A Val'anyr story - by Napps

We finally did it. I have been sitting with 30 shards in my bags for months now. Myself and my guild, focused on progression, felt it was best to continue work on the new content as much as possible. Every month or so we spent a few attempts on Yogg-Saron when our group make up wasn't stellar for a progression night or we would pug people in once awhile to try 3 lights.
A big thank you goes out to my guildies who changed that yesterday. I jokingly (alright, half jokingly) asked for a Yogg+3 kill for my birthday so Sunday night being Valentine's day and expecting hardly anyone to come on we pugged a few players and made a go at it.

Pugging Yogg when some players had never seen Yogg before if not a fun thing. Players 2 tier levels above this content still need to play smart in order to down this boss. It's not a tank and spank, and the mechanics are still some of the hardest in the game. Going in without a clue is not an option.

Although coming close to making Yoggy soggy with only 3 keepers on Sunday night, with the pugs and group make up we were unable to down him.

Come Monday night, after being embarrassed all day by coworkers and 5 bajillion (yes that is a word.... in my eyes at least) birthday "thank yous" we logged in to start our regular Monday night raid. I was suprised that almost every single on of my guildies who came were on wanted to run Yogg for my birthday. It really makes me get all warm and fuzzy inside when my guildies all band together to make my day.

We all zone in and go down to Yogg. All of a sudden vent explodes with a bunch of "Uh... it's taking forever to cast an instant cast spell", "I went to buff and my arm is stuck in the air." Instance server crash. A half hour later our toons are finally released and we find ourselves back in Dalaran.

We decided to then go to ICC and continue clearing down Rotface and park ourselves in front of Valithria's hallway. Having been delayed it was close to 11pm and we were about to clear new trash to a new boss; the guildies voted to go back to Ulduar and play with Yoggy again.

The first few pulls of Yogg, were good pulls. We tried a couple of different things to make the fight go a bit smoother than it had in previous nights. It was the 5th pull that proved victorious!

Everything was going flawlessly - our dps was on the ball, we got very close to a 2 brain phase second phase but decided against it since we had a significant amount of tentacles up. The 3rd phase came around when the last crusher was at about 500k health. DPS didn't freak and stayed on their mark. We assigned our rogues, warrior and 1 ret pally to focus down the adds one by one - everyone else was on the boss.

Down a healer as I focused on the dwindling "roar" cooldown bar, I nailed Yogg in the mouth with my shards on the first shot. We spammed the tanks, I healer aggroed a couple of adds twice and luckily got iceblocked both times. Everyone kept their insanity in check - nobody had to be killed. We called turns, we performed sanity checks for our players we focused on continuing the rythym.

I was suprised when the Deux Vox victory sound went off and 3 Light in the Darkness flashed accross my screen. We didn't notice how close we were.

Thank you again to my guildies - You really made my birthday special.