XT is also spawning more adds than I've ever seen in 25 man.

Blue said they are going to hotfix the number of adds, but they seemed to come from 3 piles regardless of where we positioned him. They may have fixed the trick of tanking him between two piles and broke their spawn in the process.

There were also significantly more adds than there used to be in the 10-man as well, even post-hotfix.

Is the Steelbreaker issue only on Heroic? Did 10 man last night and the explosion happened as the debuff faded, like normal.

A few undocumented changes in Ulduar that I noticed.

Freya

-Beams are hard to see
-Roots can be removed by various means (vanish, BoF, master's call, shape shift, PvP trinket etc)

Vezax

-Has 22 million hp, Animus has 9 million
-Animus spawns on the 6th vapor as opposed to 8th
-Shadow crashes are much more consistent (not anecdotal, we had a good 5 attempts where the time between was pretty consistent)
-Searing flames cast a lot more frequently (pretty sure he just casts it when the lockout ends every time, as opposed to sometimes not doing so).
-Enhancement shamans heal for exactly the same effectiveness that ret paladins use too, so those whacky enhance/resto specs won't work anymore

The transparent beams on Freya are certainly annoying, but the ability to remove roots by many means makes that aspect of the fight a lot easier.

Looking at the above changes to Vezax one might come to the conclusion that he is much easier, but I would say that he is roughly the same as before, maybe a bit more difficult. A new guild just trying the hard mode will have much more attempts on the boss, and obviously more mana. For more veteran guilds you will definitely notice the JoL change and well, let's just say you won't be complaining about a lack of shadow crashes in p2 ;P

With regard to Vezax - if the Animus spawns when the sixth cloud is up, does that mean you can use two clouds on hardmode? Or did they reduce the total number of clouds to six to compensate for his reduced HP?

Clouds stop spawning after the Animus spawns.

Like Corrupted Wisdom, there is now a debuff called Corrupted Rage

Corrupted Rage
Your insight into Shamanistic Rage is intensified but corrupted by General Vezax's Aura of Despair, hindering your ability to heal.

I can't recall the name of the debuff (maybe there isn't) but paladins who were specced into Judgements of the Wise would heal at 10% effectiveness (or something like that). This essentially prevented holy paladins from speccing ret for this encounter and having essentially unlimited mana. It must have been a huge oversight on blizzards part to prevent ret/holy specs from emerging, but allow the use of enhance/resto specs in 3.1.. thus this change.

Somebody else can clarify it a bit more, because I honestly don't play a shaman, but our regular enhancement shaman pointed this out to our typical resto shaman last night (who specs enhancement for unlimited mana for Vezax) asking him to look at how much he was healing. Sure enough he was healing at ~10% effectiveness as opposed to 100%. Makes sense though.

[e] - See above post!

I'm looking for advice from experienced guilds out there. My guild just downed GV HM last week and is down to Freya and Mimiron HMs. Our leadership seems to be split on what to go after next. My personal opinion is that we go after Mimiron next. We are a very top-end heavy group, with a good 5-7 players who could play for any guild in the world, but are past that point in our lives. Then we have a solid core of players who are very solid, capable players. But then we also have a small consensus of players that, due to one reason or another, are uncapable of picking up basic principles in any semblance of any acceptable time frame. I mean players who are heavily skill-capped.

With us, we have to design our strategies around reduction of mental bandwith needed to execute a given strategy to help mitigate their ability to wipe the raid.

So with that being said, and taking into account all recent changes and/or nerfs to these two encounters, which one of these do you suppose we dedicate our next couple weeks to?

I would recommend Freya depending on who your core is. Freya is primarily stressful on healing. The actual mechanics aren't much harder than the normal mode, there's not that much to understand, and the hardest thing is making sure that you're not interrupted or you can react well to bursted down players who got unlucky. If your bad players are the healers, Freya is going to be hard. If they're the good ones, it's probably going to be slightly easier to carry them. Also, you can work on the +1 and +2 modes as practice.

Mimiron, early on, I think really requires everyone to be on a certain level. It's stressful on healers, it's stressful on DPS, and it's sufficiently different than the normal mode that it gets everyone out of their comfort zone. The nerfs do make it easier, and it's probably an overall easier fight than Freya+3 - but it's less able to allow multiple people to be carried.

Freya was finally nerfed, I think with those nerfs it might put it back down below Firefighter in total difficulty.

Should be fixed after a minor patch. MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Realm Restarts - Patch 3.2.0a - 8/19/09

* Fixed an art issue with Freya Hard Mode where the light beams were visually too hard to see

---

Freya hard-mode is relatively simple with three or more Paladins. When we went up to four the fight went from difficult to just annoying -- Concentration Aura and Aura Mastery on Conservators and Hand of Freedom on the roots takes away two of the most annoying aspects of the fight.

With the million-and-one ways to break roots now, I wouldn't really regard them as a major component of the fight; especially for Alliance players. Human/Gnome racials can break roots, Shapeshifting for Druids can break roots, Shadow Priests can Fade out of them, and for the very few classes/specs who can't self-break them somehow, you have Blessing of Freedom. Since the patch, I don't think we've killed a single root. The Invisible Sun Beams were literally the only difficult component, and now that it's been fixed, I'd rank Freya at a Thorim/Hodir difficulty.

Unfortunately, that's a no on ghost wolf breaking roots.

EDIT: Delete Post please! I was wrong, wrong, wrong!

Earthen power does not break or grant immunity to roots, only to snares/slows. Outside of a PvP trinket and wolves sprint an enhancement shammy has no way to reliably break Strengthened Iron Roots.

Spirit walk doesn't work? I admit I haven't done this fight as enhance, only resto, but I imagine if HoFreedom works, there's no reason Spirit Walk wouldn't. If the shaman only got rooted a couple times in the fight, he probably would have been able to break out by saving Feral Spirit until then. Apologies if I'm beating a dead horse here, but I'd like to clarify as I'll probably be going enhance on this fight soon.

Feral spirit slipped my mind for some reason, spirit walk naturally works and should instantly break them with auto-cast enabled whilst the wolves are out. Pet AI has been even buggier than usual since 3.2 however and sometimes they'll refuse to respond to commands.

Has this always been possible, or only with the release of the latest patch? I.e. did the silence debuff override Aura Mastery whenever it pulsed?

It worked before 3.2

We got 3 more HM left for the glorie of the ulduar raider achievement and i would like some advice on the amount of healers needed per fight. Our healing setup is currently:
- disc priest (me)
- holy priest
- resto shaman (its his offspec, normaly elemental)

We got mimiron, general and yog HM left and i was wondering how many healers all fights need. Both me and the holy priest are ulduar25 geared.

On mimiron we used 3 healers
On general we used 2 healers (where disc shields+glyph helped alot) but only had 3 tries so far and got to 30% then the healer mana problems arrived (still need INT trinkets!)
Yog havent tried him HM yet only normal.

What i was wondering now was more like should we try mimiron with the shaman in elemental and let him trow some offheals if needed. His dps is around 4-5k so would help alot to get faster to the fases.

We use 3 healers on Mimiron, our standard combination being Priest/Druid + Paladin or Shaman.
The priest can be disc or holy both specs works very well here.

For Yogg 1K (and Yogg 0K) we use 2 healers

For Vezzax we prefer to use 3 healers because we always use a Disc priest in shadow crash to spam shield the ranges. This choice prevents more heal on Vezzax than the damage a dps class could do.