Last Thursday (10th of May) we had our first kill in Heroic Dragon Soul. The group managed to kill Morchok, the first boss of DS, after few wipes. The fight is fairly simple, and as we now have it under control, we can expect more HC-progress soon!

Congratulations to the group!

Knodix

Yeeees!
Finally Deathwing had to surrender under the mighty KOE. As usually when we raid the good KOE spirit was there and good team work made the kill possible. I want to thank you all who where there and i am, like the rest looking forward to have a peek at the HC version in DS.
Jaufenblue
 
 

We did it!!!!

Yesterday we got our first Cho'gall kill, completing the Bastion of Twillight raid instance. After putting in a lot of work and some close calls (including a 0.5% wipe) on Cho'gall on tuesday, we came back last night to finish the job. And it went perfectly. First try, most people on 0 corruption when phase 2 started, phase 2 went like a charm and Cho'gall bowed to our assault. Adds-handling, tanking, healing, positioning, dps and interrupts; all went smoothly, and shows you do get something back from a (perhaps frustrating) night of wiping. So we're now ready to try heroic encounters in Bastion of Twillight.

Furthermore, we had a fantastic night in general. We cruised through the Blackwing Descent, 1-shotting all the bosses (except for a mis-pull on Chimaeraon) comfortably until Nefarian, and then doing Conclave of Winds before calling it 30 minutes before normal raid-end. 

This leaves just Nefarian and Al'akir, with Al'akir arguably the easier - will be fun to try them now. Congratulations to the dedicated team and to KoE in general; proud to be among you. 

So patch 4.1 has arrived, and we've been given a chance to revisit Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub (previous 10- and 20-man raids respectively) as 5-man heroic instances. They're a step up in difficulty compared to the "normal" heroics (Zul'Gurub especially is tough), but they are very doable with a good group and tactics (check tactics here). There's not much trash to be cleared in either of them, and the bosses drop ilvl 353 epics so there's plenty of upgrade-possibilities in there. And the bosses are quite fun, keeping to the spirit of the old raids, but tuned for 5-player groups. Note ilvl 346 requirement for these for LFG tool (so quite a step up from 329 for normal heroics).

Zul'Aman also has the timed run that we had back in the 10-man for the bear mount. We tried it yesterday in quite a good group, but didn't quite make it; just ran out of time on the 3rd boss (the flame-guy with the eggs). So that's still challenging but should be doable.. the first 4 bosses themselves aren't particularly hard but you need to quickly move through some (sometimes very) hard-hitting trash without triggering reinforcements from scouts. 

Other new features include Guild Challenges and some people will have seen these "popups" appear when in a guild group or raid when these challenges are completed. Also there's a number of fixes and changes to classes and encounters. Patch-notes gives all the details. And as always with a new patch there's the addon-update "quest" to be completed (and unfortunately some have not yet been updated).

On the raid-progression side we've added 2 new kills since last update; Chimaeron in Blackwing Descent (killed twice now) and Twillight Ascendant Council in the Bastion of Twilight which we finally got down yesterday. Both encounters are very, very healing intensive; Chimaeron with some counter-intuitive jobs for the healers and Council with an intense burn phase. And the Council especially is very unforgiving with regards to mistakes or bad luck, but now that the difficult 1st kill is completed it should be repeatable. Yesterdays first kill of Council was at the end of a very, very good raid-night where we killed 7 bosses, one-shotted what we should and also managed to do the "Double Dragon" encounter with just 3 healers for the very first time. So we're now 3/4 Bastion of Twillight, 4/6 Blackwing Descent and 1/2 Throne of the Four Winds. Very nice indeed. Next up for us will be Cho'gall (to complete Bastion of Twillight) and Atramedes. Excellent work by all involved and congratulations to KoE!!

Edit: Update 02.05.11: Yet another first for KoE!!!! Atramedes bowed to our assault and went down fairly easy on our 3rd (or so) attempt. Once we got the mechanisms and gongs under control the fight is very straightforward and should definitely be repeatable. So as per today we only have the last bosses of the 3 available raid-instances left: Cho'gall, Nefarian and Al'akir. We spent some time on Cho'gall yesterday and got him to about 40%... It seems like quite a tough fight but I am sure we can make it once we sort all the tactics well (grouping up incoming adds for quicker killing by our ranged, maximizing dps-time on the boss and removing mind-control quickly) it should be doable. So once again, congratulations to KoE and everyone involved.. excellent progression. 

