Retail Bullet Points

I haven't written about it in more than two months, but I thought it might be worth noting that I'm still playing retail on the side. Let's summarise the sorts of things I've been up to under different headers.

Playing the table game

The thing that actually keeps me logging into the Shadowlands client on a daily basis is, funnily enough, the adventure table. Ever since WoW introduced these tables reminiscent of mobile games back in Warlords of Draenor, I've heard people express nothing but scorn for them (at best they've seemingly been a feature players can just about tolerate), and to be fair, I didn't exactly love the first iteration of the system that I myself encountered in BfA content either. The table in the Legion class order hall was a bit better, but I've got to admit, I really like the Shadowlands version. I'd never played an auto battler before and only really knew about the concept from Wilhelm's posts about them, but I honestly quite enjoy it!

I do still have the casual long-term goal of maxing out my main's covenant sanctum features (something that I'm sure more regular players finished months ago) and I like the slow and steady trickle of anima that some of the table missions provide. I enjoy choosing which ones I want to do on a given day and then sorting my companions into optimised teams for each one. I love the collectible aspect of recruiting new companions and I love making their numbers go up, even if it doesn't serve any greater purpose.

I even tried to install the WoW companion app on my phone to manage my table through that, but it crashed every time I tried to log in so I eventually gave up. The only result of these login attempts was that according to my launcher I now apparently also have a US trial account for retail...

Korthia & Zereth Mortis

For a while, the husband and I kept going to Korthia once a week even after we'd unlocked the last bit of story, but our interest didn't last very long. Initially it was nice to be able to upgrade our gear by doing dailies, but the pace soon slowed to an absolute crawl, to the point where we weren't able to buy even a single upgrade per week, and that kind of made us lose interest. Why spend this much time grinding for gear that'll surely be replaced by the most basic rewards in 9.2?

Speaking of the latter, I'm sure we'll check it out and it will be fine, but the 9.2 developer video really was quite embarrassing. I got the feeling Blizzard was genuinely trying to do something different with it; e.g. I don't think they were featuring female devs "just for show" or anything like that, but it was just. So. Bad. Seriously, who signed off on lines about water "unlike any water that we've seen before", or extended talks about how unique everything about this new zone is, coupled with shots of a snail and a chicken? They really deserved all the memeing that people did about that.

Torghast

Back in July, I wrote that the changes to Torghast didn't really impress me but that I could see the husband and me playing around with them a bit. For quite some time, we didn't. However, one of the changes introduced with patch 9.1.5 was that the weekly quest to rescue souls could now also be done in Torghast... and as that aligned with my desire to work on my covenant sanctum, I decided to give it a go again.

Since then the husband and I have been running a couple of Torghasts a week, with me swapping between my monk and my demon hunter, and it's actually been decent fun. Once we got a bit more comfortable with not worrying about deaths anymore and going faster, we eventually managed to achieve some flawless runs - though I do think it's annoying how heavily the score is weighted towards beating the timer - if you do so by a large enough margin, little else seems to matter.

At some point it struck me that I should use some of all this currency that I'd been gathering to upgrade my monk's legendary... and got supremely annoyed by both the gold cost involved in the process and the utter unintuitiveness of the user interface, which actually resulted in me buying the wrong materials at first. After that I quickly discarded any thought of getting a legendary for my demon hunter too because it just seemed like too much of a hassle.

I will say though that it's funny to me how my relationship with Torghast illustrates the many ways in which I'm seemingly the total opposite of the current retail player base. From everything I've read, they just wanted their legendaries and were annoyed at having to deal with "Chore-ghast" to get them... while I find the gameplay decent fun and then basically toss the gear-related rewards because they are uninteresting to me.

Guildies & Levelling

In September I mentioned that we'd formed a levelling group with some guildies from SWTOR. One of them dropped out after a while, but with the two that remained we did pretty well, completing all the original dungeons, all the Cataclysm ones and most of the Wrath ones, which has taken our alts close to fifty.

Our experience with the last Wrath dungeons was really odd though... we went into Forge of Souls manually with a group of four, something we'd done before with other instances, and got absolutely destroyed on the first boss. Being one person down means lower dps and all that, but we didn't even get close to having to worry about that because his constant AoE damage would just delete us. Somewhat bewildered, we exited and went to try Trial of the Champion instead, where we made it through the jousting event, but then wiped over and over on Argent Confessor Paletress, whose spammable main attack would shave off 70% of a person's health with each hit. I tried to research this online but couldn't find anything about scaling problems with these dungeons, only confirmation that the damage we were seeing was definitely off and we weren't just being bad. We haven't really decided how to proceed after that.

