There seemed to be a bit of a pause between being dismounted at the end of the jousting phase and when the champions started beating on everybody. It's barely enough time for a skilled tank to hit them all with something, but it made the phase transition go much smoother, as we were able to get organized and get our weapons back on before the fighting actually started. I did find that it's best to hotkey a weapon equip macro if you don't already have one, though, as it is extremely chaotic and if you mess up the timing even slightly, it's pretty much a wipe.

It may be listed at 219 by some things, but it is definitely 213 level of stats. Just compare weapon dps or armor values to actual 219 and 213 gear.

This was fixed today - World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Recent In-Game Fixes - August 2009
"The weapon damage and armor of items dropped in the 5-man Coliseum Heroic version have been updated to match their item level."

This was listed in a hotfix note.

Edit: Beaten to the punch.

Another bug we found yesterday: Don't leave your totems down by the big door after killing the 3 champions. The trash immediately aggroed on it, killed us (since it was a 9-pull), and then reset back inside the doors, out of line of sight. The only way we could pull them was with an earth elemental totem (which killed us again, since it was another 9 pull) or a soft reset.

Another totem-related note: in phase 2 of the final fight, the corpse explosions are killing totems. I am not used to totems being this vulnerable to AOE, so it took me a while to figure out what was going on. But this is really what was going on, and here is a log file to show it:

Wow Web Stats

I don't know if this is a bug or otherwise but I zoned in during a boss's death on H5-man. I missed out on the loot (group loot) but got the Champion's Seal and WG shards after the loot was distributed. Zoning in during the other fights (not during a boss's death) were normal.

I speculate master looting would prevent that?

It was discovered on the Armory that ilvl 272 cloaks would be dropping in the new raid, likely from the heroic 25man chest. This puts the hardmode loot 50 points above the ulduar25 loot, a huge difference.

More likely the ilvl 272 cloaks are from doing the hard mode 25m within X attempts (25, was it?). It's already pretty well established that the hard mode loot is 258, and blues said previously that the Tribute runs would have a special reward. That would also explain why there are cloaks which are 272 but absolutely no other items as such an ilvl.

Probably 50 attempts.

The World of Warcraft Armory lists eight different chests spread out across the two difficulty levels. My guess is that there's a different chest for 0-24, 25-44, 45-49, and 50. There are also weapon drops (ilvl 258 for 25-man, ilvl 245 for 10-man) in three of the possible chests.

There's an ilvl 258 cloak that drops from the 10-man Tribute as well.

The hunter has a nasty multi-shot which hits cloth for 14k, he/she will also Disengage occasionally so if you place your clothies next to the hunter to avoid multi-shot they'll need to reposition at times.

It's harder to judge because Beasts of Northrend is probably tuned a lot easier than the rest of the instance, based on past raids. The overall difficulty of that fight is probably about the same as Mimi-10.

My notes on the 25 man fight -

Gormock won't use Impale when disarmed, but the 10s durations mean it's not much use for dropping stacks, just for reducing his overall damage output. Also in case it wasn't obvious, his melee stomp also causes spell lockout.

We lost tanks sometimes to Icehowl when he did a headbutt-melee combo, for around 45k in much less than a second. Is there something we are missing to mitigate this or is it just a matter of being fast with the shield buttons?

Also, can anyone confirm if Icehowl's enrage on successful trample is removable with Tranq shot? Not that anyone here has seen his enrage, of course.

Edit: And another thought - Can paralyzed victims be saved by Hand of Protection? What about PvP trinkets?

We found the 10 man to have high enough gear requirements to make it not faceroll easy. We started with a relatively weak group and had to sub in for some better players before we were able to clear it. Ulduar 25 geared players should have no trouble at all with it. Ulduar 10 geared players will likely be challenged decently. In particular, it seemed the tanking and healing requirements were a bit higher than initially expected.

Each week an additional boss will be unlocked. You'll fight all of the available encounters each week.

Edit: I can confirm that Tranquilizing Shot does indeed remove Icehowl's enrage.

