With the 3.1 patch being live for over a week now, I think it’s about time for a new blog post. I’ve been waiting with writing this post for a while, because the first few days of 25-man raids weren’t that much successful anyway, and I’m quite sure nobody would be interested in my constant whining.
This Wednesday though, we started working on the 10-man version with a solid group of raiders. It went much better that day – we tried for a bit on Flame Leviathan with one tower up, but he’s not a total pushover anymore, so we just killed him without the hard mode after a few tries. We then took down XT-002 Deconstructor and Razorscale with no big problems at all. Ignis was the last boss of that evening, but after a few tries we left him, as it was getting already late.
Yesterday we were supposed to go and try the 25-man, but with only two tanks and not enough dps signed up, that’s of course not going to happen. Funny how people give up so quickly. We did go again with our 10-man team and killed few more bosses. Ignis went finally down, Iron Council was quite fun, and Kologarn was surprisingly easy. We decided to finish a bit earlier before Auriaya’s trash mobs. It’s certainly not on par with the hardcore guilds that do world firsts, but I’m fine with what we accomplished.
After all this, I still like the instance a lot. The bosses aren’t very hard if you follow the strategies and stay out of the fire, and the trash mobs are finally to be killed carefully (the Tier 7 way of grouping them up and AoEing them down will not work anymore, and I’m so happy about that), but as there’s not so many of them, clearing the instance does not feel tedious. It is a lot of steps up from Naxxramas, though. You can’t just screw the tactics and outgear the instance so much that you don’t have to watch out for stuff that happens around you, or move out of the fire. The fire here will kill you in about 5 seconds.
Blizzard’s developers are still fiddling with the difficulty of the fights. Some are eager to call it “nerfing” and other silly stuff that I won’t use here. I’m fine with the changes. Shaving some damage from an ability or extending an enrage timer so that you don’t really need a Heroism/Bloodlust to kill the boss is not really a big deal. And in some cases, they even buff it – a perfect example is the Flame Leviathan. It was a total pushover, so much that we did him with a tower up on our first kill in the 10-man, and now each tower adds significant HP to the boss. You just can’t do it anymore if you don’t know the fight well.
Even with the melee unfriendliness of some fights (it seems Blizzard’s encounter designers can’t design a fight without some kind of AoEs on the floor placed on top of the boss or whirlwind abilities that make a leather wearing melee go splat instantly… ), the bosses are still very fun. And this is why we do this in the first place, right?
I just wish the sword models were better.
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