WOW

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.

This weekend I dove down a rabbit hole of nostalgia and it was magical. Ever since even the hints of a new Karazhan started to surface, long before Legion was released, I started to get a bit hyped. Once Legion launched and I saw how good of a job they’d done with the Broken Isles, I got even more hyped about the new Kara. I dared to hope that it would do justice to the original. You see, I started playing World of Warcraft near the start of The Burning Crusade, its first expansion. Karazhan will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the very first raid I ever set foot in. I made some great friends, and got completely hooked on raiding. By the end of that expansion I had healed, dps’d, and yes, even tanked my way through Kara many times. The raid was oozing with character and charm, a fully realized haunted mage tower big enough to get lost in for hours.

The new Kara is the same, but different. I mean this in the best possible way. It certainly still is big enough to get lost in, as we proved immediately, getting lost on our way to the first boss. The first half of the instance is essentially the same old space we knew and loved. Even the bosses are all reprisals of the originals, and they are just as brutal to learn as the originals were. We one shot the first boss, the Opera event (it was “Westfall Story”), but most of the night was spent learning fights, picking ourselves off the floor and throwing ourselves at bosses until we won. The Moroes fight in particular was just completely brutal from a healing perspective. It was also really fun, because it was every bit as satisfying to kill that boss as any raid boss.

In fact the whole take home message of our first night in Karazhan was that this truly does feel like a 5-person raid rather than a mythic dungeon. The scale of the place is still epic, the fights are punishing, and it doesn’t just feel like a rehashed, slightly harder version of something we’ve already done. Even though that’s exactly what it is. Kudos to the devs for pulling this off spectacularly. The vague ingrained wisdom we all had from clearing the original Kara served us pretty well, but things were also different enough to offer some great surprises. It has been a very long time since I laughed as hard on the way back from a wipe as I did last night, and that alone was worth the price of admission.

After the first 5 bosses, the instance switches to some new sections. There were a lot of surprised and pleased reactions. I don’t want to completely describe the whole thing, because if you get a chance to experience it for yourself you absolutely should. We spent over 4 hours in there, and managed to kill 6/8 bosses and get some solid attempts in on the 7th. That’s definitely on par with a raid, rather than a dungeon.  I absolutely can’t wait to get back in and see the rest of it, and to do it again next week now that we vaguely know what we’re doing.

Blizz took a big chance re-working such a beloved instance, and it paid off hugely here. I’m also glad to hear the news from Blizzcon that they’ll eventually be releasing a non-mythic version of new Kara so even more people can experience it. I had an absolute blast, even if some of the fights made me cry a bit as the healer. It was a pitch-perfect nostalgia bomb and I hope it inspires even more people to fall in love with the magic that is Karazhan.