Crazy Times...

Work has been mental recently and the blog (and my sleep) seems to be the first thing to suffer. 
I unashamedly write all my blog posts at work during a combination of downtime and coffee breaks so, when that downtime disappears, the posts dry up (again).

I need some way to find those few minutes each day or two to keep the posts flowing as, once I get home, I am much more interested in playing the game than writing about it.  Suggestions anyone?

Anyway, lame apologies for not posting aside, what's been going on?

Raiding moves slowly onwards with Archimonde Heroic now firmly in our sights. 

Our first full progress night on him was excellent!  Steady improvement made all through the night, culminating in our final attempt wiping at 7%

We've started killing Archi on normal as a guild each reset for ring upgrades so most people knew the tactics, nothing much is different apart from the usual 'everything hurts more'.

Phase 1 was going fairly smoothly bar the occasional lack of spreading sending half the ranged team into the air but that was soon sorted out.

Phase 2 was a little trickier for a couple of reasons...
First, we kept losing a tank when a Deathcaller coincided with Allure of Flames - Our RL Blood DK was getting very annoyed, claiming that people weren't doing enough damage to the Deathcaller.
I thought the issue was more to do with the ranged all moving for Allure and not being able to dps but she must have been right because the problem just seemed to disappear.

Every time you introduce a mechanic that targets a random player, it takes a little time for the whole team to have experienced it enough times to know exactly what to do (Amber-Shaper anyone?).
And this was our second issue, Wrought Chaos. 

You would think that stacking behind the boss and occasionally moving a few yards further back would be fairly straight-forward but some people seem to lose their heads completely! 
There would be people running all over the room in all directions as if they had to get as far away from it as possible. 
Maybe they thought they had to break it like the chains or something?

I don't know but it did end up with a few comedy moments of people seemingly chasing each other round the boss (with the Benny Hill theme tune playing in my head)

As the night went on we improved at those two phases and began to reach phase 3 in
fairly decent shape with all raiders alive.

Phase 3 seems to be the first point the fight is noticeably more difficult than normal, with HP-bars spiking very low at times and each mistake resulting in a death or wipe.

A couple of attempts to get the Nether groups sorted (and properly killing the Void Star), a couple more to push Infernals at the right time and to remind everyone to kill them. 

We were getting there slowly but it felt frantic at times, never truly under control as we pushed into the Infernals and then the closing moments of the fight.

As much as we were improving, time finally caught up with us and we called an end to our raid.

There was to be no kill this night but, overall, there was an almost tangible feeling of great progress being made and we will attack him next week full of confidence.

Archimonde, your days are numbered!