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Once we got past the server issues of last week, we did pretty good with running two 10-man teams into Ulduar for learning fights, then merging once we had enough bodies to repeat in 25-man.

One thing to emphasize from Blizzard: They didn't intend Naxx25 to be easier than Naxx10, and they've made sure that's not the case in Ulduar.

So us learning the fights in Ulduar 10 with one or two groups as possible will probably serve us better in the long run. It'll get us up to speed on the fights faster without having to manage 25 people (which we're so frequently short of anyway). And we can move up to doing Ulduar25 with less than 25 people for any of the fights which we've succeeded in 10-man.

Last week some of us spent some good time working on Razorscale, tough, but pretty sure we can count that dragon as slain this week. Ignis the Furnace Master and Deconstructor are also the next ones available, and running two groups would double our effort at learning those fights too.

This seems reasonable, but we need to determine raid groups ahead of time, instead of just filling them as we go.

I'm bumping this thread for our "lessons learned" in Ulduar.

Flame Leviathan: Cannot overstate the importance of getting 4 people up to take out turrets, and stacking pyrite dots from Demolishers. However, new things to add: Demolishers have a really long range! Too many are too close to FL. That targeting sphere it provides, you can elevate that up to get more range in a high arc. Works for the #1 catapult shot, the #2 pyrite barrel, and the #6 launch passenger.

Regarding the stacking pyrite dot: as long as you're a demolisher at range with ammo (50/50), you then have 10 stacks to put on FL. Because it ticks for a while, and can then get replenished, but you're minding when to run away, I found it advantageous to launch pyrite, 3 -4 main shots, then another pyrite. When I had that sucker up to a 9-10 stack, it was doing 100-150k hits.

We found a new good strat for picking up people, if the demolishers come in right at the shutdown, and then GTFO. Ideally that only needs to be the bikes doing it, but if we're ever short on bikes it's not a bad way of getting people back to demolishers. The other thing is that, FL has that 50-yard aoe that kills pedestrians. If the Demolishers are out of that range, they can still shoot, and bikes can drop off people without people dying. Really that ought to be the more ideal way to run it, keeping the Demolishers at range and only having the steam tanks in close.

I'm going to turn the thread over to others for further tips on Razorscale.

The more we do it, the better we get at it!

hmmm, sounds like the following encounters will soon be easier:

Ignis the Furnace Master
Razorscale
XT-002 Deconstructor
The Assembly of Iron
Kologarn
Auriaya

GC: "Further adjustments are highly likely to some of the other encounters in Ulduar, but these were the highest priority encounters for us. We want to allow additional players to experience more of the cool Ulduar content."

I can imagine the devs scratching their heads... 'I thought players WANTED things to be harder and more challenging?'

They've been steadily adjusting the fights since the patch came out. I'm sure they're looking at the numbers to make sure that more than 1% of the population is making it into Ulduar. In spite of them adjusting it down, we still need to spend more time working at the encounters so that we figure out what's going on and what to do.

Comment on Flame Leviathan

I was driving a demolisher on Tuesday, and after I shot my passenger, I drove over to some spare ammo and tried to switch seats by clicking on the vacated passenger position. My vehicle was at about 50% health, I was at 100%, and I was not the Flame Leviathan's target. I ended up outside the vehicle, and a moment later the demolisher despawned. I've done it successfully before, so it's either bugged or there's another factor I'm missing.

Adam (Cazi)