Month: September 2019

First off I have to say… I am shocked and amused at just how many people ended up reading my “non-post post” from yesterday. I am also thankful for the people who checked up on me throughout the day to make sure I was okay. I have no clue why I suddenly needed copious amounts of sleep Wednesday night, but I most certainly did. Last night however was apparently the opposite and it enabled me to do some shenanigans that I will probably pay for later. For the better part of this week I have been living in Arathi Highlands working on the warrior quest. The drop rate of the items needed from the elemental “exiles” is sufficiently low enough that when combined with how tough they are to take down it feels like I am mired to almost a halt. At this point I have 8 of one type, 6 of another and 2 of the last. The other side event that has been going on this week is that Eliyon and I have been trying to make some dungeon runs happen. Thalen and Vernie both needed another trip into the Library to finish a quest. We all needed a run through the Armory to get credit for the overarching quest and I think Eli probably wants the axe. Lastly we have all been sitting on a stack of Razorfen Downs quests.

While I failed completely at taking any screenshots of our Scarlet Monastery run, we started there and did the two wings. It was around this point that it was nearing 10 pm and in theory should have been the moment I begged off for the night. However given that last night was effectively my Friday and that I was off work today… I kept going. We all agreed to make our way to Razorfen Downs and start working our way through that instance. I was a bit surprised that Vernie agreed to this given that I think he probably still had work today.

There is an aspect of the dungeon design of Vanilla instances that on some level we knew at the time but never really marveled at. So many of these instances are designed in a way that they clearly expected you to go in and do one side of the dungeon, and then return a bit later to finish out the dungeon and do the other side. So in Razorfen for example you have two sides that are accessible from the entrance. You have the side with Undead Boars that ultimately gave themselves over to the Scourge, and then a side populated with more traditional Undead skeletons and ghouls. The Boar side starts around 34 and tops out at 39, and honestly was a pretty easy jaunt giving us a bunch of false confidence. So much so that we damned near wiped when we got the first pull of Undead side without being completely ready for it. The level increases to 37-39 for the trash mobs and the final boss is 41 ramping up the difficulty significantly. The wide level ranges I believe are designed to have you split your run up over several nights, like we have done with Scarlet Monastery. We talked a bit last night about how they could have messaged this better, with making having a quest that sends you into the instance and there being an obstacle that you then have to leave the instance to figure out how to get past.

In a style that Grace would have been proud of, we managed to take down the final boss by the slimmest of possible margins. All it took was sacrificing the tank, because seemingly I was the only one who died regardless of everyone getting super low. Effectively we struggled because we were “ignoring the mechanics”. The final boss summons 3 ghost adds when you have pushed the health past certain thresholds. What we should have done is stopped dpsing the boss and cleaned up the adds before returning to fight the boss again. Around the time the summon happens the boss roots the tank making it super hard for the adds to be picked up. Instead in truth nub fashion we burned harder escalating the problem and making it a race to one of two conclusions… we win or we wipe. The problem is that once you start a death race like that, you really cannot back out and try the actual strategy. The only reason why we won at that point after failing the mechanical components was by sheer determination to push through. As a result however I have a really nonsense sword that will hold me until I can get a Thrash Blade, and something to fill my neck slot, along with the lopsided tanky shoulders from Scarlet Monastery. The only negative of this whole situation is that we didn’t wrap and I didn’t make it to bed until roughly 12:30. A really long time but a really fulfilling one as we knocked out three instances.