I posted a little while back that I raided in World of Warcraft for the first time in many, many years. We managed to take down 6 our of 8 bosses in the new raid on that evening leaving two bosses alive. Not on purpose but simply because there was a difficulty spike on the 7th boss that required a bit more practice. A few days later we went in and downed the last two bosses.

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The Silken Court

The first issue in this raid presented itself at the second to last boss called the Silken Court. All the bosses leading up to this one were easy and basically a one shot for our group. This boss is difficult for a number of reason. It's a double boss fight with the bosses meaning you have to control two bosses. It's also a three phase boss fight meaning you have to remember what happens through three different phases.

Our main issue were tied to two abilities. One of the bosses called Anub'arash will every now and then charge across the arena. If he finishes his charge and hits the opposing wall it will wipe the group. He has to be stopped by two people stepping into a spider web and pulling the web across the charge path to stop him. Sound easy enough, but it requires some coordination as the web will snap if pulled to far apart and you only have a time window of 10 seconds to do it.

The second issue comes in phase 2 when the other boss called Takazj casts debuffs on three random people. These need to be dispelled at which time they'll just to the nearest player or enemy, also giving them the debuff. For this the people need to run to Takazj and call out for a dispell so it hits the boss herself. This needs to happen three times in roughly 10 seconds. This was our biggest issue and it took us roughly 10 attempts to kill the boss.

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Queen Ansurek

Queen Ansurek is the last boss in the raid and one would think she would be the hardest one. Turns out she's not. At least not on normal mode. This is also a three phase fight but it's a lot easier to control. It doesn't rely so much on individual people dealing with mechanics but rather on the positioning of the group as a whole. It's a lot easier to coordinate everyone going in one place.

I think it took us five or six attempts to kill her and there wasn't any one ability that gave us a lot of grief. Wipes were mostly tied to getting to a new part of the fight and not quite knowing what to do, which is natural.

With Queen Ansurek down it means I've finished my first raid in World of Warcraft since the release of the Cataclysm expansion in 2010, and I even did it as a tank. I'm quite happy with that. I'll probably be taking on heroic mode next which is the same raid but harder, giving the bosses more health, more damage and new abilities to deal with. Let's see how that goes.

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^{All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.}

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