After months of waiting for someone, namely Glen, to write some form of news post(s), it proved to be a total waste of time, so here it is, I am finally not so busy at work (read: nothing to really work on, but too many people around me so not being able to do randoms/VoA), wall of text inc!

Highlight of the past month is the Professor Purtricide kill. It took us a month or so of trying, and it proved to be the hardest encounter we faced in ICC up to date, tactics wise.

The fight itself has 3 phases, 1st being the easiest, and basically a preparation for latter phases, and a good benchmark of how good your dps is. In this phase he spawns two types of adds, one by one, periodically. The first being the Volatile Ooze - a green add, which picks a random person in the raid, roots them, and start moving towards them, inflicting a nasty damage in the process. After it reaches its target, it will explode, dealing roughly 70k of split damage to all nearby targets. Another add that spawns is Gas Cloud - an orange add, which picks someone from the raid and starts chasing and damaging them. Both adds must be killed asap, and the main problem we had is how to split the dps classes, so we could kill adds quick enough, and still be able to do damage on the boss. After trying all the possible combos, we ended with all dps killing the green add, and ranged with help from warriors and maybe one more melee dps killing the orange add.

Phase 2 is a longer version of phase 1, with 1 more element - bombs he casts on the raid, both melee bombs, and ranged bombs. Melee bombs deals damage and reduces your chance to hit by 75%, while ranged deals damage and increases your casting time by 75%. So, avoiding this is pretty much a must, although you can survive a hit from one.

Phase 3 is basically a nuke phase, but still you have to avoid those bombs, while the floor gets filled with green stuff you have to avoid standing in. In this phase he casts debuffs on the tanks, for each application he heals, and deals more damage to the raid.

Sound complicated? You can't imagine how complicated it was for us! Our main problem was that you can't really simplify tactics in any way, to let our usual kamikaze / zerg style do the work. We ended by tanking the boss near the green add spawning place, convincing the melee dps that they must dps the green add, and started to look really good, we were reaching phase 3 almost regularly. But, although phase 3 was supposed to be the easy phase, we had a lot of agonizing whipes (one at 40k hp left on boss!). Again, we had arguments as to when was the best time to use bloodlust, some wanting it at the very start of ph3, others wanting it as late as possible - we ended with BL at 15%, to please both sides. And then, Blizzard introduced a very nice 5% dps/heal/hp buff in ICC, and we one shotted the bastard with it! But imho, even without buff, we would have had a kill that night.



Next in line was the Blood Princes Council fight, which we were told is pretty easy, just a bit chaotic. And they were right, of course we had our shares of whiping, but that boss(es) proved to be nowhere near professor on difficulty.

There you have 3 princes, 2 tanked by regular tanks, and one tanked by ranged tank. They share the health pool, and you can dps only one at the time. Tactic was to spread the raid, in order to avoid static shocks, kite the fire balls if they were going your way, and make ranged dps worry about kinetic balls, not allowing them to hit the ground. After we got all that sorted, and letting Tak show us his tanking skill on the ranged prince, the kill was pretty easy - although, having a lot of ranged can make a fight last for 8-9 mins, giving us time for 2 mana tides/innervates, and bringing back some memories when bosses didn't have enrage timers.



After Blood Princes, we decided to give it a try on Blood-Queen Lana'thel. The fight is not so hard tactics wise, but you need insane dps and good spreading, and there is some fun element, when you get bitten by boss, usually the person right below tanks on threat), you get to do insane dmg with no threat on boss, but you have to bite someone else after 50 secs or so, or you will get mc-ed for the rest of the fight. That brought us some comical situations, like people not being able to see their targets for bite, even though they were shouting on TS "I AM RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU JUMPING YOU BLIND BASTARD!", which ended in blind person being mind controlled :) Anyway, we didn't manage to kill it, mostly because we need to practice a little more, especially on spreading and surviving the aoe after fear, our best try ended at 19% (that's 11 million of her health).

So last night, we barely managed to get a raid going, bringing one freshly returned player to raid, Walerian aka Speshtality aka Slavko, and decided to try the new boss, Valithria Dreamwalker. The fight itself is interesting, because you don't have to kill the boss, but rescue the poor dragon by healing it from half to full health, and protect it from a zerg of undead mobs.

As the fight goes on, more and more mobs are spawning, and it gets harder to keep the raid alive. On the other hand, the dragon spawns some portals, and you have to assign a few healers to step into it, pick some green clouds, each cloud you get will increase your healing and mana regen, and after portal phase is over have them spam healing on boss. After some time, we were beginning to get a grip of the fight mechanics, people were starting to kill mobs marked with a skull pretty quickly, healers stopped losing buffs, and we could sense a kill (heal in fact) was just around the corner. In true HyS fashion, on the very last try of the night, we managed to last long enough to have Leodris, Belfy and Mikro heal the boss to full health, picking loots and making a screen shot at 23:15 server time! Hardcore at it's best!



