Monday night Rev and I log onto Argent Dawn to see what SAN is up to. There’s a few folk around, so we decide to re-attempt Blackwing Lair. Hairy and Daruma join, as do Missholloway, Rogerstring, our soulstone-slave Invariant (my RAF alt, on follow and not doing anything) and Norinka, a SAN druid who hadn’t joined us before.
First, we got attuned. We found the guy who drops the letter that starts the quest (that Jack built? wait…) outside of Blackrock Spire, cleared UBRS fast, and touched the orb behind the dragon boss there. Then we could use the orb outside the instance to get in BWL.
First boss was still dead from our weekend attempt so we went and faced down the corrupted red dragon, the one that dots you with a dot that kills you at the end. We had it carefully planned; Consolidate was Soulstoned and would Brez me, Norinka would Brez if she could, and we’d just burn him down.
We started. Daruma threw Heroism, I popped my wings, tanked, got dotted, died, got rezzed, re-taunted – and he dropped before too many more of us did.
Hilariously, Hairygiblets and Rogerstring still had the dot at the end. Five seconds later as we’re examining loot, they drop dead…
We continue upstairs and find a room full of pillars, whelps, and a slowing field. None of us knew what to do; a guildie who wasn’t there mentioned that a stealthed rogue could disable the field. Great! Except… we didn’t have a rogue. Oh well. We started wading through the room in slow motion, me trying to grab aggro, wishing paladins had a charge… Hand of Freedom wasn’t really helping (it didn’t remove the slow effect but would prevent one re-application sometimes)
Invariant, being low level, died from aoe or something. So did Rogerstring. I decided we should press on to the end, hope that killing the boss at the end would stop the field and let us get out of combat (the whelps just kept respawning) so we could rez. This is important.
The supressor whelp room is actually two floors. Invariant was dead on the first floor. The rest of us pressed slowly onward, like something from a bad horror movie. The kind with endlessly spawning whelps.
We found a boss, killed him. The field didn’t drop, but the room just past didn’t have it. I decided to start clearing trash while Consolidate slowly made his way down to get Invariant. At this point Consolidate was the only one healing. This is important too.
I pulled a few trash mobs, planning to kill them before they could kill me. It was working – until out of nowhere there’s a DRAGON in my FACE eating my SPLEEN. Through my face. Yeah. And he knocked me back into 9000 adds, who instantly start whacking me. I tried healing myself but kept getting interrupted. Most of us died right then. I sighed.
Consolidate was downstairs, and not dead, and I’m thinking he can rez me when I hear a “whoa!” behind me and turn to look at his screen. The dragon had just summoned him! We hadn’t known it would do that.
Long story short – we all ran back.
We again started clearing trash in the room and again the dragon appears, but this time we’re ready and take him down! Not that bad as long as there’s heals in the room.
More trash dies. Some of it was nasty, with lots of shadow bolts. Some of it resisted magical damage, ie Holy damage, ie there I was futilely throwing my abilities around and keeping aggro mostly by force of will. Fortunately we had a hunter, and when Norinka shifted to cat, things really died.
We moved into a big room – the whole place was very cool, lots of draconic experimental remains lying around – and see a dragon, some big dudes, and a dragon in the room that followed. Wise to their tricks, we killed the trash behind us, then pulled the dragon. Sure enough he knocked us around like crazy, but we prevailed!
By this time it was late, so we called it for the night, agreed to extend our lockout and finish up Tuesday.
Tuesday rolls around and so does patch 3.3.5. And the servers are DOWN! Sigh. Reversion and I are forced to spend quality time together, play with our daughter, go for ice cream… then, just at Nomster’s bedtime, the servers were up. Sort of. Once we got through, there was a number of SAN folk around so we re-grouped up, asked if anyone else wanted to finish the place, and started summoning.
Well, other people did want to come. They kept coming as we progressed, so here’s the final list:
Divergent – me – paladin
Consolidate – Reversion – druid
Hairygiblets – hunter
Daruma – shaman
Tasteless – druid
Shiftless- druid
Norinka – druid
Dropout – paladin
Edamaxim – dk
Enyss – druid
Vet – hunter
Missholloway – paladin
Rogerstring – shaman
Invariant – useless
(no order here, this is how they appeared in one screenshot I have)
So some subset of us kill that dragon we’d left alive the night before, then Chromagnus the penultimate boss, a two headed dragon-corehoundy-looking-thing. And there we were, on Nefarion’s balcony.
He didn’t look that impressive sitting on the throne, even if his head was on fire, but he was a real raid boss. Vet had lot of experience killing him and gave us a rundown – kill adds coming through the doors on phase one, take him by the balcony on phase 2, beware of “class calls” – incidentally, I was really impressed that they added a class call for DKs. That’s a nice touch. Most of us seriously overgeared the place and the class calls ended up not being an issue for anyone but the hunters who had to un-equip their bows or they’d get broken.
So we fought him. During part of it, Invariant died, and Nefarion called out the line I have as the title for the post, heh.
And then – he died.
SAN is hoping to go to Molten Core tonight. After that… who knows but we’re loving the old school raids as we wait to get enough 80s to do Ulduar and ICC. If you’re on an American server and this sounds fun, join us! Roll an alt or transfer and come play!
