A funny thing happened on the way to the Terrace

I was supposed to talk about our pre-upgrade Onyxia run after that last post on turning level 80, but I’ve been a lazy blogger so this comes first. Sad, because that was our first WoW Raid ever, and we learned a lot from it.

Still, our recent foray into Magister’s Terrace was… fascinating enough to merit a post.

It actually all started out with a random thought. We had our third level-80 sometime last week, so, out of the blue, I asked if the Guild’s three 80s  – me (Humie Retadin), the Guildmaster (Ryunaito, NElf Marksman) and the new 80 (Silvanus, NElf Beastmaster) – joined by any two of the 70s would want to take a stab or two at The Return of Kael’Thas.

Just for fun.

See, that was it: JUST FOR FUN. For kicks. For laughs. For us to see, at this particular point in time, what we can do and can’t. Many of the active Guildies are breaching the mid-70s mark, and we three 80s have been doing Argent Tournament and Northrend “Main Faction” Dailies to get the stuff there and Gold. In fact, Louie (Ryunaito) came to the Instance Run with his brand new gun, and Silvanus brought his new Spirit Cat pet. One of three. My Pally just brought his weak little self with slightly better gear than when we ran (and wiped twice) on pre-80 Onyxia a few days before she upgraded. We needed to start learning Instance / Raid play, after all, since we should be hitting the Dungeons on our levels sometime soon, so this was part of our “Raid/Instance Acclimation Exercises.”

With Lead Rogue Igtenos (mid-70s NElf PvP Spec; he leaves Battlegrounds only to eat, sleep and get the occassional level), and Lead Tank-in-Training Yronhand (early-70s ProtWar Dwarf), our little “fun run” group was complete.

Sounds crazy to bring into Magister’s Terrace for a first run, doesn’t it? I mean, look at it: lots of DPS – Igtenos gives HELL OF A LOT OF DPS – and only a stupid little Retadin to do any incidental healing. And did I mention that the stupid little Retadin was also supposed to serve as Main Tank?

Of course, this wasn’t a serious run from the get-go. We were actually doing this partly for the reasons above, and partly in “celebration” of Silvanus’ dinging 80. While waiting for Yronhand to re-login (had to reboot PC to clear mem and net resources) we were, of all things, comparing weapons and companions.

And, also, there was a certain level of confidence because, after all, there ARE three DPS-dishing 80s, a PvP DPS rogue, and a dwarf-for-a-shield. Mobs wouldn’t (shouldn’t) be a problem since we’re of a good enough level (except for Yronhand) to survive a “casual” kind of “oops” in the Run. For most of the mobs, this was the case, except those two times I wasn’t paying attention to my HP bar and, after the dust settled on a multi-mob brawl (courtesy of an unlucky pull), realized my 15k HP was down to 2k and Yronhand was face down munching on gayelf grass.

The first boss, Selin Fireheart, was a straight up gangbang. We cleared the trash mobs around him and then we went for the kill. I told the guys to start shooting at the crystals he was going to drain once he starts doing that action, but the poor druggie wasn’t even a third into draining his first crystal when he fell dead on the floor.

I should have realized then how portentious this was.

According to the post on WoW wiki about the second boss, Vexallus, he’d be a bit of a bother since he’s an Arcane Elemental andwould be spam AoEing Arcane attacks after a while. This was a concern for me, being the main tank, since we (a) have no healer and (b) I sold my anti-arcane stuff sometime ago to clear up Storage space. And Arcane is the one school of magic we Paladins have no protective Aura for. Even worse, before you get to him, you had to pass through a literal school of mana wyrms. Lacking any better ideas – and healers and AoE casters – we did the next best thing and had the tank – me – charge the bastard.

And here was where the first funny happened. Someone grabbed aggro from me after the first few blows against Vexallus. As I went around it to give its back to the others, I was looking up at the boss… and suddenly saw its HP bar go from around 80% of life, to around half.

I was so surprised that I wasn’t able to attack for a few seconds (in the chaos of his charge and the loss of aggro to me, I managed to somehow de-target him). And some seconds after that, the bloody thing was down.