Have fun and see you ingame.  :)
/Regards Vas.

Hi all,

A little update on KoE raiding progression - some "news from the front".

As you know, a couple of months ago we drew up some raiding requirements (see below on this page, or check here), and we said we'd be ready when we did go - when we had characters with the required ilevel, experience and enchants/gems. And we have now come to that and we can cash in on this effort and these requirements.

We only just recently started, but we already have 4 boss-kills (and of course 4 KoE-"firsts"). In the Blackwing Descent raid instance we've killed the first 3 bosses; Magmaw, Omnitron Defense System and Maloriak. All these should be repeatable (we've already killed Magmaw twice). Of the 3 the hardest is definitely the Omnitron Defense System (the fight consists of tanking and dps-ing 4 golem sentries each with unique abilities which require specific handling, which come on-line and go off-line in turn). 

The next boss for us in Blackwing Descent is Atramedes, the blind dragon, and we gave him a couple of shots yesterday, but he seems to be a step up in difficulty though that fight also boils down to handling his unique abilties and good movement and coordination. 

So yesterday, after having killed Maloriak for the 1st time and a couple of wipes on Atramedes, we decided to switch to the Bastion of Twillight raid instance with one hour left on the raid-clock. The trash went down easily enough and we came to Halfus Wyrmbreaker. We had a quite nice dragon-combo on him (Time-Warden, Nether-Scion and Whelps), but still we 1-shotted him and cleared the trash up to the 2nd boss, Valiona & Theralion. How repeatable Halfus is will be a bit dependant on which dragon-combinations we get (some are much nastier than others), but I feel comfortable we can do it again. And Valiona & Theralion is a fairly straightforward fight and we can hopefully add another KoE-first on tuesday.

So in a very short time-span (since we actually started raiding) we've killed 4 bosses and have more within reach. Credit and congratulations go to all who has participated, but I'd also like to say that I think this tells that the requirements-system does work. It allows us to solely focus on getting the boss-strategies under control, confident in our tanking-, dpsing- and healing abilities from numerous heroics and with a minimal and reasonable gear-requirement. So please, to those who have not yet raided, do get the requirements met and sign up and we can maybe get 2 groups running and have more flexibility in raid-compositions. 

And finally, congrats to everyone in KoE for this excellent progression.

Update: We did it again.

Yesterday we added yet another KoE-first, Valiona & Theralion - the "Double Dragon" encounter, 2nd boss in the Bastion of Twillight raid-instance. It was a night of wiping and learning, and a couple of close calls (<10% wipes) before they finally went down about 20 minutes before raid-time was up. The fight is fairly straightforward, but it does require good execution and coordination, and it is a very healing-intensive encounter; we went with 1 tank, 4 healers and 5 dps (recommended configuration) and still healers were rather strained. However, as we get the fight under control the raid-damage should get lower (tank-damage is trivial) and the fight is quite predictable. So this means KoE now have 5 bosses down (4 new in the last raid-week), an excellent raid-progression. Congratulations again. The only "easy" boss we have left is the first boss in the Throne of the Winds raid-instance, so there is little point in extending locks; it's better to redo the ones we now have (more or less) under control, and gear up more before pushing on.. there are many exciting and interesting fights to look forward to. Finally, let's not get discouraged if the current rate of progression doesn't continue (it won't); 4 new in a week is very, very good. It has taken us some time to get started with raiding (some would say too long), but we are now prepared and are progressing nicely so let's keep it up.

Update 2: Another first for KoE.. The Conclave of Wind in the Throne of the Four Winds raid instance. We've had it in reach for a few nights now, and when we did kill it it was without the normal cheering and shouting on TS because we didn't quite realize we had done it (quite an odd moment :) ). The fight sounds very complex on paper but is actually very straightforward, and after this 1st kill it should be repeatable. So we're now 6/12 Cataclysm raid bosses. We've been very close on Ascendant Council in Bastion of Twilight as well, but phase 3 is a dps check and requires an insane amount of healing, plus absolutely everyone needs to make it to phase 3 and one tiny slip-up by anyone can wipe the raid. Other good news is that we 1-shotted Halfus with a much harder dragon-combination (slate, nether + whelps) and the Double Dragon encounter, so they should be on farm status as well now. Congratulations again.

/Cheers, Vas :)