We tried 25-man on Tuesday, with our regular raid group - (3/9 hard modes in Ulduar down) and 2-shot the boss - very easy.

I do want to confirm that the 10-man, however, is not faceroll easy.
We tried a mostly random group(good tanks, good but random DPS(almost all melee - I think part of our problem), 1 resto druid 2 offspec discipline priests(when one wasn't enough)) and couldn't seem to get it down in ~1 hour of attempts. I have no doubt that with any sort of real group we'd have gotten it, but even outgearing it (full Ulduar 25 gear + some hard mode gear) we failed to kill it in 10 man. 9 out of the 10 players in that group had killed the 25 man version.

10man is a good challenge, as mentioned a few posts up, similar to Mimiron. Learning the different stages is the hardest part.

We had 1 hr to zone in last night before server shutdown, and we managed to kill the Beasts with only myself reading anything about the fight beforehand.

3 Healers (resto drood, disc priest, resto sham) was fine and healing was fairly constant with only a few spikey patches when starting each new stage.
We had a mix of melee/ranged dps and had them ALL killing the adds on the first Stage, and then using Heroism to drop Acidmaw asap which worked a treat.

Quoting myself from the EU-forums:
What the one boss rule means is this:
Week 1 you face boss 1.
Week 2 you face boss 1 and 2.
Week 3 you face boss 1, 2 and 3.
Week 4 you face boss 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Week 5 you face boss 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Regarding the first boss of beasts, does anyone know what are the criteria for the snobold throwing? Is it health-based or time-based and whether he requires a certain number of ranged targets before targetting melee (i.e. Vezax shadow-crashes). Reason being, I'm wondering if it would be possible for ranged to quickly duck into melee range before the snobold is thrown and have a dedicated soaker run out and take it (the current off-tank for example).

It appears to be time based, and targets anyone including melee. Unless your DPS is very quick on their feet, you'll often have two up at once. They don't really do an excessive amount of damage, but if they're aggroed onto a caster they will silence them periodically. It's best to have any melee or an offtank hold threat while they are killed.

It took us about 2-3 wipes to get them down. 2 tanks, 3 healers, mostly ranged DPS. We're a fairly progressed 10-man guild though (only Yogg and Mimiron hard-modes to go). We had a few vague ideas going in, but the debuffs and emotes are descriptive enough to tell you all of the major mechanics within a few attempts.

Mimiron is probably the best comparison in Ulduar, although with a bit less movement-based difficulty. Meeting up for the Bile removal will be easier when boss mods mark people for the debuffs. Tanks were taking some big hits; we had one go down in P3 due to a stun followed by a melee hit 0.5s later. Aside from another tank being very quick on taunt, the only options I can see are aggressive healing, or potentially pre-emptive cooldown use, if it's on a regular enough cooldown.

EDIT: Another way to put it: NB-10 felt easier with Ulduar-10 gear than Ulduar-10 did with Naxx-10 gear on release.

We encountered the same bug, except that it applied to all 3 of the NPCs. All had been defeated and were lying on the ground (with people standing on them), but it would never start the normal combat part of the fight. They would just all 3 lay on the ground for a while, then one would try to get up and get a mount. We had to zone out and back in to reset the event.

NOTE: If you experience the above bug or somehow manage to wipe during the fight with the NPCs, you do not have to start the whole event over when you zone back in. The 3 NPCs will be waiting for you when you get inside.

Just want to add to this, week 5 you should also be able to face hard mode bosses 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 unless theres some other artificial lock in place?

I get the feeling that NB10 is tuned to a minimum of ilvl219 loot for healers and tanks, especially in P2 and P3 (large damage spikes on tanks), so it's not trivial in a month when everyone's got some of the higher ilvl loot. We one shot both 25 and 10, with 10 being significantly harder to heal with a not particularly weaker group (early u25 hardmode geared). 10 and 25 do seem to be the same difficulty, which I assume is the idea with 10 and 25 normal modes.