Three months ago Motive killed the first of many hard modes available in Ulduar 10. As of Thursday this week we have completed the Glory to the Ulduar Hero (10 man) achievement and received our Rusted Proto-Drakes. Big deal right? I know 3 months isn't exactly a short period of time to do fairly easy task but there were, as always, complications along the way. To be perfectly honest only two fights really seemed "hard" and they were Mimiron (fuck) and Freya. I am not one to get excited or "nerd out" over a kill but I have to say doing this achievement (specifically mimiron) really did feel good.
I never thought we would complete this achievement, I never planned on it. However thanks to some urging from a few people and the dedication of the guild we pulled through despite raiding a mere 2 nights a week. I would like to thank those who stuck it out and made this happen even when I thought it would not. I would also like to thank those that came and have left, including my good friend Mike who has moved into the real world finally!
I formed Motive under the idea of casual 10 man raiding would be fun and interesting. I was dead wrong. The philosophy of doing 10 man content to raid with my friends and pugging 25 man content to get gear seemed backwards. Our second week in full clearing ToC 10 we disenchanted all but 1-2 drops. Awesome eh?
Because of this Motive will now disband and move to 25 man raiding. We will join some our old server mates in a 25 man guild and hopefully have a better time there! I know the Horde are ugly as shit but...FOR THE HORDE!
Well that was silly. At least it's just one boss in.
One Light in the Darkness went down quite easily for us. It had been a while since we last bothered full clearing to Yogg, since we have been focusing on getting hardmodes down in our fairly-limited raid schedule. Coming in to Yogg hardmode, after a month of upgrades and improvement, it actually didn't feel that much different than before. The same was true of Vezax which (okay, nerf aside) felt a bit easier than the old regular mode even, when last we did it. Vezax hardmode only took us a couple of attempts. Yogg-Saron then took just a few hours of relearning not to stand in clouds, and not to be silly in phase two.
Glory has been the main "goal" of this project over the past month or two, and it feels great to finally have it effectively done; we'll be picking up our protodrakes early next lock.
We finally wandered back in to Trial of the Grand Crusader today after One Light and one-shot Northrend beasts which had felt brutally over-tuned for us the first time we tried it. Jaraxxus and Faction Champs went down without much trouble too, but we ran out of raid time before we could do more than a couple pulls of the Twin Valkyrs.
Mimiron really dwarfs (get it?) the other hard-mode keepers in difficulty, but this still took a while longer than it should've. We had a few close attempts last week, and ended up with about 5 really-close-should've-been-a-kill attempts today before getting him.
This was our last keeper, so we finally got our hour in on Algalon as well. After Mimiron, Algalon seems anticlimactic. We still have hardmode Vezax (which we haven't tried yet) and Yogg-1 left until we get our fancy protodrakes.
Also we need to go back and roast some iron dwarves on Razorscale at some point. Stupid achievement.
In other news, we've obviously downed all of ToC regular. The tuning on Trial of the Grand Crusader seemed a bit steep for our gear level, but we'll likely give that another shot soon and start making some progress; we'd been focusing almost entirely on the Uld10 hard-modes instead of that.
We are indeed still alive and making progress with hard modes. Only raiding two nights a week, the new Trial of the Crusader has been eating into our learning time for Ulduar. The week before last we got our first kill of Steelbreaker, which ended up being surprisingly easy for us. We had been shying away from the hard-mode, thinking our time would be better spent on hard-mode Keepers, since we already have Algalon keys in progress, but it turned out to be little more difficult than the easy kill order.
This past week then we came in with our most solid composition and group in a while and finally knocked out Freya and Hodir hard-modes. Not much to say about Hodir, since it's simply a matter of not failing. Freya was the most challenging hard-mode for us so far, for no terribly good reason. However having wiped to it a bit over the past few weeks made the kill that much more rewarding for us this week, so some good certainly came of it.
Just hard-mode Mimiron left until Algalon, and then hard-mode Vezax and One Light in the Darkness until Glory of the Ulduar Raider. Trial of the Crusader has been copacetic; we've been downing the new bosses as they come up. It's quite a bit on the easy side, but hopefully the Heroic will scale up appropriately.
As always, if you're interested in joining us or helping out, contact Iyre or Makyle, or approach us on the forums.
P.S. 10 man drops suck.
We started working on hard modes and started with Thorim. After an hour or so we got him down. I'll add more to this post as we get them.
On a side note recruitment is closed pretty much. We will of course accept people but cannot guarantee them raid spots.
If we do nothing else this week we're killing Flame Leviathan 4 tower!
Words to die by I swear. We certainly did do nothing else this week but got a few early hard modes (due to some really bad scheduling). FLx4 and Heartbreaker. I didn't expect FLx4 to take as long as it did, but I didn't expect Heartbreaker to be as easy as it was so live and learn I guess.