Ulduar Raiding

Another long spell of not posting. And again I'll say that it's just how I am :(. I get topics I want to write about sometimes, but it's never on a consistent basis. This time around it's raiding.

Our guild does a weekly Ulduar 10man raid. It has been going on for about 16 weeks. In that time we have managed to kill 5 bosses: Flame Leviathan, XT, Razorscale, Kologarn, and Auriaya (but only once). It's my personal opinion that we aren't doing well in here. This is how our progression went.

Flame Leviathan is a joke. I'm fairly sure we killed him the first time we stepped into Ulduar (after a wipe or two as we got the vehicle controls down).

Our next target was XT, skipping the two optional bosses. This was the "original" or at the least harder version of XT with the lower enrage timer. We just couldn't put out the DPS to down him under the enrage timer (but to be fair, we were getting close). We were making it to the enrage timer though. Our problem was a mix of tactics and raw DPS output. We were positioning XT at the stairs, meaning all four trash piles had adds streaming from them. That left one DPS on the heart (along with the tank, who would be me). Shockingly enough, we actually downed XT with this tactic after the enrage timer was lengthened. Now we tank him to the side and only get two trash piles spawning allowing more DPS to focus on the heart. XT is not a problem for us now (if we have our regular healers).

After XT, we hit up Kologarn. I don't remember exactly, but I'm *fairly* sure we one shot him our first try. After XT (the way we were doing him), Kologarn was easy. These days, Kologarn is our stopping point however. We wipe a few times before downing him every week. Someone dies from the Eye Beams, either a healer or a DPS. If it's a healer, then we have a healing issue and people start dying when they're grabbed by the Right Arm, or I go down as the main tank because healing becomes too thin. If it's a DPSer that goes down, we don't have enough DPS left to free the person grabbed by the Right Arm meaning we get picked off one at a time till we wipe.

Of all the bosses (other than FL) I think Razorscale is our easiest kill. I know when I'm tanking I don't feel the pressure of enrage timers like I do on other bosses. The stacking thing that Razorscale does doesn't seem to do much, since we've never had to worry about it even when our DPS has been low. The only way we wipe on this boss is if an overzealous DPS dies in the Mole Phase, and even then we can sometimes make a comeback.

The details of our only Auriaya kill are fuzzy to me. I do know that we didn't directly kill the Defender, since the Void Zone he drops is what was killing us every time on other attempts. Other than that we just pulled out the DPS and healing that week.

And that's it, that's all we've done in Ulduar. Some of the problem is that we only go into Ulduar once a week and by the time we kill the bosses we can, we don't have time to try any of the others. We basically need a flawless kill on each of the bosses to even be able to attempt Auriaya. I'm hoping with 3.2 we can get better gear elsewhere and dive deeper into Ulduar, but from what I'm hearing the fights aren't all about the gear.