Lightning Round in Ulduar

Saturday night and time for round two in the Halls of Lightning.

Last time we went in to the instance cold to learn the fights.  We made it through to Loken, died, found ourselves faced with respawns and a late hour, and decided to call it a night.

But we came back confident that we could finish off the instance.  For starters, we were finally all at level 80.

80 Priest – Skronk
80 Mage – Ula
80 Warlock – Bungholio
80 Warrior – Earlthecat
80 Paladin – Vikund

If nothing else, level 80 gave us the multiple Ula option.

And we felt that our first run gave us what we needed to know to take on the bosses.  So there we were again, standing in the doorway.

Enter the Halls

We also all grabbed tabards for factions with which we wanted to raise our standing.  Skronk and Vikund went with the Wyrmrest tabard, having found the Wyrmrest daily quests to be annoying and few in number, while Earl, Ula, and Bung picked the Knights of the Ebon Blade.

Once in, we did our dance with General Bjrangrim, shadowing him around his circuit to kill off all his allies until it was just him and his two minions wandering the room.

General B getting charged up

We then waited until he hit a point where his electrical charge buff faded and went after him.  Earl danced with the General while the rest of us took out the minions.  We then assisted Earl, bringing down the General on our first try.

That lead us to the slags, but we learned the hard was last time around how to deal with them.

Slags for the memories

We ran through, bearing to the right (something decided when we were already in motion and one of us realize that we’d all better go the same route) to lead all the slags up to the steps where it was area affect spell time to eliminate them.  After the slags and a some yard trash, it was our turn with Volkhan.

I was pretty sure we could handle Volkhan.  Four of us happened to be on the night before.  We went in to scout the Halls of Lightning and to do a quick bit of faction for Earl as he was very close to hitting honored with the Ebon Blade, but had already done the daily quests.  On a whim, the four of us took on and defeated Volkhan.  And if the four of us could do it, then adding in Warlock DPS should make it easy.

Having figured out that the minions he summons explode, we tried a new tactic.  We decided to keep close to him, keep the minions in one concentrated area, and either burn Volkhan down before he could set them off or have them all in one spot from which we could flee.

It mostly worked.  We won.  The minions were not as cooperative as we would have liked.  Earl had trouble holding aggro on them as they seem to reset their target now and again.  Volkhan also made a last minute lunge at Ula, who opted to ice block.  That at least answered the question about whether the multiple Ulas would all ice block or not: They don’t.

The real Ula on ice

So far so good.

Then we hit our first snag.

We couldn’t really remember how the next section, the Hall of Watchers, behaved.  We messed around a bit with it last time, but hadn’t really figured out the pattern.  So we decided to treat it like the slags and see if we could just run through as a group and take whoever followed at the far end.

That didn’t work out.  We ended up with six guys whacking us as we ran to the far end.  We wiped.  And we wiped with the watchers wandering all over our corpses, so we had to release rather than use the soul stone we had up.

After our return, we came back and pulled the groups still wandering in the hall one at a time, bringing them all the way back to the entrance, until we had cleared them all away.  Then we seemed to be able to walk safely to the far end.  I think we have the hall figured out now.

That left some rounding up of trash before we faced Ionar.

Ionar awaits

We did okay against Ionar last week.  He is a pretty standard fight, with a couple rounds of him disappearing and leaving electrical sparks wandering around for a short duration.  All you have to do is stay clear of those sparks until the draws them back and reforms and everything is fine.

The first time Ionar did his routine though, Earl ran really far away.  Far enough that when he reformed, Vikund had to do a few rounds with Ionar.  But that is what they make health pots and health stones for… and priests… and lay hands.  It didn’t help that Vikund had gotten caught by the sparks right before he reformed.

Still, he lived and Ionar went down.

Which meant that the way was clear… minus lesser mobs… between us and Loken.

So we cleared the way.  A little bit of proximity aggro surprise Vikund and he went down, but was quickly ressed.  And soon we were preparing to face the main boss yet again.

We looked up his attacks and decided that we really had two options.

The first, the ping-pong approach, was to try to avoid his lightning nova attacks by running away when the emote for them came up.  This had the advantage of avoiding damage, but meant that we would have to run around, reform.  And it would also leave us exposed to his pulsing shock wave attacks which hit harder the further away you are from him.

The second approach was to pull everybody into melee range, ride out the lightning novas, and just burn him down as quickly as possible.

We chose to second approach.  Skronk, our alchemist, provided us each with some potions to help us get through at least the initial lightning nova.

We each drank one before the fight, then got right in there with Loken.

The fight at Loken's feet

Skronk seems a little too far out in that screen shot, but it worked.  We did not take that much damage and Loken went down surprisingly quickly with all of us unloading on him.  Once he fell, we got the achievement.

There was even some decent loot this time around.  Our recent motto for drops has been, “You’ve got mail!”

Vikund ended up with the Fists of Loken, a decent upgrade for him, while Ula won the roll for the Ancient Measuring Rod.

Loken defeated

All of this finished up a bit sooner than we expected.  We rounded off the night by doing a couple of rounds in the Isle of Conquest battleground.  Lots of turret and vehicle fun to be had there, though you feel a bit naked when you’re on the ground alone.

A couple of us die hards waited until after midnight and did the Argent Tournament daily quests again.  It was a hot August weekend in California at least, so there wasn’t much point in going to bed until it got a little cooler.  At least that was my excuse.

Eventually though we called it a night.

We should now be lined up for the Oculus next time.