Monday, November 17, 2014

Upper Blackrock Spire (100 normal) Impressions

Well, I guess we can say that this dungeon has had four versions - the original, the level 90 preview, and the normal and heroic versions of it now.

Bosses one through three are identical to how they were in the preview. Mainly we're just not as well geared anymore. My biggest recommendation for the initial room of trash is that if you have an engineer in the party, have them interact with the various auto-cannons in the room before you pull. You can make these guys friendly, and won't have to deal with them when the Leadbelchers inevitably try to activate them.

As I've already talked about the first three bosses, let's focus on what comes next:

The trash following Tharbek can get a little complicated when you're in such tight corridors. There are ogres who can fear you and proto-whelps who will lay down some fire on the ground. Try to pull conservatively, and remember that CC is your friend here.

Ragewing the Untamed:

You fight this big proto-drake on a narrow bridge over to Drakkisath's old room. The tank should stand in the middle of the platform, as the main danger in this phase is that he will do sweeps across the bridge with fire - when he does, everyone needs to run away from his breath (there will be some safe spaces on the opposite side of the bridge than where he starts his breath, but you won't know which way he's going to breathe until he does.) Periodically, he'll fly away and begin to bombard the bridge with pools of fire and summon tons of proto-whelps who put a bleed on the tank. Stack up initially to make sure that the tank gets aggro, but then spread so that not everyone winds up in a fire pool.

Trash before Zaela:

The trash before Zaela is mostly pretty easy. You can avoid a lot of it by hugging the right wall. There are some shamans who will drop wind fury totems, increasing the damage they deal to the tank, and there are some proto-drakes who will leave patches of fire on the ground, which is nasty. Once you get onto the bridge to where Zaela has the doomsday device suspended over the Molten Span, there will be a pair of pretty tough warriors who use colossus smash and shockwave. I'd CC one of them.

Warlord Zaela:

Zaela's the hardest fight in the instance. First off - you're on a relatively small, square platform. There are no rails, so if you run off, you'll die. Zaela will do two main things in the first phase - she'll fixate on a random player and do a whirlwind-like attack as she pursues them. Make sure you don't run her into your group members. She'll also toss an axe at random players (knocking them back, I think.)

Phase two is where things get very tough. She'll fly away and three adds will show up. These guys more or less just melee the tank, but you'll also start to get proto-drakes flying up to blast certain parts of the platform with fire. This fire hurts really badly, so make sure you're not standing in it. After a minute or so, Zaela will come back to the platform, doing all of her normal abilities while you also have to deal with the drakes' breath and the adds if they're still up.

Rocking the Spire:

Again, I think a large part of the difficulty of the instance is due to the fact that it's unfamiliar (I still need to figure out the proper way to pull the trash after Tharbek.) Bosses one through three were much easier on the groups I ran with than the other two. Also, we're only just barely starting to get geared up at this point - though I got three new 615 pieces on my second run (and I've got four garrison follower missions that reward that level of gear, though I don't yet have the followers with the right abilities leveled up enough to do them yet.) Gear is going to help a lot in making these dungeons easier, though I suspect that we're going to be seeing very difficult heroics. Still, Blizzard claims that normal dungeons will be enough to gear people for LFR. Really, that's the thing that makes me the most curious - how hard LFR and the new Normal are going to be.

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