Once upon a time, we were still struggling to move forward through Ulduar....

Ahh, those were the good old days. Of course, nothing has changed since then. We are still working our way through Ulduar and having fun doing so.

But come to think of it something has changed.....on this, our first kill, we went in with a full three tanks and three healers. It was a long and arduous fight, but we finally managed to take them down.

Flash forward to now....all the trio takes is two healers, two tanks, a bunch of DPS and it is a much faster kill. I like these later days better. :)

So we finally headed back into Ulduar ten for a serious approach at moving forward.

Over the course of the evening we managed to down all bosses we had downed before, clearing up Flame Leviathan, XT-002 and Kologarn in short order. Razorscale proved temporarily problematic as the priest Bjornstern remained obtuse regarding the nuances of the fight.

Once he got his head on straight the big dragon went down easily. So we moved onto the new maiden on the raid scene, Auriaya.

On the second try she dropped like a stone as we continue to move forward.

As our ragtag group moved a bit further into Ulduar we continued with a little more focus on Kologarn, the Boss/Bridge blocking progression further into Ulduar.

After a few tries, the healers worked out the kinks and managed to keep most of the group alive. As two of the healers started running low on mana the members of the team started to fall. With a mere three members standing his right arm was destroyed one last time....and with that another boss was downed.

So after we regrouped and figured out who we are and where we are going, we decided to resume our assault on Ulduar.

We had been taking out Flame Leviathan regularly - it was foolish not to. but we had really only dabbled in playing with XT-002. Some AFKs, some bad group make-ups, the need to continue to ensure gear was coming in - we just didn't put the group together.

I decided that this week was time for things to change. And change they did.

Of course Flame Leviathan went down like a wet sack of potatoes. If only taking out the trash didn't take so long. While the whole fight including the trash is great fun, it eats into the raiding time. Shortly before 9:00 (with an 8:00 start), the tank was down.

Moving on to XT-002, we took some of what we had learned and other bits of research and walked in and handily downed the child construct in one shot. Sinful Spirits 2, Ulduar 0.

On to Razorscale. The first pull was less than stellar resulting in a wipe. The mechanics were in place, the execution was not. Time for attempt number two. This time things went mostly without a hitch. The one regret is that the narrative leader (who conveniently was not in raid) neglected to mention a tank debuff. As a result, Pixelvixen met her maker in a second shot kill of the scaly boss.

Sinful Spirits 3, Ulduar 1.

Moving on to the Iron Council for Shits and Grins we took a couple of shots and ultimately found out that we need to work on our approach. That will come soon enough.

On the 28th, Ignis, Kologarn and Auriaya will fall.

After a break in philosophies in the guild became all too apparent, we saw a number of members leave. Good luck to them in their endeavors is all that will be said on the subject. But Sinful Spirits is a guild that is built to have fun and raid when they can. It can be seen all over the site here - we get serious when we need to, but we are ultimately here for fun.

The result of the turbulent times is that we lost some good people for this reason or that. But the people who remain are those who adhere to that philosophy of this guild. We are here to have fun. And we will rebuild. We are strong. We are united. And we will move forward. We will regroup and once again move forward.

Over the course of the next weeks we will continue to (and did) clear Naxx on ten man to ensure that loot continues to flow into the guild. We will (and did) continue to down Flame Leviathan. And most importantly we will continue to have fun.

We are even proving able to gear up alts and provide alternatives for the groups that take on the raid instances. Good times are returning indeed.