Thursday, December 10, 2009

Improvised Awesome

It has been a long time since I actually got to try new content with absolutely no background information or previous experience. It is by far what I enjoy most in the game. Testing my mettle against the unknown and coming up with tactics on the fly.

I was once told after someone had the opportunity of helping me out on a low level alt on their low level alt that they understood why I react so well when things go to hell, because that is how I usually play. I actually tone it down in groups for the benefit of others (not enough for some/most).

So right on patch day I grab my sister and her girlfriend and start looking for a couple more for the first of the three new 5-mans. We find a couple more guildies without much trouble and after ten minutes or so of bouncing off the instance entrance we get in.

We grab the quest, spread the buffs and start pulling. Immediately we notice that the big boney things spell reflect on occasion. Speaking of which there are few things more amusing than a mage two shotting themselves with lucky crits. Perhaps not to the mage, but everyone else gets a good chuckle.

Exploding skulls, healing adepts, shadows that hop around like etheral rabbits, oh a boss. I made the unusual suggestion to clear the extra bit of trash before the boss just in case since we had no clue what would happen or where we might have to move.

We start in on the boss and things are going well, a little spike damage to heal, but pretty intermittent. Then souls start getting ripped out of people and head for the boss. What does a tank do when there is something new floating around in the group, I tanked it! Boss heals to full after absorbing the soul. Hmm, that didn't work, another soul comes out, kill it! It didn't seem to be a threat so I didn't feel the need to tank it, but I did run over to help DPS it down faster thinking there was a time aspect. Nope, boss heals to full. Another soul, I run around in circles keeping the boss ahead of the trailing soul while everyone kills the soul, success! Few more repetitions and things change, we're in phase 2.

Seems DBM was already updated from the pointer and announced to run in (I hadn't updated any add-ons for 3.3). Made sense considering everyone in the swirling cloud away from the boss takes damage. There DBM goes ruining my fun, that is why I didn't even use it until WotLK. We burned down the boss and moved along.

Last boss was just a tank and spank, don't stand in stuff piece of cake. Turns out after trying that same boss the next day with a different group it isn't as always as easy as we were led to believe.

By this time we were into prime-time and after bouncing off the next instance for quite a while we called it for the evening and went off to do other things.

20 inches of snow overnight and the next day was declared a snow day! Got a time to do the other couple new 5-mans and try the new random heroic feature. Great stuff, the only drawback is the death of guild 5 mans as they were and the rebirth of the pug.

Edit: Oh and when we go for something new, we go all out. This was all on heroic, normal is for sissies. Turns out I am a sissy when it came to the last heroic, Halls of Reflection. Few tries with the waves on heroic we got to the 4th wave and then decided to flip to regular just to see it before our Wednesday raid.

2 comments:

  1. Morphster of AggramarDecember 10, 2009 at 2:10 PM

    Heroic Halls of Reflection is a riot huh. I jumped right to heroic as well and had to pull out all the stops for my bear while we were running from the lich king: dodge trinkets, hotting myself, innervating the healer, b-rezing the mage, aoe taunting, but we finally made it on the 3rd attempt. I'm so happy to see cc become helpful again. Lol, I hadn't thought of kiting the boss away from the souls. We just burned him and burned him and burned him until casters went oom and died. Frenzied Regeneration ftw. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hah, I totally forgot that in phase 2 of the first boss the healer got feared out and died. It was a frenzied regen that won us the fight.

    The second time I went in as a healer the tank stayed put and we just burned him. Guess it depends on how much DPS you have available.

    ReplyDelete