Timewalking

Another thing we've been doing whenever it's been on has been timewalking, something that hadn't yet been added to the game the last time I played retail before our current stint with it. It's certainly been odd for me whenever Burning Crusade timewalking is up, to see the contrast between doing e.g. heroic Shattered Halls in Classic and then the timewalking version in retail. It's no comparison of course, the retail version is still ridiculously easy when you look at them side by side, but the attempt at scaling the dungeons to current power levels is at least something. As an evergreen feature that provides almost nothing but cosmetic rewards, it's also quite at odds with the modern WoW team's usual priorities. I wonder how popular it is with players? It certainly strikes me as one of the modern game's better additions, and to be honest I don't know why they don't do more with this scaling tech.

Wrapping Up Wrath

After we burned through the entirety of Burning Crusade's level range in about two days, I should have known that Wrath wouldn't take very long either. I couldn't quite believe it though, because somehow I still remembered seventy to eighty as this massive slog, and I figured that Wrath of the Lich King wouldn't have quite as many dungeons to keep us busy either.

In truth, it only took us another two days or so to get through that stretch of content as well, and the only thing that felt slow was moving across Northrend. It's still huge, and neither of us were able to afford fast flying yet, which meant that transportation was a bit of a drag. Still, when we weren't trying to get from Howling Fjord to Boring Borean Tundra and back, we were making swift progress. Quest-wise we only did Howling Fjord and about two thirds of Sholazar Basin; the rest of our XP came from gathering experience and two-manning dungeons - and while there were fewer of them, there were still enough for us not to need to repeat anything.

Initially I was a bit disappointed that we still didn't seem to have any trouble two-manning things. Wrath instances were never particularly hard, but I recalled the normal ones being at least a little bit of a challenge initially, especially when you were coming into them with sub-par gear. But no, even with mid-level Outlands gear, the two of us cleared everything up to Drak'tharon Keep with no problems.

Old Kingdom was the biggest disappointment to me personally, though not because of the difficulty. First off, they redesigned the quests to guide you straight past the optional boss, à la Gnomeregan. Not just that though, they also removed the little bonus quest you used to be able to get in the cave with the mushrooms. Mustn't reward people for straying off the main path, oh no! It was a funny quest too: if I recall correctly, you gathered all these "interesting" looking samples from the elementals and then the Nerubian you handed them to gave you a bit of an odd look because they were essentially elemental poop and worthless. The worst thing was the final boss though, as they changed the insanity mobs into generic red blobs that didn't seem to have any abilities whatsoever! Was that mechanic really that confusing as it was? Killing lookalikes of your party members was what made that fight fun! Le sigh.

When we hit seventy-five halfway through Drak'tharon Keep, I put a Glyph of the Treant into my third minor glyph slot and spent the rest of the instance bouncing around like a loony. It was so nice to be an ugly little tree again! I still remember the "save the trees" parade I observed at the end of Wrath. And I have to admit that making it a minor glyph is actually a great solution, as you can keep the look if you want it, or drop out whenever you feel like it, without incurring any practical penalties either way.

Gundrak was the first dungeon where we ran into a genuine challenge, as we couldn't kill the first boss and his adds fast enough before they cocooned both of us and we got hopelessly overwhelmed. Eventually we succeeded by having me switch to my feral spec and going for a quick burn before he even had a chance to summon any adds.

In Halls of Stone we had a funny moment when I DCed and died during the Brann fight, and thanks to talents and self-healing, pet tank managed to stay alive long enough for me to not only come back online but also run all the way back into the room where he was fighting. During the NPC conversation afterwards I also had the embarrassing realisation that I've been spelling vrykul wrong for a whole five years - for some reason I always thought that the r and y were the other way round ("vyrkul").

The Oculus was the next instance that turned out to be a major challenge, as our gear was crappy and the drakes only had the absolute minimum amount of health. After a couple of failed attempts on Eregos we eventually managed to get him down by having pet tank circle-kite him on a red drake, spamming his main ability to do damage and get rid of the whelps, and occasionally using his dodge (especially whenever the boss enraged). Meanwhile I sat on top of the boss on a green drake and alternated between focusing on dpsing him and casting heals on the red drake as needed. With the kiting the damage on the drakes was manageable, though it was a very long and slow fight with no bronze drakes to do proper dps.

