spring, river, flower, moon, night


Mimiron appears to have this all-encompassing aura of sheen to him that perhaps the other bosses in Ulduar don't. Calling his trash creative would be a disservice to the rest of the zones finely crafted equally interesting yet non-epic dropping non-bosses™ but hey, it has a little battle tank you can ride! This all comes before a huge tram that drives you down to a preposterously oversized room encircled with a less lethal version of frogger. Giving the impression that a disproportionate amount of the time developing Ulduar was spent on Mimiron and his surroundings supported by his almost complete lack of nerfs, he very much comes across as the baby of the dev team.

The first phase exists if only to see a return of tank damage so high that it's tricky for a single one to deal with it. Chris and Yuna bounced the MKII between each Last Stand and Shield Wall cooldown as he fired off his Plasma Blast. I suppose it would be possible for one tank to deal with all of that but it would be pretty risky. While thumbing my ass, I took it upon myself to do a little mine sweeping so the melee always had a clear path out while running from Shock Blast. That is, of course, assuming they did. On more than one occasion, we had people stand in and die to it, more than once our Warriors. I swear both of them are devolving back to their Neanderthal state. Still, I shouldn't be surprised given how long we took to kill Thorim this week while the gibbons in the gauntlet figured out their left from their right. Oh well, despair not; faint heart ne'er won fair maid!

The damage taken in phase two just feels insane when you first start learning it. I do think a large part of that had to do with our handling of the rockets though. A lot of us were struggling to see the subtle graphic and turned the strategy into just running and making sure the graphic wasn't where you were running to. Again, having a fairly uninteractive role in this, it was pretty easy to identify that this caused a deficit in healing that was difficult to climb out of when all was safe. People eventually became comfortable in spotting where they were going to land and only those that needed to move moved. Damage was further controlled by staggering people into six groups. I think the key in getting through this phase is just accepting that a fuck load of damage is going to happen and streamlining it as efficiently as possible. I would think that one of the inevitable nerfs this fight gets will be the travel time of the rocket and it's less-than-obvious graphic coming with an epilepsy warning.

I'm not really sure what the purpose of the third phase is now. Perhaps for spirit users to regenerate some mana? Since the Assault Bots no longer need to be kited and the Bomb Bots and Aerial Command Unit's damage can be perfectly controlled by a Protection Warrior, it's become a formality. The week previous, I was tanking the head and the bots were hitting for 40k so the difference was laughable.

Until we got used to the final phase, it was a little chaotic. The times where his abilities all line up together can be brutal but, really, it's just knowing what he did, expecting what he can do and adjusting to the patterns. If they wanted to make this phase really hard, all they had to do was up the damage of the mines. Now that would've been interesting! Though he fires off two rockets now, at this point everyone was so comfortable with them that it was irrelevant. They might want to look into it's being ridiculously hard to see under his ram when it lands on the main tank though, that's retarded. Again, forecasting the tragic nerfbat, I'd guess the self repair time will get extended but the one time we got to it we killed it just fine.

Fantastic fight overall. Not only was it about as fresh as a fight seems like it can get at this stage of WoW's life but Mimiron himself was rather comical. The first one to really give the deep satisfaction when it goes down even if it wasn't quite the GOD TIER fight it had been made out to me. A pure execution fight that took us 2-3 hours to get down from first pull, incredible for how bad I tell myself that we are.



For his placement in Ulduar, Dr. John Vezax is an extremely basic fight. Learning and killing him took even less time than Mimiron, less than two hours according to trash. And lets talk about that for a moment! This is one set of trash I don't feel so enamored with. Shadowstep and Fan of Knives is funny the first time around as is discovering that one of those things does indeed fear you into everything else but by the fifth and sixth pack is a tiring chore. Faceless Horrors are really something too. Trash with PHASES? Holy fuck, where is my badge? Seriously, where, because I'm pretty sure those three big trees in Freya's room took less time to kill and dropped some.

Our kill had a Searing Flames let through, far too many people getting hit by crashes, a Holy Paladin dead early, a Mage dead a little bit after that and bugged vapors. I suppose it was thanks to Yuna miraculously resisting the armour debuff that we got the kill on the attempt we did. Considering how easy it was when so much went wrong, I can't imagine how it'd be with everything going right and it stuns me that some of the guilds on Argent Dawn that had leapfrogged us after our horrendous first week haven't killed it yet. We got server third kill, which is nice.