WoW Journal - 27-November-2006

This weekend I spent a lot of hours in Blackwing Lair, raiding the place both Saturday and Sunday afternoon / evening. It was a rather successful duo of raids, killing everything including Chromaggus, and saying hi to Nefarian himself. As I previously had only come until Firemaw, the whole second day was new to me. And even if we haven't killed Nefarian yet, at least I have seen everything in this place now.

My least favorite, and maybe even hardest fight in BWL is the first one, Razorgore. As you need to split your raid in 4 groups, you don't get many options in the class composition of the raid, you basically need every class at least 4 times. That often leads to our BWL raids starting an hour late, until we got everybody together. We promptly wiped on the first try, although we had popped all eggs at that stage, but with nearly all healers dead it was impossible to finish Razorgore off. But after that everybody was fully awake, and on the second try we won easily enough.

Directly afterwards comes my most favorite fight in BWL, Vaelastrasz. I love this fight, because I can do it in silly mode, spamming Holy Nova. That is as effective as Prayer of Healing for group healing, and does a bit of damage to Vael as a bonus. Too bad this spell is only good if you have unlimited mana.

After Vael BWL gets a bit more annoying. Fighting through the suppression room is a bit of a bore, and the Broodlord at the end isn't particularly exciting. And after that, you still need to clear out the remaining mobs in the suppression room.

The next fight, Firemaw, is more exciting, as you need to play with your line of sight, and fight him at a very specific location, with everybody in the raid placed just right. The trash mobs after that are rather nasty, but we got the strategy down good, with some mobs kited away while we kill the others. With that we finished the first day.

On the second day we killed more trash mobs, and the next two dragons, Ebonroc and Flamegor. These are similar to Firemaw, just without the line of sight problem, which makes them easier. Both go down on the first try, so up to now we did all bosses in one shot, except for Razorgore.

So now it's time to try Chromaggus, which the guild has killed only once before. The raid leader says we will do one not-too-serious attempt on him, just for practice and to find out what colors of ability he will be using. We expect to wipe, and then use the knowledge of what abilities he is using to bring him down in the next attempt. But it turns out that Chromaggus abilities this weekend aren't his strongest, and we end up killing him on the first attempt too. Man, we are good!

Lootwise there wasn't much on offer for priests. Only Firemaw dropped something I was interested in, the Black Ash Robe. With its +30 fire resistance it makes a very nice addition to my fire resistance gear. With fire damage still being rather prominent in the first zone and dungeons of the Burning Crusade, FR gear might actually still be useful to collect. I'm not really much interested in getting loot from BWL otherwise, I'm fine wearing 3 pieces of tier 2 and 5 pieces of tier 1 gear.

As an added bonus of my BWL adventures, I got my semi-retired troll warrior to do something he had never done before: Use his alchemy recipes for flasks. On our first BWL day we had just cleared out the place enough so that the alchemy lab in there was accessible without meeting any mobs. And the guild needed flasks of titans for the main tanks. My alchemist warrior has the recipes for flask of the titans and flask of supreme power since over a year now, but never made any of them. Whenever he was in Scholomance at the alchemy lab, he had forgotten to bring his materials. And with me playing nearly exclusively my priest nowadays, he didn't have much opportunity to do Scholomance in the last year. But now it was as simple as getting the materials, being invited by somebody who was saved to the instance, and going in after him. Me and several people from the guild donated materials, and I ended up making 9 flasks of the titans for the guilds raiding efforts. I also made 2 flasks of supreme power for myself, just for fun and because I had the mats in the bank. Obviously not for raiding with a priest, but maybe I'll need them in the Burning Crusade. I don't remember having seen an alchemy lab in the beta, so with the expansion lowering the interest in BWL and Scholomance, I don't know how making flasks will go in the future.

One bottleneck for getting the materials for the flasks was the stonescale eels. So I decided that it was time that my warrior learned fishing. Between raiding, playing some Medieval 2, and playing the BC beta I only managed to get him up to 75 skill this weekend. But I'd rather do this a bit slowly. Fishing is a good activity to relax. Using the tacklebox addon it involves less clicking, and I can read a book while fishing. This is something I always wanted to do with my alchemist, as fish appear in some alchemy recipes, but haven't go around to do. This pre-BC period is a good time to finish all these little projects you never had time for before.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link