A guild’s balance between achievements and progression is best individually tailored for each group. On our server we have competitive guilds who have slammed through Ulduar AND many of the achievements. We have guilds who are ignoring achievements and just working on bosses. And then there are guilds that thrive better on achievements than with strict “who killed what first” progression. We’re the latter, I think. We’re not the fastest guild by far, or the most uber skilled, but as I’ve said before when it comes to taking on a challenge: sign us up! Let’s do this thing!
The result is that we’re “late bloomers” on the realm guild rankings, not that I worry too much about those things. We’re routinely in the top 12 based on strict boss progression, which is great, but often closer to the top 6 for achievements. So given that my guild clearly has certain strengths, which means we have skills and some prestige in this area, do we focus on getting all the bosses in Ulduar down now, or dither around a bit and look at achievements?
Thus far I’ve been moving us towards downing new bosses, which has been great fun. After some chats with officers, though, it seems like now might not be a bad time to also start working on the achievements for those first, easier nerfed-all-to-heck bosses. Dragging dwarves to Razorscale’s head during DPS phases should be easy enough and will eventually get us Heroic: Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare, and I think we could probably tinker with Heroic: Nerf Engineering a bit. I wouldn’t want to spend an entire raid night working on achievements at this point, but it seems an appropriate time to fold some of them in with farm content.
It was with that in mind that we went for Heroic: Orbital Bombardment last night, and it was remarkably easy. You get an extra badge for the tower, which comes in handy now while people are still eager to get badge gear. Keep in mind that we’ve done this once, so this strategy lacks refinement and we might be missing something.
When you leave up any number of towers on Flame Leviathan, the boss increases its health by 25%, and its damage by 15%. We left up the Storm Tower, which is associated with Thorim. This tower increases FL’s physical damage even further, particularly when it hits your vehicle. It also means FL can use Thorim’s Hammer (he’ll announce when he’s using it). This creates beams of blue light around the room. These beams are bad news, and will damage you more the closer you are to them. Stay away from the light!
There are two key points we found to defeating FL: Shutdowns and pyrite stacks. Send three ranged DPS and a melee/healer hybrid (we used an enhancement shaman) on top to destroy turrets and stun FL. Mark the catapultees and their assigned rescue vehicles, making them easier to spot. One of our cycle drivers recommended looking up in the air when catapultees are thrown off FL so you can track them right away.
The majority of your damage is going to come from pyrite stacking. One of our demo drivers, who had a steady supply of pyrite as his passenger wasn’t being catapulted, did over twice as much DPS as everyone else. It is extremely powerful. Much like phase 3 of Malygos, ideally you’ll have a rolling stack of 10 pyrites on FL as much as possible, but it’s critical during Overload. We’re still figuring out the balance between catapulting people as quickly as possible for faster Overloads and restocking demos with pyrite. I think at a bare minimum demo passengers who have been ejected should grab some pyrite before loading themselves in the catapult again. Theoretically a rotation of pyrite-boulder-boulder-pyrite will keep the stack alive while not burning through ammo too quickly. (Thanks to guildie Hamilinde for the awesome pyrite insights!)
You’re not going to have to execute all these concepts perfectly to kill FL+1. However, it’s excellent practice for adding more towers in the future, when DPS and coordination really, really do matter. We tried FL+2, with the Tower of Life also left up, and although those plants ate our lunch we got it to about 44%. Soon!
Anyway, if your guild regularly one-shots basic Flame Leviathan, I highly recommend trying a tower!
