Serpentshrine and Patch 2.1

The long-awaited Patch 2.1 finally rolled around last week, bringing with it the alchemy nerf and end-game raiding retune. Unfortunately a lot of our week was wasted by the usual patch-day shenanigans. We lost all of Tuesday to the server being offline; by the time it came up we didn't have enough time, or people left online, to accomplish anything gainful.

On Wednesday we were still plagued by some UI issues, but managed to completely stomp the heavily retuned Magtheridon and Gruul fights. At first glance you'd think these had almost been nerfed to comical levels, but seeing the number of guilds on the server who had killed Magtheridon you begin to realize that it's really just finally bringing them back to where they always should've been four months ago.

Morogrim Tidewalker

Later in the week we ventured back into Serpentshrine and finally relearned Hydross the "right" way. It's still not a completely trivial fight, but the retune made it a much more enjoyable encounter. The Berserk timer is no longer a looming death threat, rather something that's just there to finish if you off if you're not playing well enough in the first place. A kill is still within reach if you have a couple DPS-types die, but if you're limping along with 5 people dead (or slacking off) you won't make it.

We spent the rest of Monday learning Morogrim. Morogrim is a pretty fun fight, if not a bit long. The complete lack of a berserk timer is refreshing -- even though the new Hydross and Void Reaver weren't scary by any means -- and it's nice to see Blizzard still actually knows how to make fights that aren't a joke without them. Ultimately Morogrim is pretty easy on execution, it's mainly just a matter of designing a solid strategy, and having the gear and raid composition to execute it.

Fathomlord Karathress is next on the list.

Fathom-Lard [sic] Karathress

Update: We rallied back in to Serpentshrine tonight and made our first attempts at Fathom-Lord Karathress. And we killed him.

Karathress ranks in difficulty somewhere around Maulgar. Admittedly we wiped a handful of times when we shouldn't have, probably taking the number of attempts it should've taken to kill him from 2 to about 4. In the middle of one of our flawless attemps, Canada decided to disconnect all its raiders on us. Maybe our healers are just exceptional, but this fight seemed completely trivial. Even the enrage timer is way off, we killed him with almost 5 minutes left on the clock. The trash was a joke too, at least Void Reaver's trash was difficult. Oh well, Morogrim and Hydross are both reasonably tuned, so I guess we shouldn't complain about him being a loot vendor.

P.S. I should mention that Void Reaver has been nicely retuned as well. He's still easier than he could be, but he's hitting tanks a fair bit harder, and our kill had a good two minutes spare on the enrage timer. It's more of a healing test than it was before, certainly, so it makes a bit more sense in the progression.