including me – and I rarely disconnect. I have large corporate cable internet and I live in an extremely digital place, on one of those “keep the power up on this corridor at all times” type regions, with my quadcore computer. But I got evicted from Ulduar so emphatically that I had to reset my cable modem and reboot. And I even came back in alive, unlike a few people who came back to discover they’d been mind controlled and we were in the process of killing them.

Tempers were high. The leader was in particularly good form as far as verbal abuse, and I was fortunate enough to not be on the receiving end of it. We wiped at it for an hour. I ran out of flasks and bummed another one.

Here’s what the Yogg fight is like – in phase one, you have ugly yellow smog clouds floating around. If you step into one, a mob spawns. If you kill that mob most of the way dead and then drag it back to the boss, it explodes and partially kills her. But you can’t drag it through the yellow clouds or you get more mobs. The DPS has to keep from killing the mob before it gets near the boss. And stuff is aoeing us.

When we first started doing this fight, someone got mind controlled every few seconds and I spent most of my time furiously spamming dispel, but they took that part away, fortunately. So in the first part I basically kick back and heal whatever’s bleeding.

Then there’s phase two. For this phase, Yogg turns into an evil brain and rants about being the god of death, and tentacles appear. Some are giant and try to kill you, some are small and grab you and flail you around, while green lasers try to fry you and various special effects attempt to drive you insane, which you cure by standing in a green beam off to the side. Periodically, portals open up, and some of the raid goes in and directly attacks Yogg’s brain.

The previous attempt, they had let me go in the portal to heal the people assaulting Yogg’s brain directly. It’s bizarre in there, you have things you’re not supposed to look at or your sanity plummets, and the actual brain room is all in photo negative. Then you portal out (if you’re too slow you get mind controlled) and repeat a couple times.

Phase 3 – don’t ask me, I did it with my back turned. Mobs were being killed, Yogg’s brain was being thrashed, and if you face it, you lose sanity. So I faced the wall and stared at the health bars. This is apparently how Blizzard intended the healers to spend the Gigantic Climactic End Battle of Ulduar – facing a stone wall. Yeah, Blizzard, we healers love you too.

Anyway, after months of beating our head against the wall on this thing, we tweaked the strategy slightly. That was enough to get us past it. We wiped at 3% the first time we tried it, and the second time – Yogg fell down.

He dropped the shoulders that would finish my T8.5 set, but I deferred to the paladin tank. I’d rather stand behind someone more geared than me than try it the other way around.

We took our screenshot, for our personal archives.

This same weekend, the remnants of what used to be the top guild on the server all transferred. The population doesn’t seem capable of supporting that many guilds, so they’re going somewhere else to try and get their full 25. Throughout much drama, my guild is now the top on the server.

We joke about how we’re not World Class. We get a lot of players who don’t think our pace is fast enough and end up transferring. We’ve got an obsessive core with little in common yet who work well together. The guild is at its second anniversary, and I’ve been with it about a year and a half now. Seeing them bulldoze their way past all the content in the game has been extremely rewarding. Probably the best thing I’ve come across in WoW.

After I came out of Yoggland I couldn’t resist sending a tell to that paladin from my first guild. He and I still occasionally boast back and forth at each other, although I think he finally gave up trying to catch me. He was a good sport and congratulated me.

And since I can run around in battlegrounds again, I went in the new one, Isle of Conquest. I got to skydive into the gnomes’ fort from a zeppelin, and float around over some lovely scenery, and my side won, so I think the new battleground is just dandy.

I’m still glowing. Horde first.