Effective 2/23/2010, Order of the Raven is retiring from 25 man progression raiding. Thanks to all our raiders past and present that have kept us going for the past 5 years. Effective 3/1/2010, Order of the Raven will be starting a more casual 10 man raiding schedule. The various pages will take a few days to get updated.

With the second wing of Ice Crown Citadel opening this week, we headed in for fun with the new bosses. Cleared the first 4 bosses quickly, then headed into the upper citadel. First off was a new gas barrier frogger mini-game, always love those. Then some interesting new trash mobs. I've got to applaud blizzard on this wing, some fun trash to clear and even the two named mini-boss dogs...(shouldn't they drop something? Maybe a low chance for a pet to drop..HINT)

We found Festergut around the corner, put in a little work on his abilities and raid composition to down him. Kill Shot

Rotface was up for the next night, an interesting fight with lots of dance moves to learn.. but down he went Kill Shot

Professor Putricide is up next for the end of this week, we're going to run some 10 mans on him for practice before burning the 25 man attempts this week.

Overall a good wing for ICC, and seems to be a step up in difficulty.

With ICC cleared so quickly, we took a step back into Ulduar25. Time to knock out some achievements we skipped before and for some of our new raiders a chance to start on them. Our first night in, we knocked out:

• Crazy Cat Lady
• I Choose You, Steelbreaker
• Shutout
• Unbroken

update - added a few more to this raid lockout

• Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood
• Lose Your Illusion
• I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare
• Stokin' the Furnace

Tuesday brought a new patch cycle with 3.3, attendant with the usual extended downtime and instance instability that accompanies large patches. We had scheduled a full guild meeting for Tuesday in anticipation of these problems. The meeting went well and will provide some upcoming plans for the guild.

Afterward, since everyone was itching to see the inside of ICC25 we headed out. ToC has been completely devoid of trash, so the return to a more normal instance setup let's us dust off the plow. ( I like the trap style adds! ) Pushed on through the clear and found Lord Marrowgar just waiting to spin around and light up the dance floor with us. After a few reminders that you don't stand in even blue flames, we dropped the sack of bones. He even held a few purple toys, like an early Santa Claus. We had to wrap up the 25 man due to the time, but a few of our hardy vampires went back for a 10 man clear, minus a buggy Saurfang.

Wednesday started out with completing the first weekly raid quest, Lord Jaraxxus was a push over of course. Jumped over to ICC25, Lady Deathwhisper sits in a room that's reminiscent of Shadow Lab from TBC, although I'd have to say Shadow Lab was the harder clear. A couple pulls to refine healing and dps assignments and she dropped like a rock. We will be taking remedial courses in Ghost Busting though. We took a boat ride, might have been a Carnival Cruise for all the difficulty of the gunship encounter. The boat deposits the raid on a little terrace with a unfriendly Deathbringer Saurfang. Despite the bugs, I like this fight, there's a lot going on with tank switches, marks, beast spawns, boiling blood, etc. It took a few attempts but we got him down, even getting I've Gone and Made a Mess in the process.

Then the bugs showed up, Saurfang is on the ground with zero health, but he's still attackable, his combat pulse is still active, and while the loot chest looks active we can't loot in combat. We tried clearing the zone, which fixed the in combat bug, but the teleporters to his platform aren't working. (We did finally get the loot, gratz Kandar and Synistur on the T10 tokens). Other 25 mans and even our 10man raid got hit by the Saurfang bug that makes him despawn after a soft instance reset. Need some more QA work on this.