One of my main goals for this season in World of Warcraft: The War Within was to take down the new raid in heroic mode. Raiding is one of my favorite activities in this game and it's something I've been missing for the last 10 years due to not committing enough time to it. It usually requires 2-3 hours set aside for 2 days of the week. This time around I decided I was ready to commit. I do not regret it.
The fall of a Queen
When we did Queen Ansurek on Normal mode it took us 8 attempts to take her down. On heroic mode we needed 130 attempts to take her down. The difficulty spike is quite insane on this one. It's also worth mentioning that this is a 7 minute long fight with our average attempt lasting close to 5 minutes. That's a lot of minutes spent fighting the one and same boss.
What makes this boss hard is that it's a three phase fight that requires a lot of coordination. Phase 1 is the longest phase and it has a lot of individual mechanics that will wipe the entire group of a single person fails. There's also a lot going on that will simply kill anyone outright. If you go into phase 2 with 1-2 persons dead you can't really expect to complete the rest of the fight. Things need to be handles perfectly.
My role as a tank wasn't to bad. It all quickly became routine and me and the other tank basically handled the fight on auto pilot by the end. One thing I really enjoyed about this fight is the fact that I had ot plan out my abilities for the whole fight. I could have smashed a lot of cooldowns early in the fight to get a little bit more damage output but that skill would be severely needed for a later mechanic meaning I had to hold back. It's really fun when you get to use your entire toolbelt like that.
Ahead of the curve
This is my first time getting the ahead of the curve achievement in World of Warcraft since it was introduced. These achievements are only available while a raid tier is current content. Once new content drops and we're able to acquire better gear these achievements go away. They're basically like a trophy to show you're on top of your game.
This season started on the 10th of September and ends sometime in February. Meaning you will have to take down the Queen on heroic mode before that to get this achievement. I was able to get it on the 4th of November, leaving me plenty of time to chill and relax until the next raid will release in February.
Until this I'll probably just take it easy in the game, focus on collecting mounts and transmogs while also delving a bit into the hardcore mode for Classic.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.