A Work in Progress
Well, after a long and arduous journey my guild has finally started focusing solely on progression (for this week at the very least). We now have all of our raiding members keyed for Hyjal and, as of last night, Black Temple. For once we are working solely on T6 instances and it feels great. We went in and one-shot Rage, Anetheron and Kaz'rogal last night and got some solid time to work on Azgalor.
Feeling the Rage
After downing Kael'thas and Lady Vashj, Rage Winterchill makes for a nice relaxing evening. Once everyone gets into the rhythm of the trash it's easy rolling. Giving the tanks A so that they can mark their primary threat targets helps us out a lot so that we're not trying to out-threat each other on a single mob. We also don't have a Prot Paladin which is a big help here (we had one of our pallies respec Prot when we were short on tanks and it worked out very well) but the fact is that we have done all of the trash packs in the instance without one successfully so it's certainly not a requirement. So long as the mobs are kept grouped nicely and well aggroed then AoE dps should let you coast through wave after wave. When Rage himself comes feel free to use your rogues to distract (as you can with each of the bosses in the instance) to buy your casters some time to get more mana. The fight then becomes a matter of avoiding Death & Decay and healing the ice tombs quickly. After an easy downing enjoy the bracers that you'll be DEing in no time
A view from our Infernal Tank position
A few more waves of trash leads to a fight with this guy who like to make life hard. He can't just sit back and take his beating, instead he decides to use abilities like "Carrion Swarm" and puts raid members to sleep along with throwing Infernals on top of people. So long as the raid spreads out and there's some communication going on the fight really isn't that difficult though. Of course, there's always the chance of some really bad luck but that can't always be avoided. This week he decided to throw me a bone in the shape of [item]The Unbreakable Will[/item] which isn't quite [item]The Brutalizer[/item] but I've learned not to sit around and wait for tank drops
Anetheron's unimpressive corpse which coughed up my shiny new sword
After a little jog over to the Horde Encampment and a little chat with Thrall we find ourselves fighting, you guessed it, more trash. I covered this fight the other week with some pretty pictures to go along with it so you should check out that post but, to sum up the fight.... From a tanking perspective it's a tank and spank. From melee DPS' perspective that pretty much holds true as well.... From the caster's perspective, however, this is a major race as he throws his marks out at an increasing pace that will blow your casters up if their mana pools get too low while still requiring them to burn like they've never burned before. Thankfully for one of our other tanks he has been kind enough to drop [item]Kaz'rogal's Hardened Heart[/item], a badly needed upgrade from him [item]Crest of the Sha'tar[/item] and one I wouldn't mind picking up to replace my [item]Merciless Gladiator's Shield Wall[/item] at some point.
Kaz'rogal was kind enough to cough this up for us.... The shield, not the gnome...
So, Kaz'rogal is dead and Thrall's expecting more action soon. More trash! Now with infernals, fel hounds and more! I'll write up a bit more on the trash next time I'm in there because I was really tired last night so I don't have screenshots to go with it today but, needless to say it's more chaotic and wave 6 has some deadly potential. It will likely take any guild just starting to learn in a few wipes to get the hang of it quite unlike most of the trash previously encountered in the instance. Once it is down, however, the real fight begins. Azgalor, the last roadblock in the way of getting to Archimonde, and what a roadblock he is. The fight is fairly straight forward on paper but the combination of all of its elements makes for a challenging encounter. Take for instance, the fact that the boss hits like a truck (I've taken 9.x K white dmg hits after blocking 600). Add to that a rain of fire that makes life fun. On top of that add in a doom effect that WILL kill whoever it is cast on and summon a doomguard in their place. Oh, and did I mention the rather frequent 5 second long AoE silence? All in all there's a LOT to work on and plenty of room to screw up. A poorly placed RoF with a badly timed silence can spell death for the tank. Aside from the trash which gets a little repetitive while learning the encounter this is a really great fight in my opinion , all luck factor aside. It's nice to have an encounter that isn't learned in a night or two that easily unlike the previous encounters in the instance. I really look forwards to getting this guy down and hopefully I can report his death very soon
A view of the Horde Encampment from our Azgalor tanking position 
