My guild, Aquila have been steadily working on hard modes in both 10 and 25 man. We’re not a huge guild nor are we peeps who spend every minute of the day trying to beat the game. However we’ve been pretty successful back through TBC. Hard modes in Ulduar, heroic at least really have proven to be hard. Something like a dozen guilds worldwide have so far completed the [Heroic: Glory Of The Ulduar Raider].

This past reset we managed to do [Heroic: Orbit-uary] and [Heroic: Heartbreaker]. Thorim hard mode nearly joined them but we wiped at something like 20% – we did get [Heroic: Siffed] though.

Anyway this past night we had a shot at Steelbreaker last. We spent an evening on this last reset perfecting our strategy. Tonight we went in and BOOM one shot it! I must admit I was really shocked. From a tanking perspective it’s a real “oh shit!” fight. My job was tanking Brundir (he dies second in our approach) and taking over Steelbreaker as the third tank – we res the first tank (our warrior, Zekans) who then tanks again fourth blowing all cooldowns. Wearing my EH gear I have something like 45-46K HP buffed – even so with cooldowns there are still “oh geez” moments in the 30 seconds of tanking him. It really was smooth – so pleased for everyone.

With the announcement that the Ulduar meta rewards of the [Reins of the Rusted Proto-Drake] and [Reins of the Ironbound Proto-Drake] won’t necessarily be removed with 3.2 we’ll keep pushing away and see what happens.