Trial of the Champion was also pretty tough, and not just because the jousting was quite a drag with only two people. Argent Confessor Paletress did absolutely nasty damage, especially to me, since she does a lot of non-aggro-based attacks and I was the only target that wasn't the tank. I'm not sure I would have been able to survive being feared around and smited as much had I been playing any other healing class, without the druid's heals over time ticking away whenever I was incapacitated.

The ICC five-mans were interesting as well. Again, the bosses in there had a lot more mechanics than previous ones, and I basically had to deal with everything at once since there was nobody else to do so. I always had to kill my soul fragment on my own on Bronjahm; I always had mirrored soul on the Devourer of Souls. On the last boss of Pit of Saron, I was almost constantly incapacitated or transferring damage and healing to the boss, which made for a very long and touch-and-go encounter. Halls of Reflection actually defeated us initially, as we didn't quite have the dps to make the fourth wall, but we came back once we had upgraded our gear a little and made it without problems after that.

We were level eighty-one by the time we moved on into Cata content.

Voices of Wrath

Back when I reviewed the Cataclysm cinematic, one of the negative points I mentioned was the fact that I didn't really care for Deathwing's voice. This then made me think about what I thought about WOTLK's voice acting in general, what I thought was good and what was... less good.

The latter doesn't take that long to sum up, as it only consists of two points really. The first one is simply Arthas himself. I didn't have a problem with his voice acting per se, but I swear that the pitch of his voice changed every single time he made an appearance. People joked about how sitting on the Frozen Throne all this time had given the guy a cold, but what it came down to in the end was that the voice of the major villain of the expansion changing all the time hurt immersion and generally gave the impression of Blizzard doing unusually shoddy work with him, as if the sound editor randomly came up with a new mix of settings every time they had to record more voice work for Arthas.

The second thing that I didn't like was that all the NPCs just talked too damn much. I know that certain upcoming MMOs are really priding themselves in the fact that they include a lot of voice work, but personally I don't think that this is a good thing. An MMO is not an audio book, is not a film, is not a single player game... it's not a medium where you should have to spend extended amounts of time just sitting back to listen. If a boss wants my attention they have to be snappy; otherwise I'm just going to tune their yapping out eventually, in order to focus on, you know, actually playing. (Gruul's "Come... and die" is one of my favourite lines to this day, simply for being short and to the point.)

For all the time that I've spent in ICC in the past year, I'd have trouble quoting most of the bosses from there, with the exception of Sindy's terribad "BETRAAAY you" line. I mean, I know that they talk a lot and I have a vague idea of what it's about, but what I really hear in my head is something like "Arthas blah blah Tirion blah blah Bolvar blah blah". Not really memorable to me at least.

That said, when they don't go into endless monologues, a lot of WOTLK's NPCs had some pretty good lines coupled with solid voice acting. My personal favourites from Wrath's five-man instances are:

1. Keristrasza: Finish it! Finish it! Kill me, or I swear by the Dragonqueen you'll never see daylight again!

I have a suspicion that her voice work was done by the same woman that did Sindragosa, only without the annoying screechiness, and she does a pretty good job at conveying emotion with her voice (maybe overacting just a little bit, but that's okay). Whatever you thought of Keristrasza's story in general, her last lines in the Nexus are a heart-wrenching mix of aggressive insanity (threatening to kill the players) and what's left of her original personality (swearing by the Dragonqueen and wanting her torment to end). I like all of her lines really, including the "Preserve? Why?" upon pulling her and her last words asking for the Life-Binder to preserve her after all.

2. Scourgelord Tyrannus: Rimefang! Trap them within the tunnel! Bury them alive!

Scourgelord Tyrannus is actually one of those characters that talk way too much, even if he has a very nice voice, but the above line shows that he can get to the point when he thinks it's urgent. I've been known to randomly call this one out whenever we're fighting Rimefang in ICC.

3. Skarvald the Constructor: Pagh! What sort of necromancer lets death stop him? I knew you were worthless!

I love this line for the simple reason that I've always felt that the Scourge's necromancers have a tendency to look a bit sissy, and Skarvald not only shares these feelings, he expresses them better than I ever could.

