We're going to kill the Lich King!

3.3 is tomorrow, and I have never been so excited about a patch. I think it's because I've done Trial of the Crusader to death on both 10 and 25 man, and even completed 10 man Trial of the Grand Crusader twice (the first time a few weeks ago, and again last night). This is the first time I'll be approaching new raid content knowing that I've done everything possible in the last one, and I'm really happy about that. My guild -still- hasn't downed Yogg-Saron, but hopefully sometime before the release of Cataclysm we'll get around to doing that.

We lost some people to boredom and/or real life recently, so we probably won't be doing much in the way of 25 man content, but we still have a really strong 10 man team, so I'm hoping I'll get to do Icecrown Citadel hard-mode progression raiding, and get one of those awesome frostwyrm mounts.

I have all but three slots with item level 245 gear; some crafted, some bought, some from 25 man ToC, some from 10 man ToGC. My two 232 pieces are shoulders and shield, and I have a 200 trinket (from 5 man ToC normal). 42k health unbuffed, which isn't a huge amount worse than the best tanks on my server.

Raiding Ancients (that's my guild, not sure if I've ever said) are ranked 18th on the server for 10 man content, having cleared ToGC 10 with more than 25 attempts remaining. We missed out on the 45 attempts remaining achievement by 50k last night, which was kind of a disappointment. Then had a load of 1-2% wipes, before finally clearing it. I also got an awesome new sword, less than a week after getting the non-heroic version (and a day after spending gold to enchant it).

Not really much else to say. Very, very excited. Expect posts tomorrow after we've done our first Citadel run.

Ulduar Update

So I haven't really written much about Ulduar for a while now. That's because I haven't really seen any new content; 10 man progression is still on 10/14 (we've yet to even attempt Mimiron) and 25 man progression is now at 3/14 (Flame Leviathan, Razorscale and XT-002).

I've yet to down Ignis on either 10 or 25 man. Ignis should be downed easily, but it just hasn't happened. 10 man failures for the few attempts we've had on him seem to just be a lack of focus - we start on him late, so people are tired. 25 man failures are simply a lack of healing, at some point in the fight I'd simply not receive any healing for two hits in a row - I was sitting at just under 41k health unbuffed, so two ~20k hits (plus possibly a tick while moving out of scorch) without healing means I'm dead.

We've also been losing evenings. Saturday night's raid was cancelled due to a lack of available people - a large number of those signed for the raid simply didn't show up and the other tank had his account hacked. No big deal, it happens. We downed seven bosses in just over three hours on Friday night and haven't been back since. I was confident that this week we'd at least get to see Mimiron even if we didn't down him, now I'm not sure.