Oh look, another Karazhan post! I was struggling mightily last week under the combined weight of the election results and some personal and familial medical issues. I missed our guild’s weekly raid night as a result, which made me feel even worse, more isolated from my friends and stressed out about things I couldn’t change. Luckily I got to dive into Kara twice this week to help take my mind off of my real world woes. On Saturday I went on my mage with a mix of alts and mains just to see how far we could get. The answer was that we cleared Opera and got some attempts in on Maiden. It was a bit rough, and makes me incredibly glad that Blizz will be releasing a less highly-tuned heroic version of the instance. I had a great time working through the fights with my friends, but with our gear mix it will probably be a long time before we can forge all the way through to the end.
Sunday night however was our fixed Kara group night. We didn’t try to extend the lockout from last week, but instead started over from the beginning using what we had learned to aim for a smooth run. And it was far smoother than last time. For one thing, we didn’t get lost so much this time! We 1-shot a few of the fights that gave us trouble last week, including the dreaded Moroes. As the night went on and we started getting into the 2nd half of the instance I was feeling sick and exhausted and unfortunately it started to show. We wiped on Shade and had some unnecessary deaths, but we worked through them. We killed the Mana Devourer with just a couple attempts since we got our strategy sorted out between last week and this week. The whole 2nd half of the dungeon is incredibly well made and interesting, both to look at and mechanically. There’s even a nod to the old chess event.
The last boss was a nightmare of RNG and insta-kill mechanics. Some of the fights in new Kara, like Moroes and Shade, feel like huge healing checks with a frantic healing pace and a drained mana bar at the end. This horrible beholder-like boss, on the other hand, had very little I could actually heal through and was much more dependent on everyone not screwing up. We did eventually manage to kill him, but only after many many wipes, most of which were caused by me being too tired to focus on the boss’ positioning of disintegrate and dispelling and healing horrible balls of doom and not standing in barrage nonsense. I’m hoping next week I can redeem myself with a smoother run.
I stand by my evaluation last week though, new Kara is an incredibly well made instance and a hugely fun time with a solid group of well-geared friends. I can’t wait to get good enough to make a run at Nightbane and his fancy mount someday. Thank you to my Kara groups this weekend for giving me a great distraction and making me laugh when I desperately needed it.