4. Ionar: Master... you have guests.

Ionar must be British or something, because that's quite the understatement when talking about people storming your castle and slaughtering everything in sight. Even in death he retains the elemental equivalent of a stiff upper lip, and I can dig that.

5. The Black Knight: No! I must not fail... again...

I always thought that the Black Knight was a bit of a weird character, because on the one hand he's supposed to be this really powerful Scourge lieutenant, but on the other hand he's very obviously a Monty Python joke. How do you reconcile these two images? Well, I thought his last words do a decent job at it, by showing that his constant getting up again is not a sign of overconfidence, but rather the last desperate attempt of someone who knows that he messed up before and can't afford to do so again. The way that last line is delivered is enough to actually make me feel sorry for him a little every time.

The "So bad it's good" award: Devourer of Souls: You dare look upon the host of souls?! I SHALL DEVOUR YOU WHOLE!

If you've ever done Forge of Souls, this needs no explanation. You just want to tell this guy to chill the hell out.

And my five favourite voices from WOTLK raids...

1. Sara/Yogg-Saron: I am the lucid dream. The monster in your nightmares. The fiend of a thousand faces. Cower before my true form. BOW DOWN BEFORE THE GOD OF DEATH!

This phase-transitioning line is probably the single most amazing piece of voice acting I've ever heard in WoW. Even just playing it back in my head gives me the shivers. The transition from Sara's almost sensual voice to Yogg's fury is just so incredibly well done; it completely blew me away the first time I heard it.

2. Thorim: I remember you... In the mountains...

I never actually got what the fuss was about with this line. I remember our main tank and raid leader repeating it ad nauseam and I just didn't see the appeal, but the longer they went on, the more ingrained it became into my own brain. Then I found out that it had even become an internet meme and... well, now I can't help it anymore either. (Seriously, search YouTube for this phrase and you'll find loads more.)

3. XT-002 Deconstructor: New toys? For me? I promise I won't break them this time!

While having to hear XT's voice over and over again whenever I run past someone with the mini pet has demoted his voice from amusing to annoying for me, I still have to give credit where credit is due: I still remember pulling him for the first time and vent erupting into laughter upon hearing his squeaky voice - and I know we weren't the only guild that had this kind of reaction.

4. Lord Jaraxxus: You face Jaraxxus, eredar lord of the Burning Legion!

I suppose I have a bit of a thing for eredar lords, considering how many times I abused Malchezaar's lines to announce to people at large that they weren't facing our raid alone, but the legions we command! Jaraxxus has a similar kind of thing going on, and like Thorim he's made it to YouTube as well. Hard to get that out of your head again after a while.

5. Anub'Rekhan: I hear little hearts beating. Yesss... beating faster now. Soon the beating will stop.

Being a product recycled from Vanilla, Naxxramas wasn't exactly innovative and new in terms of voice acting, but bloody hell, Anub'Rekhan's voice is still amazing. Especially the line quoted above is just so creepy, delivered in a way that makes it very clear that the big bug won't just eat you, he's also perv enough to enjoy it in a very naughty way. /shudder

The "So bad it's good" award: Sindragosa: Suffer, mortals, as your pathetic magic betrays you!

There couldn't really have been any other choice for this. There's just something about Sindy's voice that makes it grate so very, very badly, and you'll hate her for that alone - not to mention the many wipes that most of us will have gone through on this fight at some point. However, making a boss hated by the players is not entirely a bad thing, and if nothing else that BETRAAAY is very memorable. Though personally I almost prefer her intro line of: "You are fools to have come to this place! The icy winds of Northrend will consume your souls!" I now find myself wanting to continue any sentence that starts with "You are fools" with this line.

You say goodbye and I say hello

This blog's focus was meant to be on instances right from the beginning since they are one of my favourite activities in the game, but since the introduction of the new dungeon finder I just can't stop writing about them. The amount of amusing and confusing pug experiences just never ends.

Today I got to experience first-hand just how ridiculously easy it is to swap people in and out with the new system - over and over again. It's both good and bad: I mean, obviously it's nice when someone just disconnected, you queue up to get a replacement and it appears instantly. On the other hand people's patience with mistakes or accidents of any kind has clearly reached an all-time low. It's a sad irony that the ones with the "The Patient" title are usually the worst offenders. Then again, if you get a new title that requires you to pug with fifty different people only a few days after it beomes available, you're very obviously everything but patient. But I digress.