We were also doing 10 men in the spare time, one group actually managed to kill all bosses prior to the Lich King himself, but more about that when LK is dead. :)

After the numerous comments on the previous news posts begging and pleading for more witty, insightful commentary as to the goings on of Hybrid Species raiding… I thought I better keep the news fresh, even though recent 25 man raids have been a little… disheartening.

After initial fruitful steady progress in 25 man ICC we’ve laletly found ourselves stuttering and floundering a little. With the first wing now being a breeze, the second is proving less so, especially on Rotface, having 2 kills on the boss but still struggling to down him consistently enough to progress else where. It’s hard to pin this down to anything other than the casual nature of HyS, with many players maybe only raiding 1-2 nights of the 4 we raid it takes a lot longer for all players in the guild to learn fight mechanics with the core getting a little agitated that they have to go through the same mistakes with different people each week. This is nobodies fault as such it just the way HyS operates.

Anyway I digress, last night we were a few short of taking ICC25 progress any further so took two groups to ICC10. Every boss is pretty much a one shot now bar any major mistakes (i.e. wiping on the trash in the first room!) leaving time for attempts on 10 man professor. We even managed one of the new quests, whereby Rotface and Festergut had to be slain within 30 minutes of each other with at least 1 member of the raid surviving both encounters, which results in a bag of gems with a further 5 frost emblems inside.

This fight is extremely fun, but I’ll leave the details for our first 25 man kill, here’s the screenshot for our first 10 man kill, hopefully the 25 will follow shortly!

Another wall of text so soon after the last you say? Damn Right!

Festergut was the next encounter we would face in the Citadel, not dissimilar in looks to his “brother” Rotface. Initial tactics suggested this would be a quick tank and spank dps gear check that we could faceroll our way through with little to no problems. As many times before and I’m sure in the future, our theories were disproved.

The basic overview of the encounter is that Festergut is tanked in the middle of the room, with tanks swapping aggro due to a debuff that makes them explode on 10 stacks. On pulling the boss the room is filled with a blight, the ranged DPS and healers we had spread around the room ensuring an 8 yard radius as Festergut does an ability called Vile Gas on a specific target who then takes damage and loses control of character for a few seconds, however if anybody else is close the gas spreads to them also as they are vomited on.

Periodically Gas Spores spawn on players (not dissimilar to the Loatheb encounter), the raid then needs to spread between these spores, stacking on them till they explode, on explosion the damage from the Gas Spore builds your immune system, giving you a 25% resistance to the blight for 2 minutes, which is essential for future survivability.

After 3 rounds of spores, Festergut inhales the blight in the room increasing his damage for 15 seconds before spitting it back out at the raid, causing large amounts of damage, however you will survive if you have picked up the stacking debuffs from the spores.

As a whole this is a big gear check for how well tanks can soak up the massive 15-30 sec damage spikes, how well the healers can switch from raid healing to massive spike damage healing and how well the DPS can consistently put out 7K+ DPS whilst thinking about spore movement. The problem being it is also a skill check on how to use that gear!

The tactics are relatively simple to begin with, however, as with many boss tactics we had to adapt them to make them, how can I put this politely…. OK I can’t, retard proof! Initially we were having major problems with people running all over with the spores ending up with many not having the extra resistance for the blight and thus taking too much damage and meeting an early grave.

We simplified this down to certain people being marked and spores running to the three marked spots, one for melee and two for ranged, this alleviated the problems slightly but was still far beyond some of our 1 brain-celled life-forms. We were also having major problems keeping people alive in general especially the tanks, whom were being hit for 30k at times, and with healers having to move around the damage spikes were just too much to handle. We solved the healing issue by having all of our healers sit in the melee pack so they didn’t have to move at all and Leodris could no longer bore us with his “the tank can die between one heal and the next, don’t blame me”, yet blaming everybody else in the raid, their siblings, parents and grandparents, then moaning about Paladins in general again (we may have to begin calling him Marvin)!

We were getting a little closer with these tactics; however the spore running was still a little chaotic, so it was time to simplify again! Again we made 3 specific points for spores, but made things a little easier, if you has a skull you ran to the tanks, if you had a cross you ran to the melee and if you had a square you ran to the one healer designated to stand in ranged. The only thinking this left people with was if a tank or the designated healer got a differing mark, however a little shouting on TS would resolve this (eventually!).

With all these new tactics set, last night we headed to Festergut yet again, and in true Hybrid fashion, first attempt of the night…. we wiped on 1% or 0.3% if you want to be pedantic! The second attempt of the night people were a little excited and a few misplaced spores ended in another wipe (a couple of moments of dps having to think out of the box!), this time much less convincing. However picking ourselves up we dusted ourselves down and took down Festergut comfortably…. 10 seconds to enrage!

