Deeprun Pest Control

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Finally retired the ageing and creaking Joomla install and set us up a shiny new WordPress instance!

After setting it up, Jellymel chose and tweaked the theme and I then spent 5 hours or so importing all the news items and images from the old site. Nostalgia trip reading through all the old posts!

Anyway, everything’s nicely categorized now, see the list of categories on the right. ⇒

Probably some more changes to come!

The favoured spawn of Deathwing: Nefarian and Onyxia, have now been slain on heroic 25-man mode; completing our progress through Blackwing Descent, and granting us another server first achievement.

I’m hoping they’re really dead this time; as resurrected bosses go these ones have had quite a few runs.

I’m obliged to mention that some mages also did some heroic respeccing and we’re all very impressed…

In other news we have also defeated Al’Akir heroic on 10-man mode (which is currently a bit easier than 25-man) for yet another server first achievement. Everyone in that raid forgot to take a screenshot though. Bunch of muppets.

Hopefully we’ll be able to report on a 25-man kill of that some time soon, but our focus now is the remainder of the Bastion of Twilight: Ascendant Council, Cho’gall and of course Sinestra.

With our rogues making the noble sacrifice* of going subtlety spec, we went into Bastion of Twilight for our first night of attempts on the dragon twins of Theralion and Valiona and… killed them!

Great job everyone!

* This is what you get when you leave the rogue officer to do all of the news posts

Here is the boss kill report for our first 7 heroic boss kills in Cataclysm!

They said it couldn’t be done, that I was not up to the challenge of coming up with a DPC caption for each one, but they were wrong.

Dragon Preponderant Commander

Ok, that one was a stretch, but anyway… Halfus Wyrmbreaker (being one of the easiest heroic-mode bosses) was the first boss on our list to die.

Devastatingly Poisonous Chimaera

Chimaeron was next in line and proved to be quite the healing challenge, but fortunately not too difficult.

Disappointing and Potion Crazed

Maloriak… yeah I wasn’t around for this kill but I’m sure it was, like, hard and stuff.

Draughty Prelude to Chief

We dreaded the Conclave of Wind fight and put it off for a bit, given our often flaky performance on the normal mode of the fight, but when we actually went for it, although it took a few nights of tries it wasn’t actually that hard.

Deafening the Poor Chap

Atramedes turned out to be way easier than we expected. With the heroic mode not really adding anything new to the fight we soon got it down (although the first kill was… a close call).

Dwarven Protective Constructs

With a heck of a lot going on at once, the Omnotron fight was quite challenging to learn (dealing with the tricky combinations properly and not failing on the basic stuff were the main orders of the day). Fun fight though.

Damn Pesky Centipede

Magmaw went down today after the second night of attempts. Good kiting, good healing, and not standing in fire are key to victory here.

Seems we forgot to take a screenshot of this kill so, erm, here’s a picture of some DPC officers standing where the boss would have been! Yay!

(I wasn’t even there for the kill, why am I in that shot??)

DPC’s Progress Continues

So I hope you enjoyed reading this post more than I enjoyed making it. We’re over half-way through the bosses now, just the much more difficult ones left to go. No problem…

DPC has now cleared all current 25-man Cataclysm content on normal mode! Today saw the demise of both Nefarian and Al’Akir. Though we had successfully beaten both of these on 10-man already, these 2 kills complete our 25-man round-up.

Nefarian & Onyxia

Al’Akir

Raiding Progress

The round-up of our normal-mode kills is as follows:

Boss	25-man kill
Blackwing Descent
Omnotron Defense System	13 December 2010
Magmaw	16 December 2010
Maloriak	16 December 2010
Atramedes	20 December 2010
Chimaeron	21 December 2010
Nefarian	11 January 2011
Bastion of Twilight
Halfus Wyrmbreaker	21 December 2010
Valiona and Theralion	21 December 2010
Ascendant Council	30 December 2010
Cho’gall	21 December 2010
Throne of the Four Winds
Conclave of Wind	15 December 2010
Al’Akir	11 January 2011

So… heroic mode go go!

Finally finishing off the last of the Wrath of the Lich King content, DPC has defeated Halion the Pink Dragan on heroic mode.

Update: video of the kill is now available: part one, part two

Good news everyone! Heroic mode 25-man Lich King has finally been defeated by DPC! The final server-first achievement of Wrath of the Lich King was claimed by us after hours, days and weeks of attempts on this encounter.

I can only begin to imagine the total amount of gold spent on repairs, flasks and pots, and the combined total amount of hours put in by everyone must be insane. The satisfaction of this kill was second-to-none; no other boss in this game has ever been this intense (not even Ragnaros was this high on the scale of epic).

The chosen winner of Invincible’s Reins was Polarís:

Other loot was:

• Havoc’s Call, Blade of Lordaeron Kings – Tinything
• Fal’inrush, Defender of Quel’thalas – Judith
• Protector’s Mark of Sanctification – Kalutica

Wow.

What a week it has been for our 25-man raiding:

• Wednesday – Cleared ICC25 of all bosses up to and including Sindragosa.
• Thursday – Defeated the Lich King on the very first attempt of the night, earning us the server-first Lich King kill and unlocking hard-mode content for next week. With nothing much else left to do, we went on back to Ulduar to clear the way to Yogg-Saron ready for our next raiding night…
• Sunday – Defeated Yogg-Saron with 0 watchers, earning us the Realm First! Death’s Demise achievement (better late than never!).
• Monday – Completed A Tribute to Insanity (25 player), earning us the Realm First! Grand Crusader achievement.

I can honestly say that I am truly proud of DPC’s raiding progress of this week. Amazing stuff!

The Lich King

Despite our main tank dying an impressive 3 times during the Lich King fight, and helped by some heroic intercept kiting when the Lich King went berserk after the harvest soul target died, this first kill nevertheless was a great achievement.

Yogg-Saron (Alone in the Darkness)

Having done Yogg-Saron with 1 watcher several times before, progressing to 0 watchers was not too big of a step.

A team of 3 hunters (backed up by feral druid, death knight and anyone else with a taunt button in case things went wrong, and helped by the Yoggles beacon marker mod), dealt with the trickiest part of the fight: pulling the empowered guardians away from the pack to stop them from healing Yogg-Saron and each other.

Of course outgearing the fight somewhat did make the encounter slightly easier, but it’s still not quite a cakewalk yet!

Suarge was our lucky winner of the Mimiron’s Head mount dropped by Yogg-Saron in his hardest mode.

A Tribute to Insanity

Despite a very rocky (and tense) start on the Anub’arak kill, where 2 raid members got ganked by an add not being picked up (and the ensuing shadow strike), the rest of the fight actually went very smoothly, with no deaths on phase 3.

And finally…

Let’s not forget our 10-man raids. Some excellent progress is being made, with all hard-mode bosses except for Sindragosa and The Lich King defeated.

We decided to go give Sindragosa a nice Valentine’s Day present (some throat sweets for that dire-sounding sore throat she seems to have), but she didn’t take too well to it so we killed her instead. Onwards to the Lich King!

First, the little bit of news from our 10-man progress:

Yes, the Lich King has been slain (server-first kill for Aggramar EU), and a (magically video-enchanted) statue has now been placed in the centre of Dalaran so that everyone may know… what no-one should ever know apparently.

Our 10-man teams can now progress on to the hard-mode content.

In 25-man, progress towards the Lich King is going well, with only Sindragosa now standing between us and him. Some gratuitous screenshots follow: