Gloriosity Attained

It ended up taking a lot longer than I initially supposed it would, but last night with the help of one guildie and some pugs (!!), I got my last two achievements for the Cataclysm heroic dungeon meta. Those last two, if you're curious, were the Deadmines dream-gauntlet speed run and killing 60 cultists during the High Priestess Azil encounter. The healer for the last one didn't quite read closely enough when I explained it beforehand and pulled some of the guys with healing aggro, making the pull take longer and actually causing my guildie tank to die, but the achievements popped up regardless! Yay! And then the healer actually battle rezzed the tank and we went on to finish the encounter without dying. Whee!

Click for biggeration!

Terribly exciting!

In other news, I'm really, really, really hoping that we kill Cho'gall this week. The strategy we're using is really leaning pretty hard on the DPS, and especially our ranged. We leave our two melee on the boss most of the time while ranged try to murder the slimes. We've actually gotten it practiced well enough that we've started pushing phase transitions, but we haven't done so well enough yet to really get practice positioning the boss and killing/interrupting the tentacles.

I actually think Cho'gall is a pretty well-designed encounter, though. There's something for everyone to be doing constantly, and elements of it are challenging for everyone. For example, if I'm playing correctly, I should be able to keep the slimes immobilized for 12 seconds almost continually while applying good AoE DPS to them. I'm also using scatter shot and wyvern sting to break worship channels and helping MD the big adds to our add tank. Everyone else has a similarly frantic number of things to keep track of and do, and everyone's using way more of the abilities in their spellbook than they typically do.

I wouldn't want every encounter to be like this, but for a tier end-boss, I think it's pretty good.