Monday, June 8, 2009

PuG Tales: 10 Man Ulduar Adventure

After finishing up my Argent Tournament quests, I was set to go fishing. Try to fish me up the new Turtle Mount maybe, but go fishing for a while maybe for fun as usual. So random PuG in trade was looking for tank and dps. I hesitated for a moment and though to myself. Thou shall not PuG raids. Nonsense! Dunno, but I seem to go about PuGing everything. So off to adventures in Ulduar as the OT. The MT was another Protect Paladin from a guild that few of the raid was apart of including the Raid Leader. Rest of raid was random PuG.

Well Kologarn sure didn't stop the PuG Raid. He went down for the count the first time around. And thanks for giving me the nice Stoneguard sword too. And the Neckpiece as well I picked up. Stoneguard is a really nice blade but has no defense rating and really had to see how much it dropped my defense with it equipped. 

Lucky for me I have enough defense with various gear piece change or shield swap since I have and always carry multiple shields with different enchants and still remain at or above 540 defense. Think i'll throw Accuracy Enchant on my new blade since my hit rating will drop a bit from hit capped on hit rating.


Auriaya is a real bitch to pull correctly with her two adds. But we managed to get it right about the third time after I dropped a consecrate at the bottom of the steps there and fired Avengers Shield at her and run back to the right corner at the top of the stairs for the other tank to pickup. We killed the 2 adds first then focus on the boss. She also spawned a guardian add thats hard to target. So we tried to target/kill the guardian add while she constantly feared the group. All in all its a fun fight especially seeing it the first time as well as hearing the strat as well. Yeah for dead bosses!


Thorim is really cool fight. Much of it being the gauntlet. I didn't quite get it the first time just having it explained. So we ended up just running it and that made more sense. After killing the mob in the arena one group went though the tunnel which I was in another stayed in the arena somewhat. On the tunnel run though we were too slow but the arena group died as well when we were in the tunnel right after the first boss. 

We regrouped and redid the run. We got it the second time and was much faster overall. It helped we had a really good raid leader calling out things as needed on vent which made a huge difference the entire raid. Almost though it was going to be a wipe in the tunnel on way to second mini boss due to the adds. But we made good time and got to Thorim. Lucky bastard went down the first time we engaged him. Fight didn't seem that hard thinking about it. All the Ulduar nerfs maybe at play. But a dead boss in my book is dead boss.

Just taking a landscape shot. I had forgotten to take a screenshot of dead Thorim. Probably because I died on Thorim with less than 100k to go as well. So I paused here to just take another screenshot. Ulduar is really pretty! Big difference it is to being in Naxxramas.


We got to Freya, played with the adds. Wiped on the adds, learning the adds. A few times actually! CC didn't go right as a few people didn't have their CC buttons on their UI. Duh! Some CC really required here so we did that and we made some headway. We killed the 2 mini bosses in the area. Interesting bosses, but you get badges for them as well so great also, no loot though. The trash right before Freya eventually got us due to CC. Getting proper CC didn't seem to go off well sometimes.

Maybe we were all tired. But the Raid Leader eventually called it a day here and the raid was called. I was tired as well running on empty for food. We may try again tomorrow night. At least some time to read up on some strat in the process before we do. I was tired as well so was just good to stop here also. But it was a fun time in Ulduar again for the 2nd time. 

Two times I've been here and both in PuGs. Makes you wonder, who needs a guild to raid Ulduar if you can PuG it. But really half the PuG was at least part of a guild including the Raid Leader, MT and had some good players as well. Wasn't super stellar dps but was still a good and fun group. One thing for sure is repair bills are damn high in Ulduar. I just off the head counted my repair bills and they were easily over 100g easily. Before you head to Ulduar make sure you can afford the repair bills as well.

Edited: Some Grammar.

4 comments:

How Do i Totem? said...

Over the next few days I'm planning on posting up my strats on my blog from the maintank pov (pally)I'll be going over flame lev. through hodir in 10 man (we haven't gotten mim, vex, or yogg yet) and translating some of those to the 25 man versions we've done (first four bosses and kolo/council maybe auriya and more depending on how tomorrow's raid goes).

Gravity said...

Hi Galo, nice to see you blogging again. I'd stopped coming by after your (temporary, I guess) retirement from wow. On Auriaya, we have a shaman put a totem in her path, which agros her. The tankadin then has consecrate waiting for her when she rounds the corner to us.

Paul said...

Well for starters, you were in a semi-pug, not a full pug. :)

All the bosses up to Mimiron are pretty much facerolls now in normal mode. You shouldn't need a guild for them and in fact it's Blizz's intent that people should be able to see as much content as possible.

Mimiron, General Vexaz and Yogg Saron (working on him tonight, haven't managed to get him out of p1) all require a fair amount of skill and coordination to succeed though. And most of the Hard Modes seem to offer greater challenge.

Still, I'm glad you're having fun.

Ardent Defender said...

@ Gravity, nice tip. Will try to remember that.

Yeah so far its fun in Ulduar.....when I can get there that is. Hit and miss week to week as far as raiding Ulduar really.