Putricide: 2, Surreality: 0

Far from being the frantic DPS race I was hoping for, Festergut turned out to be a real pushover.  Granted, our two 25-man kills to date both occured with less than 10 seconds left on the enrage timer... but given that the fight will only get easier as our gear improves and ICC's self-nerfing feature kicks in, I'm satisfied with the cushion (and, truth be told, a little disappointed with the fight in general.  Were were definitely carrying players when we trounced Fester on Tuesday, and my ideal DPS check wouldn't allow us that luxury.)

However, Professor Putricide continues to get the better of us.  We managed to push into P3 a couple of times last night, and even suffered the humiliating enrage wipe that means we understand the fight's mechanics well enough to survive and now need to work on fine tuning our execution.  (Do other guilds gets excited by enrage wipes?  We've always tended to view them as a benchmark on difficult encounters.)

While I would have loved to have downed Putricide in our second week of attempts, I'm thrilled to be working on a new fight that is challenging enough to allow for actual progression.  Over the course of two weeks and 20 attempts, we went from utter chaos in P1 to near-masterful control, with Keaton calling DPS starts and stops to ensure that Putricide's health dipped to 80% exactly when we wanted it to.  (This kind of coordination has never been our strong suit, so I was suitably impressed!)  We also learned P2, and while it's far from perfect — Dear Surreality: l2dodgeball, kkthx. <3 Sari — we did manage to survive it several times with the raid more or less intact (give or take a shaman or rogue or two >.>).

In spite of the wipes, morale seemed high and almost everyone had something significant to contribute to the discussion.  I had a lot of fun, especially when a number of players decided to hang out on Vent after the raid just to chat.  We don't tend to be a particularly gregarious group outside of raids, so it was nice to share some stress-free downtime.

I'm really happy with Icecrown Citadel so far.  Raiding feels like raiding again.