Ulduar-10 Hard Modes

Apart from the regular Ulduar-25 runs during weekdays, my new guild also does Ulduar-10 runs during the weekend. Sometimes it is 2 groups, usually a strong "A" group (who have cleared Ulduar-10) and a much weaker "B" group.
Last weekend there were not enough people for 2 such groups so there was only one group, a mix of people from both groups. Since there was pretty good firepower and healing, we took on some hardmodes and achievements.

XT - we managed to kill him within I think 200 seconds or something like that. Very nice DPS, even I as a healer helped a bit :)

Hodir - we went for getting him down within 3 minutes, did a very good job with the crit buff but we were just 6 seconds short - I blame it on the fact that I had to heal all the time so couldn't help the DPS :)

Freya - we went at first right to the biggest challenge, taking her down with all 3 adds up. The complexity and intensity of the ensuing fight has to be experienced to be believed, I seriously have to say I didn't feel as challenged since trying OS+3. As a healer, the amount of stuff I have to do and be aware of is way above a normal Freya fight. Unfortunately, I was suffering from lag and DC issues (which in fact I have been suffering from for the last week or 2) all evening, and a healer not there 100% means an almost sure wipe in this fight. Nor was I the only one with such problems, plus we also started with an under-geared OT who was simply impossible to keep alive when he was tanking the 3 big adds. Well to make a long story short, after quite a few tries the RL decided to give up, we took down one of the adds and proceeded to 1-shot Freya+2. I guess all those attempts on Freya+3 helped us learn the fight well :)

We continued to Mimiron however it was too late to do anything serious with him so we just did normal mode, no hard mode for him. After Freya+3, one-shotting Mimiron seemed almost easy :)

I read in another blog that hard-mode fights were just "gimmicks", or "more of the same (boss abilities)". Having experienced first-hand some of them, I have to say that this is only partially true. At least so far for Council, Freya and (from what I've read) Mimiron, this is plain wrong. In addition, while there is nothing different about the Hodir fight mechanics when you are going for hard-mode, execution becomes everything and this does change the fight - it's no longer enough to beat the enrage timer, you now have to really execute perfectly in order to beat the much harder 3-min timer. If good fight execution isn't a test of hard-core raiding, then I don't know what is :)