After two nights of trying, last night my guild finally defeated the Door Boss in Ulduar and zoned into the instance for more than 10 minutes. I’m not sure what Blizz did, but to their credit the server was rock solid last night and it was a real pleasure to see some new content. A big part of the fun was trying bosses with very little information. Previously by the time we got to a boss there was a tried and true strategy that had been used hundreds of times. We may have tweaked it a bit on occasion, but generally we just read the very detailed write-ups, watched the very detailed videos, and did what we were supposed to do. This time, though, we’re walking in with a very general overview of what the boss DOES, and… that’s about it. It’s awesome.

The most difficult part of Flame Leviathan was organizing 25 people into vehicles. Does everyone have a gunner? Are you all in? Now now, I’m sure X didn’t mean to steal your tank. No, stop trying to blow each other up. Sigh. Once that was over, though, we just kind of rolled our way through it and killed the boss on the third attempt. I would love to tell you our strategy, except I spent the whole fight tossing bombs and giggling to myself. I will say that we all somehow stumbled into getting the Heroic: Shutout achievement, which was pretty amusing. System Shutdown, eh? Maybe I’ll look into that for next time.

There’s no trash between Flame Leviathan and Razorscale. There are two alternating phases to the first half of the fight, which you’ve probably read by now: one with many adds and lots of fire, and one with an angry chained dragon who needs DPSing. For the second half of the fight, you need to keep Razorscale moving so the tank doesn’t stand in fire, and switch tanks occasionally to avoid too many stacks of an armor melting debuff. We didn’t kill her last night, but we did get her to 5% in a very controlled and repeatable fashion, so I feel confident in sharing our strategy as a good one.

First, we broke the raid into two groups. Each group had even numbers of melee and ranged DPS, two tanks, and three healers. A seventh healer was on harpoon duty. (Although there’s quite a bit of raid damage while the adds are up, I think we’ll try it with six healers next time.) One group went north, and the other south. We tried to tank the mobs perhaps 2/3rds of the distance between the harpoons and where the tunnelers appear. First priority for DPS was Watchers, who cast chain lightning, and then Guardians. Occasionally a Sentinel will appear. They whirlwind, and hit hard. Whichever tank picked up the Sentinel would drag it into the middle of the room and then all ranged would immediately stop what they were doing, turn around, and blast it. Avoiding fire really is key to this fight, and you should keep people topped up on health as much as possible.

When the first three harpoons were ready to shoot, our seventh healer would run over and pop them, and then wait for the fourth. She would then give a warning on Vent, and DPS would move into position for the dragon. I think more than anything this last harpoon is where we can optimize our DPS. Popping it too early means melee in particular are slow to get going, costing valuable damage. You want to make sure that no Sentinels are up, the tanks securely have any extra adds, and DPS are ready to rock. When those conditions are met, bring on the dragon, use Heroism/Bloodlust and cooldowns, and kick her ass. The raid takes very little damage during this phase, so healers can help with DPS as well.

We traditionally needed just a few seconds of a third landing phase to get her to 50%. I think ideally you’d only need two landing phases if you tweak things just right.

Once Razorscale hits 50%, she is grounded and can be picked up by a tank. The tank should move her slowly and constantly to avoid standing in fire — much like tanking Grobbulous. Razorscale has a raid-wide debuff that will eventually kill you, and a second one that melts the tank’s armor, so you’ll want to kill her quick and swap tanks occasionally.

We consistently got to p2 with 0-2 people dead, but hit the enrage timer before we could kill her. I think with a little tweaking of harpoons, this dragon will be toast. It was a great, fun fight with unique mechanics, and I can’t wait to see what else Ulduar has in store for us!