The raid group I participate in ventured into 25-man Ulduar for the first time last night. Although this was my first official time in Ulduar (ok, I may have snuck in with a PUG a month ago that wiped repeatedly on Kologarn, but I’m not counting that), we had several raiders that had at least seen the 10-man version, and a handful that had experienced some parts of the 25-man.

Flame Leviathan

We took care of Flame Leviathan in one shot. I had heard that the fight was easy, but… it really was easy. I drove a Siege Engine and zig-zagged across the room with the other tanks while the gunners took care of the choppers. I had played a lot of Strand of the Ancients and Wintergrasp, so the vehicle mechanics of the fight were familiar to me.

Razorscale

Next up was Razorscale. Everyone understood quickly that we were not going to step in and one-shot every boss (although some were already looking ahead and boasting that we would be able to one-shot XT… more on that later). On the fourth attempt, though, everything came together.

The only dicey part came when one of the Death Knights popped Army of the Dead. Razorscale then started to violently spin around, wrecking havoc on our hit point totals. I personally wish Blizzard would disable Army of the Dead when Death Knights zone into raid instances.

A Fragment of Val’anyr Dropped. Now what?

After Razorscale fell, it was time to address the loot. A Fragment of Val’anyr dropped and the raid leaders didn’t know what to do with it. They ended up deciding to let the mace-wielding healers do a random roll. The raid leaders explained that whoever wins the roll will be allowed to pick up all future fragments that drop in the raid, assuming this individual shows up.

Prior to this decision, there was a debate on how this should be handled. Should the player with the highest level of attendance get it? Maybe our “best” healer? Or maybe someone that has some kind of Internet fame? I didn’t expect our raid leaders to have this completely figured out prior to the raid, but turning it over to a random roll seemed very strange to me. This was especially odd after they had decided to use a loot council for the Heroic Key to the Focusing Iris during our 25-man Naxxramas days.

XT-002

Next up was XT-002. The first attempt went okay, but since it was our first look at him (or is it her? Oh wait, it’s a robot), a few of us died early on and we weren’t able to recover. We continued to have difficulties on XT, particularly with the gravity bombs. One of our healers assigned to the main tank got the bomb right away on one attempt, costing us the tank, and a quick wipe of the raid.

What was interesting at this point was the constant reassurance that about 40% of the raid was giving to everyone else. I never got the sense that anyone was expecting one-shots of every boss, or that anyone was feeling disgruntled and frustrated with our apparent lack of progress. In fact, it was just the opposite; we were doing quite well, learning something new on each attempt, and getting back quickly with buffs and positioning.

On the eighth attempt, we finally put XT away to rest. Our previous two attempts were terrible, and I think it was because people started to fall asleep. Vent was very quiet at this point, but everyone seemed to perk up when one of our raid leaders explained that this would be the last attempt. Our healing was fantastic, the Pummellers, Scrapbots, and Boombots were dealt with accordingly, and, thankfully, nobody used Army of the Dead.