The gong rang, as scheduled, at 5:00 and immediately the server proceeded to crash and lag so badly we could barely move. Finally we fought our way through the massive walls of lag into the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj. The first trash pulls went pretty smoothly and we got ourselves a few bug mounts ... also it's true: the trash drops epics.
We decided to go into the bosses completely blind, without revealing any strategies we already knew to the raid, to try to increase the fun value of learning the new content. As such Skeram probably took a few more tries than he should've but still went down without too much trouble. The fight itself seems pretty chaotic and felt harder than fights like Majordomo in spite of what we've often heard. Best I can describe it is a combination of Taerar and Shazzrah.
The trash after Skeram seemed substantially easier than the trash prior and within a few minutes we found ourselves at the bug family: Vem, Princess Yauj, and Lord Kri. These three little bastards are actually optional bosses, but aren't supposed to be too difficult, and drop fabulous prizes! It took a bit of work and practice but we got them down.
After killing the bug family, we headed back to the surface to play around outside. We spent some time trying to kite the colossi of Zora and Ashi to Cenarion Hold. We almost had Ashi but couldn't quite get it and eventually just set out for some more traditional rep farming at the crystals. Once we got tired of that we headed back into the Temple to play with the next boss, Battleguard Sartura. Sartura stomped us pretty badly our first couple attempts until we started to get a feel for it. Don't get me wrong, she's still stomping us, but not quite as badly. We'll get her down before too long with some practice and strategy refinement.
We ended the official raiding around 1:00 server time and headed back out to the surface to farm some more rep in smaller groups til the event ended.