Suffusion Camp

I briefly mentioned Fyrrak assaults as something that was added in 10.1 in my first impressions post about that patch back in May. I didn't really have much more to say on the subject at the time, but they've come back to the forefront of my attention multiple times again since then.

It's a bit of a meme now how all the Dragonflight open world events are very similar at this point... except this one I guess. The main thing that makes it different is that it's convoluted, confusing and ridiculously deadly - which is not a good thing, but has nonetheless served to keep me interested somehow.

I don't know why that is - most of the time when a new piece of content annoys me, I have the sensible response of going "well, that was annoying, probably not gonna do that again", but every now and then I'll feel weirdly challenged instead, thinking to myself "well, that was annoying and stupid, but I bet it I can do it in a way that is less aggravating next time". And then I keep coming back to inflict more pain on myself like a happy little masochist.

Fyrrak assaults - or to be more precise, the Suffusion Camps where they take place - are one such piece of content. The whole structure with the three different kinds of keys you need to collect is unnecessarily convoluted, but I do have that figured out by now. The problem is that I have yet to find a way around the camps' deadliness.

It's not just the mobs in them - though there are some that have pretty aggravating abilities, such as those that do a stacking DoT on you... just what are you supposed to do about that if you don't have a cleanse? But no, there are also all these random environmental effects that do damage to you, such as those thingamabobs that shoot fire everywhere and the elite protodrakes constantly flying "bombing runs" across the camp. Even if you take care when fighting the mobs, it's not unusual that you'll get smacked and killed by one of these flybys just as you get out of combat and before you've had a chance to heal up.

Which is to say that I'm doing okay on characters that can heal themselves if needed, but not on those without any self-healing or only of the type that relies on using long cooldowns. And I know that it's not just me, because every time I die I can see plenty of other ghosts around me making their way back to their bodies.

This past week completing a Suffusion Camp was part of the weekly reputation quest which I still enjoy doing on my alts, and while my priest had an easy enough time tagging things with her DoTs that other people were fighting while also spamming AoE heals everywhere, both my hunter and my rogue were basically just zerging, dying after every other mob and reviving again until a res timer forced them to wait a bit. My rogue is still levelling too, which makes it all the funnier to me that Blizzard suggests this content as something to do - yes, technically everything is scaled, but it's very noticeable how much more quickly a leveller will be obliterated by any damaging ability in the area compared to a geared max-level character.

It's just such a weird thing to me that I simultaneously find the whole event very annoying yet also kind of enjoy coming back to it, always in hopes of doing better this time. Sometimes it has been good for memorable moments, such as when I was there on my healer and a rogue actually expressed gratitude for the healing in general chat, because it obviously made such a huge difference to everyone's survivability.