Tuesday, April 15, 2008

belated weekend update: Friday

The guild I'm in is relatively small (but growing!) so we just have one Kara run per week, with a couple of people swapping toons depending on the fight. Consequently, we break it up into three parts: a Wednesday run for the lower bosses (Attumen, Moroes, Maiden and possibly the beast boss or Opera, depending on how the group is feeling); a Friday run for the first half of the upper bosses (Opera, Curator, Shade, and Chess); and a Saturday run for the big boys (Nightbane, Netherspite, Prince, and Illhoof). Because of Pox Arcanum coolness, I can't run with the group on Wednesday, but I've gotten to run probably three of the last four Fridays. The couple of Saturday runs I was scheduled for didn't go off for want of a healer.

Friday: Kara (Opera through Chess)

The Wednesday run had gone according to plan, so Opera was first up. Romulo and Julienne. Hella-fun. The first two phases were cake. We had a few problems with interrupting Julienne's heals on the third phase (she kept resisting, apparently!), but eventually got them both down. Hurray! I died once, I think, but got battle rezed and was able to get back into the fight.

Next up, Curator, which was a harder fight this time than the first time I did it, for whatever reason. I guess we had less DPS on the sparks (whatever they're actually called), so I ended up using Moonfire more than I might have otherwise liked and was essentially out of mana for the last bit of the fight. I actually kept getting aggro from the sparks, so I even melee-ed (if that's a word) them a little, to build up some minor mana. It's my inner panzerkin wanting to come out, I think.

Shade. Shade was probably the most straight-forward and easiest fight of the night. Everybody was awesome about not moving during the flame wreath (and I remembered the lesson learned from my first fight, that battle rez counts as moving, so I was patient and fought the urge to rez one of our healers until the flame wreath was gone) and I could actually see the blizzards easier, so no worries there. We took him out mere moments after the polymorph phase.

Last was Chess, which was pretty unremarkable. I still don't quite get it -- it feels very random to me -- but it's a nice break after a night of fighting.

In summary, a very fun night in the tower. I think I died twice during the whole night, so that's not too bad, and we one-shot all of the bosses. Well, I guess technically we two-shot Opera, because we did the somebody-get-naked-and-find-out-what-it-is thing, but we dropped them the first time we were actually all there. No loots for me I forgot! From Shade, I got [Boots of the Infernal Coven]. I also got eight Badges which are nothing to sneeze at.

After Kara, a few of us were still sufficiently awake to run another dungeon, so we went to Old Hillsbrad. Former healer turned jack-of-all-trades Llanion has figured out a pretty sweet build for himself that allows him to heal in Kara, DPS as necessary, and learn to panzerkin, so he wanted to test his skills on a moderately challenging instance. It went pretty well, to be honest. I stole aggro from him a few times (unintentionally, I swear, Llan!) but overall it went very smoothly. I even got the [Ravenwing Pauldrons] for my healing set which look hella-awesome.

Next post: Saturday's unbelievably fun destruction of the upper bosses, including the Prince.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Unless something has changed, you actually can do the battle rez, your target just can't accept until flame wreath is gone (otherwise they pop up in your flame wreath, gain the buff, and blow everybody up).

So if you happen to be not facing Shade and can't do anything else, it can actually be a pretty good time to get that battle rez cast off -- AS LONG AS THEY KNOW NOT TO ACCEPT UNTIL IT'S GONE!!!!

Arne said...

Ah, that's really good to know. It was frustrating, waiting to cast the battle rez and then waiting *while* I cast it to get the healer back. That first time I think it was cast and immediately accepted, then poof, we're dead.

Dave said...

Heya Wara :) Long time no talk. Just wanted to let you know I'm back on a semi-limited basis. I couldn't find an email on your site, so I figured I'd leave a quick comment. Glad to see everything is progressing nicely for you. Take care!