WoW Journal - 2-June-2005

In spite of the distractions from playing my gnome warlock, I still like playing my troll warrior very much. Yesterday I had arranged to go to Zul'farrak with two my D&D friends. But me being online before them, I had the idea to try to get the mallet of Zul'farrak first, to be able to summon Gahz'rilla. As getting the mallet technically isn't a quest, there are few people who do it, most people decide what to do based on their quest journals. So I had never found a group to get the mallet, and now wanted to try it solo.

I'm proud that I did succeed in this, because even at level 56 it is quite hard to do solo. You first need to go to one altar in the Hinterlands and get a part from a level 50 elite keeper. But that keeper isn't alone, he is standing right next to another elite of the same level, and one normal troll. But I managed to rush in, kill the keeper, grab the quest part, and flee with just a slice of hitpoints left. The second part requires you to use an altar in the huge maya-temple-like troll stronghold. The temple is full of elite trolls from level 46 to 50 (more for the named), and I didn't really want to have to kill them all. So I did the long way to the top of the pyramid with a minimum number of fights, trying to keep my distance from the mobs, even using an invisibility potion once, and once by just running for my life and being lucky that my pursuers lost interest. I killed the level 50 elite standing next to the altar on the top, got the mallet and teleported home with my hearthstone.

A bit later my friends logged on. As we were running more and more into problems when doing dungeons with just the three of us, I managed to get them invited into my guild, and we got another shaman from the guild to join us. Zul'farrak is still one of my favorite instances. We got killed once at the fountain on the first crossroads, because too many roamers added to the fight, but one of the shamans managed to die on a safe spot, reincarnated and resurrected the rest of us. We did all the quests for the 3 other guys, me having already finished all quests there. The huge battle of the pyramid is always impressive, even if you did it before. Killing Gahz'rilla was more difficult, we got wiped out because in spite of us having cleared out the area, a patrol of roamers just spawned on us in the middle of the fight. And in that case Gahz'rilla was sitting on the corpses, and we needed to run back to the instance as ghosts to try again. But in the end we succeeded.

Unfortunately I'm getting a bit too high for the place, half of the monsters there don't give any xp at all any more, while the others give very little experience points. I made only about 10% of a level on the whole evening. Which still is more than a level 56 character in previous games would make in a day, so it isn't all that bad. But there are still a lot of dungeons I haven't done at all, or only partially, and I'm really looking forward to my friends catching up a bit more with their levels. They are 49 and 50 now, everybody but me in the Zul'farak group dinged in there. I had the DamageMeters addon running, and unsurprisingly I did the most damage, being at least 6 level higher than anybody else. But I was impressed how much damage killing a whole dungeon adds up to. At the end, together, we had done over a million points of damage, with my part being over 40%.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:54 AM Permanent Link