Hello, lately there's been going around quite some rumours that we were assisted by GMs during our RF kills in Ulduar. This simply has no truth to it and I will dispel these rumours by giving you a vivid overview of MEMORIES, starting all the way back at the PTR-stage.
We started doing PTR quite early and like many other guilds we noticed that there was a lot of work that had to be done. We started to do PTR quite regularly, in the start we were mainly focused on discovering bugs and anomalies. By taking notes during the PTR raids, as well as browsing our logs from PTR very in-depth, we were able to identify the majority of them, which were forwarded as bug reports. Since we kept doing PTR regularly, we got approached by Malaco (GM) to do PTR runs with devs watching, to make collection of data (as well as tuning) easier. The first thing I did when I got approached was to recommend other guilds we knew were also doing PTR runs (Mnemonic at the time, Infinity, The Company).
We were doing 25-man PTR runs which lasted 3-5 hours, 3 times a week. Needless to say, it became very hard to encourage guildies to keep coming to PTR and eventually towards the end, we always had 4-5 new people with us, to fill up the raid (thank you). We kept doing this pretty much until release day, April 27th.
OK so, April 27th - release day. We had around 30 raiders ready at the time of release, we got a lot of preparation from the PTR and tactics/setup for all bosses had been carefully pre-planned. Our plan was to go for RF Yogg and to achieve this we naturally intended to skip the optional bosses (Ignis, Razor, Iron Council & Auriya). Starting on FL, we had all vehicle's pre-planned, as well as demo driver, demo launchers, chopper pickups etc. However, we do hit quite a bump since one of the turrets on FL bugs out, which leads to some confusion and results in getting a very slow FL kill (probably wasn't RF).
Nonetheless, we head straight to XT. Here, we get a very quick RF kill (4m 30sec) and we are now leading the race. Kologarn is also a rather quick one-shot without too many issues. Next is Hodir, which we kill RF in 3m and 39sec, not very far away from a HM kill. We got a lot of practice on PTR, to properly maximize Storm Clouds and other crucial DPS mechanics of the fight. Thorim is next. Not wanting to waste any time setting up P2 positions, they were all pre-planned, everyone knew their exact spot. Halfway into the gauntlet, the realm crashes and when we come back, we notice Thorim's HP has been buffed (now 61m without the -HP/-DMG buff he receives when Sif leaves, 40m or so with the debuff). We go again, gauntlet and arena P1 are without difficulty as expected. However, P2 is a bit more challenging, mainly due to a few newer players still not having complete understanding of the fight as well as melees chaining CL. We manage to kill him just as his stacks were getting unbearable, with around half the raid alive.
Freya is next, we clear the trash and kill the Elders. When we pull Freya, she spawns ALL THREE add waves instantly. We wipe it and move on to Mimiron while waiting for a fix. Mimiron is a bit troublesome but we one-shot him with a pretty slow kill.
After Mimiron is killed, we go and clear Auriya while waiting for hotfix on Freya. We start clearing some adds to Ignis while waiting also, then the realm restart is announced and we go back to Freya. We logon right as realm is up again and kill Freya without too much trouble.
We wipe one or two times on Vezax due to errors on our side and then we kill him as well without too much issue.
Finally, we've arrived at Yogg.
Yogg has around 115 million HP. Brain Link did not work at all (however, this is minor due to having Sanity Wells), Malady spreads to multiple new targets instead of ONE new target, P3 adds worked correctly. Crushers had just below 6m HP. We began altering our setup and strats, especially practicing our p3 execution. After hours of wiping and progressing on the fight, we managed to score a kill 1min before the enrage which can be seen in the last photo of this album: http://imgur.com/a/AZVQA . As for the Death's Demise, we obviously did not kill Yogg + 0, it was just a scripting error from the devs. Titles + Achi were reverted shortly after.
There has been a lot of talk about how bosses have been buffed after our Wednesday kills, in both 10m and 25m. We will have to see the difference ourselves tonight in our 25m raid, however for the people that believe our 25m kills were super-easy underbuffed bosses, we went into 10m to see bosses "after the buff" and that resulted in the following:
XT HM kill (on thurs, before buffs?): https://gyazo.com/b4a6fbb38680c1bdb059662459d5b8a3
IC HM kill (on thurs, before buffs?): http://imgur.com/9z5IT5T
RF Thorim HM kill (on monday, after buffs): http://imgur.com/gFhEsID (I know the Achievement for HM bugs sometimes, however this was a legit HM kill. We got a Mjolnir Runestone to prove it :P)
We then went on and cleared Ulduar 10-man yesterday and ended up getting a super clean Yogg-10 kill: http://imgur.com/bb3jjUw
inb4 TL:DR
