Not Uldaman Likely

I've mentioned on this blog repeatedly that Uldaman is not one of my favourite instances. (I remember referring to it as "Ul-damn" among my group of friends back in the day.) But as the saying goes: absence makes the heart grow fonder, and after giving my little nelf hunter a break from instancing for more than ten levels (yep, I didn't even bother with Scarlet Monastery this time), I was actually starting to look forward even to Uldaman. It also helps that its proximity to Ironforge makes it a significantly more attractive destination for Alliance players than for Horde.

So when I saw someone LFM for Uldaman the other night, I jumped right in despite of being very much on the lower end of the level curve for it at level 42. (The last boss, Archaedas, is level 47.) Imagine my surprise when I realised that actually, nobody in our group was higher than level 43. I was in fact the highest level damage dealer, with the others sitting at 41 and 39 (!) respectively.

This is the sort of situation I think many people would have noped right out of, but I didn't mind because I was just happy to have got a group so quickly and I figured we'd just see how far we could get.

It was around the area with the troggs that we started to feel the strain in the sense that our healer had to take a mana break after pretty much every pull... but both the tank and healer were very much on the ball and kept performing admirably under pressure.

By the time we got to the stone constructs, things got really hairy as it has all these groups of one big elite and lots of weaker mobs and we didn't have any good AoE either (the other two dpsers were another hunter and a feral druid), so we had to slowly pick them off one at a time, putting even more strain on the tank and healer as every pull took for-freaking-ever. Yet still we persevered, and nobody died.

Eventually we reached the last boss, who showed as red for everyone due to the immense level difference. Thinking of the dps check involved to deal with the adds, I was not confident, even with the "pulling him to the upper level to slow the spawns" strategy, but we went ahead anyway, with both of us hunters being assigned to add killing to make up for the lower dps. (At level a single dps is usually enough to deal with them.)

And it was... epic! So much so that I felt the need to make a little video about it:



In a nutshell, the fight took about five minutes, as we plinked away at Archie's health really slowly (in the video I fast forwarded through the boring bit). Near the end when the two big adds came in everything went a bit manic and people started dying, but the tank and I managed to finish off the boss together, which fortunately caused the last adds to despawn. Happy days!

I'll certainly think twice before considering someone "too low" for Uldaman next time...