Toc Articles

Some more great strats to announce from the community:

First off, one of the most amusing Anub videos I've seen from Brakthir of Phantom Elite. It's a good Anub kill video in general, but the 8 minute mark is definitely worth watching through to the end, as it may not be clean but it's effective! Anub First Kill - Full Wipe

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We finished them on 25's last night and this is the first fight in Coliseum that feels "right" to me.

The first three are returns to the "hard mode: same as easy but hits HARDER!" model. You don't really have to pay that much more attention to the mechanics than you did on easy mode (other than running from Icehowl), it's just pure execution. While there's room for some fights like that in the game for sure, I just don't find them engaging.

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This isn't a full strategy, I'd like another week at the fight so I have a clearer sense of "what we're doing is a good idea", but it at least lays out the actual abilities (rather than the list that keeps getting passed around from PTR) including key things like the timer spawns for each of the phases.

StratFu: Beasts of Northrend

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To answer some comments made to my last post. These are all paraphrased to amuse myself, not to mock the questioner.

• But top guilds can still hold their own even with fifty wipes!
• Beasts doesn't need a nerf, why we engaged them and did great on our first pull!
• So how hard did you guys find Beasts?
• Beasts has some bugs
• 10 man is trivial!

Responses to those comments after the break.

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A Story

Let's pretend there's a top world guild.

Pretend they waltz into ToC25 Hard and do amazing 1-2 shots of everything. Shows they're an amazing guild right?

Amazing yes, but it shows how easy it is to get around Blizzard's "you must raid less" as long as you're willing to raid, far, far more.

Not quite

All they'd have to do is run all their raiders through 10-man first. Then run an alt crew on 25's (tons of time to gear up alts, and many guilds have done that to fill out, say, a second 25's group to get double the number of fragments.)

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Beasts

Beasts seems mistuned for the initial boss. My guess is we'll probably see some pretty fast nerfs here on 25 at least.

Or, conversely: I can't imagine the next two bosses are tuned correctly if Beasts is.

Fusion

We got it with 36 attempts left. Of course due to the bug, that was 9 actual wipes, 5 more wipes lost due to the "wipe bug" where you lose two attempts on a pull. It wasn't hard, it was just oddly tightly tuned given what I've heard about the next two fights (we ended the raid early before learning how easy they really were.)

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Today marks the launch of the latest raid content intended to challenge progression raiding guilds since the launch of Ulduar, in the form of the Coliseum raid instance's heroic mode, or the "Trial of the Grand Crusader."

As our readers may know, the primary conceit of the Trial of the Grand Crusader is not only to defeat all five bosses, but to do so in 50 attempts or less- after a raid wipes 50 times in the Trial of the Grand Crusader, they are prevented from attempting any bosses again for the rest of the raid lockout. Guilds can also earn extra rewards in the form of achievements and "tribute chest loot" for completing the entirety of the instance in a certain number of attempts, with item level 272 cloaks reserved for raids that are able to complete the instance without wiping once.

This 50 attempt upper limit imposes some interesting new challenges for raids and raid leaders that differ somewhat from the traditional approach to dealing with new progression content.

Below the cut I  run down some ways that raid leaders can approach the Trial of the Grand Crusader with an eye towards maximizing their week-to-week progression in the instance.

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We're sitting here anxiously waiting for the servers to come up so we can sit there anxiously waiting for raid time.

Will they be undertuned? Overtuned?

How far will guilds get this week -- will we see a clear?

There's a few conversations starting up our Coliseum forum and we'll have strats and videos for the hard modes as soon as possible (hopefully far faster than I was with Ulduar -- at least my time has calmed down.)

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