Hurrah for bugs! Sort of.

So my guild has been wiping on the twenty-five-man version of the Northrend Beasts fight on heroic difficulty for what seems like a billion years now. We've been going back to Trial of the Grand Crusader every week for at least one whole night and do nothing but wipe on that one fight there over and over again.

There has been some progress, but it's been so slow as to be almost undetectable by the untrained eye. I mean, if I look at our attempts last night they were a lot better than the ones on our first night ever, but not much different from our attempts last week. That makes each night by itself seem very unsatisfying, because taken by its own merits it never appears to have achieved anything at all.

Yesterday we started the night with five wipes again. On the sixth attempt we absolutely aced phase two for the first time and everybody was alive when Icehowl entered the arena. Then he turned around and took out three healers at once with his freezing breath and some melee got punted into a pool of poison that was still lingering after Dreadscale's death. The remaining people fought on valiantly (I sound like Tirion Fordring there), but with half the healers dead the tanks quickly dropped like flies as well. As the last tank bit the dust, I thought "aw shucks, and it was such a good attempt" and prepared to die too. Icehowl turned around once more to cast his frozen breath and spewed. Then he breathed out. Then he exhaled. Those of us who were still alive were starting to seriously wonder about his lung capacity. Nobody was actually taking any damage, but Icehowl appeared to be stuck spewing a cloud of ice over and over again.

So the dps went back to attacking him and the remaining healers joined in with smites, lightning bolts and the like. The enrage timer came and went, and still Icehowl continued to breathe out. We smote him some more. And then he died.

There were cheers and laughter on TeamSpeak and in raid chat, and I couldn't quite fight a certain sense of bemusement myself, but at the same time it felt quite unsatisfying. I mean, it wasn't real, you know? I guess everyone agreed in so far as there were no victory celebrations on our guild website afterwards, though some argued that it was karma making up for the many bugs we struggled with throughout the weeks that caused us extra wipes (mass DCs in heroic mode only, Jormungars spontaneously despawning etc.). I can't entirely disagree with that either, and if nothing else it was nice to spend some time wiping on Jaraxxus for a change, who looks a lot more manageable by the way. It will just be weird to go back to more wiping on the Beasts now to learn to actually kill them without lucky bugs.

Still, while I've seen some interesting things happen during first kills of bosses before (like someone accidentally taunting Sartharion towards the end of our first Sarth+3D kill and making him spin all over the place), this one has to go down as my strangest first kill of a boss ever.