When we met with Krasus on the ledge past Vexallus’ room, I was still wondering about what exactly hit the bastard. I have my guesses but Ryunaito was just smiling on the side, patting his Blunderbuss of Khaz Modan, and refused to answer further questions.

So, there we were, hunting for the last secondary boss, Priestess Delrissa. She’s supposed to be a tricky fight, too, because, aside from her, she comes with four flunkies, randomly chosen from eight NPCs. I can’t remember who exactly were her adds, aside from the Broken named Apoko, when we got to fighting her.

Why can’t I remember? Because, in the process of clearing all the mobs around her (to hopefully make it a more decent fight), the lagging Yronhand managed to step into her aggro radius. Which must really be big because we were quite far from her little troupe. We realized all bets were off when we suddenly saw on the General Chat Channel the little demonic priestess screaming a variant of “off with their heads!!!” and charging Yronhand.

Once again being served an example of the maxim, “no set battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” whatever ideas we had on crowd control and target prioritization and whatnot went out the window as the whole encounter turned into one massive brawl. Once the Priestess and her cohorts were on Yronhand (who was beside me), I immediately spammed the AoEs to grab aggro and hitting someone with a Hand of Reckoning.

I guess I was trying to find the Priestess in all the chaos while parrying an attack and blocking another and casting Flash Heals. But then, I realized I couldn’t find her because she was there, in front of my Paladin, already a corpse, several dozen bullet wounds visible. The other adds were also falling from concentrated fire from the two Hunters, and a flurry of DPS from the Rogue. In a few short seconds of mayhem, all five were dead.

And I was, like… okay, what just happened there?

After looting the corpses, all that was left was to enter Kael’s sanctum and pwn his sorry BElf ass. We’ve read up on him, of course, and we all had plans on how to deal with his little trick of anti-gravving the whole encounter. Bloody cheater.

And, true to the How-to notes, it really is a bother when you don’t have effective Instant healers. When the bastard gave us the NASA treatment, three of us died posthaste – INCLUDING ME – since we were, to be honest, caught off-guard. Everything all the dozens of readings of Ender’s Game about “the enemy’s gate is down” and how to fight in null-grav went instantly out of the window as you tried to find your guildies, check the HP bars for who’s dying and needs healing, trying to hit Kael for some limited ranged Paladin spellwork, and trying to note where the hell that damned Phoenix you saw spawn was.

Oh, he was underneath me. Boom.

Yes, Paladins: do not use your Holy Light during the anti-grav phase. It kills.

So I guess, at the end of a surprisingly nice run, we’d wipe, anyway. No biggie: we wiped twice at the pre-upgrade Onyxia, and, really, this was supposed to just be a fun run. That we got as far as the final boss without wiping and only having a couple of us die due to bad pulls made this a good run.

And then, as I was contemplating what to do next while my Pally was facedown on Kael’s carpet, the Achievement for decking him dinged on my screen for the Final Funny of the whole run.

In all the chaos, someone got a couple of good ones into the bastard.

Checking the party screen, it showed Ryu and Igtenos up and breathing, if barely. My last act before getting nuked by my favorite mythical creature was trying to heal Igtenos, since his HP was a tiny red; my guess was he was right behind Kael DPS-ing the bastard, but that epitome of Gayelf-ness was already spamming the AoEs by then. I suppose I managed to get the Holy Light in before making a decent imitation of a burning mound of fat.

As for Ryunaito, well… IMBA was a word we think was invented for his use, anyway. He’s been doing crazy stuff since our RF days, like doing a crit-string with his MAU mecha when its hard to do so.

So, there. The funny things that happened on the way to the Terrace. It was a fun run that turned out a whole hell of a lot funnier than I thought it would be.

And now we get to hang a piece of Kael beside that ugly head we got from Onyxia, hehehehehe ^_^

That’d be joined later on by the pumpkin of the Headless Horseman but that’s a story for another time.

Meanwhile, we’ve found our “danger room.” We’re going to go here again, and again, and again to train and farm. That anti-grav thing is, IMO, the perfect training exercise for when shit hits the fan.