Ragnaros Heroic


As shown above, we have finally defeated Ragnaros and obtained that nice Realm First server spam again!

We spent in total some 198 wipes on this on 10 man, plus quite a few more on heroic 25 before we decided to revert to 10 for this. There is a story to this, we didn't just go to 10 man because we thought it would be easier, doing it was in fact very hard - not in terms of the boss, but having to tell a lot of good players we would be killing it on 10 man first of all

The main reasons we did it in this manner were two-fold, firstly we had a lot of players going away on holiday in the last few weeks and we lacked the right class synergies i.e. balance druids that made killing the adds pathetically easy. We started to gear up some druids but looking at our competition we thought that as we had practically won every other server first boss this tier, and especially after the re-building that was required of Balance after the last tier, we were determined to not lose this realm first.

The decision to convert to 10 from 25 was also in part due to the progress we had been seeing from a certain 10 man guild on Grim Batol. We were confident we could achieve the 10 man kill before our rivals sticking with 25 man, but were getting a bit more concerned each day with the other guild's progress. On the day we killed this for example, we see that they are learning phase 4, so maybe not too long now until another 10 man kill of Ragnaros on Grim Batol

Having looked at videos of 10 man kills and picking a setup we thought would work (thanks for all those disconnects Curii!) we set about learning the boss again. Within two weeks we were at phase 4 and it was looking good. Then came the nerfs to Ragnaros' health. Truth be told I don't think we were far off killing him pre-nerf but the changes did allow us, with our dps, to take the boss into phase 4 with only one meteor up.

The previous night we had Ragnaros into phase 4 a lot as well, but the tipping point was swapping the holy pally for a resto druid for more dps before Ragnaros transitioned and allowing for only one meteor to be up - we had this a couple of times yesterday, but with the revised setup it was happening every try

So there you have it, finally Balance is realm first again, true it was 10 man but we figure that's Blizzard's fault for making it this way, we'd all love there to be separate 10 and 25 realm first achievements but while they are this way and competition exists, we didn't want to be caught out as was the case with tier 11.

We will now go back to 25 man raiding and complete Ragnaros on that as well and begin the preparations for the next tier - Deathwing!

Congratulations to everyone who helped, not just those who took part in the kill - we had many who helped us start early on Wednesday for example so the majority was clear for Ragnaros tries, so while this first kill was 10 man, the kill overall was a guild effort

Dragonwrath - Tarecgosa's Rest


Our first Firelands legendary We wasn't as lucky with drops as some guilds were but we finally have our first.

We decided to give our first one to Curii for a number of reasons, firstly he's been here an awfully long time, is very active and despite first impressions all those years ago, has turned out to be one of our best mages we have had in Balance So congratulations to him and thanks to everyone for helping him obtain it.

Majordomo Staghelm


Here is our kill of the penultimate boss of the Firelands instance, which was all in all a very simple fight. Essentially the same as on normal mode just increasing the damage and health of the boss to a point where you need to make the most of the stacking damage buff that the encounter gifts you with.

We only spent just over three hours on this boss properly, which kind of tells you how underwhelming it is for the second to last boss of this tier but I guess we shouldnt complain too much as the real challenge begins now with Ragnaros Heroic