Of course, that’s when I discovered my X-Perl was borked, because I had no target frames and couldn’t tell who I was actually targeting on those AOE fights. I had already updated all my mods that had updates, so it looks like I’ll have to make sure I keep checking for updates over the next few days. The X-Perl issue is kind of a big deal for me. In any event, we worked our way through Forge of Souls, which I was pleasantly surprised to find was a very short two boss instance. I had neglected to read anything about the new instances, though I had heard you had to run them in order, in order to “unlock” the others. So imagine be me working my way through the instance with four others who I think knew very little about it as well, and without really know if, or who, I had targeted at the time. Was interesting to say the least. We did complete it without any problems, and moved directly into the second-- the Pit of Saron--which I also found to be fun. Unfortunately I had to leave before we killed Tyrannus because the guild had decided to raid Icecrown, so it probably won’t be until some time this afternoon before I am actually able to complete it.
I wish I could say more about Icecrown Citadel, but we didn’t get very far. We cleared all the trash up to Marrowgar, but we had all the same issues with people not staying out of fire, or people taking too much damage from the spikes, etc. I didn’t want to take away a doom and gloom opinion last night because people were having problems with mods, and what not, so I determined I’d just chalk up the issues to that and hope we did better the next night. Again, I hadn’t read up on any of the Icecrown stuff, so I was a bit under-prepared myself. I didn’t die to the fire, or the whirlwinds, but I did get WTFPWNED by his saberlash. Key safety note – do not stand in front, or even along side him. I was along side and he still split me in half, dealing a cool 28k damage to my 24k health pool. Ouch. We didn’t finish the fight but I saw enough to know it isn’t technically hard. He has to be positioned facing the back of the room, with the melee fanned out in a short arc around his back and the ranged fanned out in an arc further back. Periodically he shoots a beam if blue fire along the floor in a random direction, and whoever is along that trajectory just has to step to one side of the other. He also periodically causes a spike to rise up under someone and does 10% damage to the individual each second until they die. The spike has to be DPSed down and the individual healed. Then every now and again he will go into a whirlwind phase where he randomly targets someone and chases them while whirlwinding. As the whirlwind does surprisingly little damage, it’s not terribly important not to let him hit you, but during that phase it is important to pay attention to the fact that you need to stop DPSing him toward the end of that phase, as the tanks work to grab his agro again and reposition him. We had some issues with that last night, and whole groups of people would get whacked as he decided to do a saber lash while facing whatever direction he was facing at the time. If you are in front of him, you will die. After about 3 attempts on him we got him to 60-65%, so I’m pretty sure we’ll get him down once everyone’s mods are updated and people stop and think about the fight a bit.
To my surprise I saw I was getting Explorers League reputation. I had just decided to start running quests and what not to level that rep up, and now I see I don’t have to do that after all. I’ll get all the rep I need right there in the raid.
