After joining my new guild, I went along to the Argent Coliseum for my first look at the raid there, and also my first taste of 25-mans that wasn’t a pug. I had a huge amount of fun and performed respectably on dps in spite of my lower gearing. As usual, I forgot to take screenshots, so you’ll have to take my word for that.

Northrend Beasts was a very straightforward encounter from my perspective, so I’ll just summarise my experience of it here.

• Gormok the Impaler – Tank and spank. In theory you should look out for Snobolds and kill them if they’re nearby, but I must confess I didn’t see any, and no one screamed at me, so they can’t have given us too many issues.
• Acidmaw and Dreadscale – start on the mobile target, follow it round, stay out of the poison clouds, then switch after they resurface. No major problems there – just a simpler version of Grobbulus to my mind.
• Icehowl – Moar tank and spank, strafe whenever he’s coming to someone near you with his charge thinger. DBM is excellent at telling you when you need to move. My only major problem here was that my UI died on Wednesday, so I didn’t have Clique set up to put Tricks on anyone but the MT, when it would’ve been useful to put it on another dps during the stuns.

I wouldn’t say the Northrend Beasts encounter was faceroll, but it certainly seemed a bit on the easy side to be dropping ilevel 245 epix. More on that note later…

Now, Lord Jaraxxus was another proposition. The first couple of times, we wiped with him at about 95%, so it was clear he was going to be no pushover. We had a couple of problems with our interrupt rotation for Fel Fireball – I was first in the rotation and missed the very first one a couple of times. Mutilate rogues, be warned, it comes early, and before you have your rotation settled in. As it turned out though, it was neither this nor problems with maintaining a 10-yard spread between healers and ranged that was wiping us.

Jaraxxus has an ability called Nether Power, a stacking buff he gains which, at full stacks, increases his magic damage by 200%. Now his chain lightning hits pretty hard in the first place, so you can imagine how important it is to get this buff off. Initially we just had our mages spellstealing, but what with all the chaotic shit going on in this fight, that wasn’t reliable enough. For our successful attempt, we assigned anyone with an offensive dispel to get it the fug off him ASAP. We also decided to put only one rogue (Muggins here…) on interrupt duty, since kick is always off cooldown for Fel Fireball casts, alllowing the other interrupters the freedom to burn down the adds. This probably wouldn’t have been necessary in a group less stacked with melee, but it worked well for us, and allowed me the kudos of being 3rd on dps in my 10-man gear, despite kicking every 10 seconds.

All in all, Jaraxxus is great fun. Not to spoil anything either, but the start of the encounter is hilarious. Keep Nether Power off, move out of the bad shit, get Fel Fireball interrupted and burn those adds down, and you’ll soon be swimming in nice new shinies.

On which note, my loot haul for the evening:

Cuirass of Calamitous Fate
Steel Bladebreaker

I also picked up Shoulderpads of the Monolith from Kologarn when we hit Ulduar afterwards, which essentially means that last night ruined any efforts I’d made to maintain any kind of tier set bonuses. Oh well, shinies is shinies.