After putting in some serious effort to knock HM Deathbringer off his balcony, we succeeded tonight. After we mopped up we figured it was time to celebrate the PC way so we sent Hm Rotface to sleep with the oozes. Excellent work tonight, The Furball returns with a vengeance!

Normally I say a bunch of inspiring things, talk about the kill and spell something wrong. BUT NOT THIS TIME! All I’ve got to say is that I truly, truly hate ice spheres. Oh also, grats on the kill y’all.

No, this has nothing to do with entering the world of the Oozes and learning their ways until we were accepted as one of them, nor does it star Kevin Costner. It’s just the story of an Abominabortion and his ooze, and how we ran from it. Rotface’s meta is out of the way and next up is Festergut tomorrow. I’ve enjoyed this wing so far, it fills me with plaguey goodness and leaves me sticky and diseased. Good job so far Blizzard, and of course good job ‘Chillers who were in on the kill!

I apologize that I’ve been absent, but I return with good news. Last night my 10man successfully achieved “Observed” along with “Herald of the Titans” being the 18th guild to do it without 25man hard mode weapons on Earth. I will have a video in a few days. I have a screenshot for now, and a lot of disbelief that he actually died. I’m not sure any raid victory has been as sweet as beating the 1hr timer boss who feeds on our tears. I fully expect blizz to change the timer shortly before 3.2 goes live. I’m glad we beat him when he was still a dick.

As we preview more and more bosses it seems obvious that most of these encounters are either extremely under-tuned or that Ulduar’s base progression line will not be a big leap from Naxxramas. My group of 8 people who made it on and into the instance (after about two hours of DCs) managed to almost get a Hodir kill the first night, before the HP nerf.

I am not swayed one way or the other on how good of an idea this is. The “raider” in me is more used to the hard earned progression in which you claw your way up through some serious challenges in the interest of getting to fight major plot characters and enjoy some of the most interesting and challenging boss fights Blizzard can come up with. The “non-douchebag” in me understands that there’s a whole lot of people out there who would really like to see these fights, and understands that with two progression tracks more people can be happy.

I think the real qualm I have is that the lines are not clear enough. The idea of using Hard Modes to unlock a boss is a great way to reward raiders who really like making the fights hard, but it seems like the differential vs time commitment is off balance. Perhaps what I’m looking for is a hardmode version similar to heroic and nonheroic for regular instances, instead of those two just meaning the number of people in terms of raiding. These are probably the ramblings of someone who is casting the shadow of his fears over the light of the truth, I’ve always had enormous faith in Blizzard’s ability to make me enjoy the game, but the last few months of Naxxramas have really bored me to death.

With that said, I’m looking forward to a boss who feeds on my tears and destroys my raid. I actually enjoyed the difficulty of sunwell (though I didn’t get as far in as I wanted to before 3.0 hit and we speed cleared it in a week). I just hope I still feel accomplished while I’m standing over the corpses of my enemies, because PvP is starting to look a lot more rewarding than raiding.

I’d love to see some comments on what you guys think of the potential difficultly of Ulduar and how likely you think your guild will be to partake in hard modes.