Due to the holiday season (not that we need a dedicated season to over indulge in drinking, eating, and slacking, Hybrids have a tendency to do this all year round) Blizzard was kind enough to give us four weeks of storming Icecrown Citadels first wing, the Lower Spire, before last week opening up a new wing, the Plagueworks, giving us access to a further 3 bosses, Rotface, Festergut and Professor Putricide.



Thankfully, we now have the first wing on farm status which allowed us to get straight to the matter in hand after quickly tearing through the first wing giving us the option of Festergut or Rotface, we hadn’t prepared tactics on either so it was pretty much a coin toss as to which we would attempt, prior preparation prevents piss poor performance and all that!

However, first we had to navigate our way through a gas room that many didn’t know existed, culminating in a few comical deaths as we edged our way through yet another game of Frogger, for those of us who are old enough to remember… After tip toeing through the gas, next on the agenda was some trash mobs, and what do Hybrids do with trash mobs when we have no idea what abilities they may possess? That’s right, we mindlessly aoe and hope and pray that tanks keep aggro and healers keep those tanks and us that know no better face rolling our aoe buttons alive! Several frantic minutes later and we managed to come out the other side of the aoe fest with only a few minor casualties (generally a few huntards but they are slowly taking over our raids; I counted 7 in one raid!).

A few more aoe trash packs later and we were onto two big dogs, Stinky and Precious and their mad scientist handlers, ok we’ll nuke them down just like the rest… wrong! Within seconds the entire raid was taking massive damage and within minutes we were all dead and to the tactics pages we had to trundle with our tails between our legs.

Once we (finally) managed to get past the dogs, we decided on tackling Rotface first, watched a few tankspot videos read a few tactics here and there and hastily had a few attempts. Chaotic? Damn right it’s chaotic! Now to me, this is a real boss fight, and I’m still not 100% certain I know what the hell is going on half of the time! Unless you are very lucky, this fight asks a question of all members of your raid, ensuring they are switched on and fleet footed in their actions, needless to say the first few attempts were rather disastrous.

The basic premise of the fight is that the boss is tanked in the centre of the room with ranged stood behind him. Every x amount of second a random player in the raid is infected with “Mutated Infection” which creates an ooze once dispelled / worn off the player, this small ooze is then kited until another player get the infection and creates another ooze, at which point the two are brought together to create a big ooze. The big ooze is then kited by a designated kiter, with each subsequent infected moving into the path of the big ooze before being dispelled and the small ooze joining up with the big ooze again… Still following? Ok, now there are taps that are being fixed throughout the fight that create a big green sludge on the floor (ooze Flood), which slows anybody stood in it down and gives out damage coupled with the boss periodically doing a sludge spray in a cone from the way he decides to face, meaning all dps have to often be quick on their toes to get out of the way.

Now, if all this wasn’t enough, once the big ooze collects 5 of the smaller oozes there is an unstable ooze explosion, meaning all raid members have to move away, but not too soon!

As you can guess we spent a few nights wiping in various convoluted ways, i.e. managing to get two big slimes up on multiple occasions, valves opening on the kiters heads, many many times the infected didn’t bother moving, this was resolved by the old trusted tactics of shouting abuse on TS until they twigged it was them everybody was shouting at.



After another reset we managed to take down Rotface, however this wasn’t without its hitches as we lost half the raid in the process, so we can hardly resign this abomination to the farm just yet, however I hope this is an insight into what we can expect from all future bosses.

With a little delay, now that the holidays (and slacking ;p) are over, meaning we are back at work, so we can do all of the small things (like writing a news post), I wish all the HyS members (past and present) all the very best in the upcoming year.



Year 2009 was another typical year for HyS, a mixture of great achievements and even greater failures - some would say you come out stronger when you make mistakes, because you learn and try not to repeat past failures. I would like to add that if that theory was correct, we would be the most pro players around!

It was a year full of ups and downs, starting with all the hype about the new expansion, which faded away relatively fast, due to pretty much boring, repeatable content. We farmed Naxx, EoE, and OS for months, and started to lose people in the process.

A new patch added Ulduar, and with some reinforcements, we cleared it, and farmed it, again, for months. And of course, we lost a couple more people in the process. I must add, killing Yogg Saron 25 man was the highlight of the year - whoever saw the fight will have to agree on this one.

Next patch brought another new instance, Trial of the Crusade, which was a big disappointment, mostly due to its shortness and lack of any real challenge.

Finally, at the end of the year, Blizzard brought us a long awaited instance, Icecrown Citadel, which is, compared to ToTC, the proper instance, with plenty of bosses and trash mobs :) And we started clearing, killing all the bosses that are available.

So, it was generally another great year for HyS, many players retired, with many new recruits, and old school players coming back, we cleared every instance we started, and most importantly, we had a lot of fun in the process.