It’s been a while since the release of the 3.2 patch, and we finally made some serious shots at the new raid instance. I have some really mixed feeling about it now. While the instance was on the PTR, I’ve been reading endless whining on the forums here and there, about how easy the raid bosses are. Well, it’s only partly true.
The first encounter, the Northrend Beasts, is easy. If you have the tactics right, your tanks can follow the worms around, and you see on Grid who has what debuff, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you will kill it. I like it this way though, it’s a nice refreshment after boring General Vezax. I know most caster-types will disagree with me here but it seriously makes me sleepy. This is easy and quite fun.
Second encounter, Lord Jaraxxus (or Jarraxus, whatever, I called him “Lord Bob” when explaining tactics for my group on Tuesday) is a little bit harder, but still pretty much doable. It includes a really awesome scene at the beginning and the fight itself is dynamic enough not to be boring – with all the adds spawning, moving with the fires and stuff.
And now we have the Faction Champions – the third encounter which was unlocked this week. It’s something completely different. We ended up not killing them after all, but we just couldn’t do it with our group setup. What we were missing was I think a warlock to lock down the enemy resto druid. With one healer CC’d I could then go on the other one and help lock him down/dps as well. It’s also very weird seeing full-time PvE players being suddenly cast into the world of PvP. Half of the group doesn’t like BG’s and Arenas and didn’t have much skill at kiting, stunlocking, and generally doing what should be done.
I now actually want to take my warrior there, just to try kiting and dealing with the arms warrior and ret paladin. These two were the most annoying ones apart from the healers – I think they got most of the kills because of the Bladestorm/Divine Storm. They were also pretty good at peeling me off the healer I’m supposed to lock down – I simply can’t stay on one target when a warrior charges me and either fears me or starts Bladestorming.
I have to say that I’m quite amazed at the amount of programming behind this fight – the NPCs were behaving pretty much like normal players in PvP, fearing, CC’ing and using every ability you would expect from a class to use against you. If you came to this instance expecting 5 fully scripted, easy encounters, these NPCs are here to prove you wrong.
In the end I have really mixed feeling when I try to understand what we did wrong. Maybe we would be more succesful with another setup, or maybe the same setup with simply other players (ones more open to changes, as it’s nothing like your regular boss fight) would be enough. Changing the setup for one fight is of course the easy way, but I’d rather not replace people in the middle of the raid.
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