You have to clear all the other bosses in ICC before you get there and I’m assuming your probably like my guild and can do that in a night if everyone is on their game, or finish off one or 2 fights the night after when people are mucking around a bit.

We are trying HLK but if we aren’t learning from mistakes and are wiping continuously the raid is being called early. Yes its frustrating to not really see much progress but its definitely not spirit crushing and tempers are not rising because of it.

My one piece of advice I will give is make sure you have 2 disc priests in the raid. Our raid leader (a disc priest who doesn’t like competition) refused us a 2nd disc priest for 2 weeks and we kept having people die to infest over and over again (probably doesn’t help that we have 3 resto druids and hots aren’t ideal for cleaning up infest).

When they finally let us take a 2nd disc priest all of a sudden healing was if anything boring and we started noticing all the mistakes that our melee team were making.

Whether we get the fight in the end or not, I’m not sure but I would be disappointed if we weren’t even giving it a shot.

We are actually very clear about our goals and guild policy when it comes to progression when we recruit, and have turned away people that we didn’t feel would be a good fit a number of times. I do think that helps us when in comes to situations like this, because being people know coming into our guild that we want to progress, but don’t want to blow the guild up in the process

But that doesn’t make it easy – and it’s still incredibly frustrating.

I don’t envy the strict 10 man guilds working on this encounter and I would absolutely agree that part of the hardest part is not having the right group to tackle it. When I was discussing it with the priest that’s in my group, his thoughts were the Blizzard crossed the line from “challenging yet fun” to “stupidly hard for basically no reason”.

I think I tend to agree with him.

Good luck on deciding what you are going to do as well!

I think a good number of people are feeling that we’ve had a good haul, similar to you, and they aren’t too concerned about it.

Actually, great minds must think alike, as we had already placed HM Halion as our next “goal” and have spent a few nights working on him, deeming him more “killable” than HM LK.

Summer is hard for progression, but we’ve seen good progress every night we’ve gone in, and I think with a bit of work and some good old fashioned elbow grease we’ll net a kill.

We also foster a lot of alt development – and several people have suggested that they’d rather aim for some alt ICC time over HM Lich King, so that is also something that we’ve been considering.

Also – grats on Invincible!

In terms of difficulty and frustration, I would say LK25 HM is leagues beyond LK10 HM. Even after having the guy on farm for 9 weeks now, we can still spend a good couple hours on him just because of crappy Defile placement, bad stuns, ill-timed transitions, and tank kersplats. (Our Halion HM kill this week was a 1-shot, with 2 ppl on alts to supplement our vacationing healing team and 1 spot empty; just to put things in perspective.) Invincible is an amazing ride (I won mine in week 3), but man does he come at a heavy cost.

If I might be so bold as to offer a suggestion … We struggled with a similar question in my alt’s guild (we’ve been sitting at 11/12 HM for months) and ultimately decided to try Halion 25HM first, because it actually does slot somewhere in between Sind HM and LK HM in terms of difficulty and coordination, and quite frankly, there’s less of a requisite for precision. We’re about a week away from a kill in the Alt guild, after which we may simply call it a day and take heart in the fact that we all still like eachother and don’t dread raid nights.

It takes a lot of practice to kill LK in 25 on HM, and a lot of repetition. It isn’t something to take on lightly and yes, it could wind up souring your players. But if the general guild sentiment is that they’d like to try, I’d advocate making it open to re-evaluation every week. And I wouldn’t begrudge your raiders if they wanted to bask in some downtime before things ramp up again.

In the end, I’d say it would turn on what people want to do. I think I’m seeing the end-of-expansion malaise set in for us, so I doubt we’ll progress a whole lot further than we have, which is 9/12 on heroic 10. Our 25 progress stalled at 10/12 back in Feb or so when the guild split… and although we can field a 25 once a week, one night a week is not enough to pursue progression, so…

If I were truly desperate for a 25 kill, I’d simply join one of the 2 gdkp runs the best guild on our server runs, but I’m truly not fussed on it… I have the kill, and that makes me happy because I have completed the story arc of the expansion. That’s all I’ve ever wanted and I’ve finally achieved it.