After being without internet for nearly two weeks and thereby missing the 3.3 launch, my boyfriend was very keen on finally trying out some of the new content. He said that he wanted to see the new heroics on his rogue first, so I invited him to a party with my hunter and introduced him to the awesomeness that is the new LFG tool. After about fifteen minutes of waiting we got a group for heroic Forge of Souls, which isn't too bad as far as wait time for double dps goes I guess.

FoS being the easiest of the new heroics, we made it through that one without any trouble. About the worst thing that happened was that the warlock complained about people not having dpsed the corrupted soul fragments on Bronjahm fast enough (after the fact of course, until then not a single word about strategy - or anything at all - had been said). We finished quickly, thanked each other for a smooth run, and the group disbanded except for my boyfriend and me.

We continued through the portal into the Pit of Saron, queued up to fill our little party again for the next instance and had a full group within a minute. Things were going well enough up until Krick and Ick, then the healing priest told us to hurry up because he'd have a raid soon, so the death knight tank quickly pulled the next trash pack (you know the ones, the nasty ones with the fireballs and ewww). We wiped, the priest left the group. Surprise, surprise.

While we were corpse-running I put us into the queue for a healer replacement. The next instant the shaman who had healed us through Forge of Souls earlier joins the party.

"Hello again! :)" I greet him.

Shaman has left the group.

Rrright. Either I'm a lot scarier than I ever thought, or seeing dead people was simply way too terrifying for the shaman. Maybe he thought being dead was contagious or something. We had just got back into the instance when a holy paladin joined us to fill the once again vacated healer slot. We had another wipe on the annoying trash, after which point the tank instructed me to always pull with a freezing arrow and keep one of the casters trapped. I swear I haven't felt this useful since Burning Crusade; it was bittersweet. After that we cleared the rest of the instance without problems.

Several people in the party wanted to continue and it would have been nice for sure, but my hunter was already saved for heroic Halls of Reflection, so my boyfriend and I said our goodbyes, I logged on my druid to heal and we tried to form a new party for the instance instead.

After another ten-minute wait we were good to go with a paladin tank, a death knight and a warlock. The paladin's gear was pretty good and we downed the first boss without any wipes, which was encouraging. During one of the early waves preceding the second boss however, I end up standing too close to a footman, get shield-bashed while casting a regrowth and we wipe because I'm locked out of all my resto spells.

I explain this to the group as we run back and someone "lol"s, which I guess is better than expressing anger and frustration, so we get ready to try again. We start the event again, but the warlock just stands there in the middle of the room instead of joining the rest of the group. The tank makes an effort to save him but as it turns out he's been disconnected. We fight valiantly but eventually get overwhelmed due to lack of dps.

We boot the warlock and get a mage instead. We try again, but this time the paladin simply fails completely at picking up the mobs during one of the later waves, they all pile on me and I die instantly. She then leaves the group without another word - why, cause it's our fault when I get mugged by untanked mobs?

We get in line for another tank and get joined by a death knight of the silent variety who doesn't respond to our greetings. Still, he gets into position to start tanking the event so all seems good. The first wave of trash spawns and shiiit, what is this, why is my screen freezing up... "You have been disconnected from the server." I log back in right away but already the tank and the mage have dropped from the group. "Stupid DCs," I mutter. "We noticed :D," responds the death knight.

We use the dungeon finder to once again find a new tank and one more dps. A hunter joins as well as a tauren warrior called "Aggrobot". My boyfriend and I barely have time to consider the originality of that name (just between the two of us, not in chat or anything) when Aggrobot leaves again. Why? Who knows? This time it's not like we even had time to say or do anything at all to scare him off, and we were all alive.

The next tank follows soon afterwards, another tauren warrior with a less ridiculous name. He, too, is of the silent variety and decides to completely ignore our greetings. As it turns out he tanks reasonably well though, and while we end up facing Marwyn with one dps down, we finally do get to face him and I'm already sighing a sigh of relief when suddenly, the tank goes splat before I can even blink. What the hell? According to the log he got debuffed with corrupted flesh, which I was pretty sure wasn't supposed to go on the tank like, ever, and then got two-shotted. Good times. Unsurprisingly the warrior leaves the party, still without having said a single word.

We queue up for a new tank yet again. This time nothing happens for several minutes, except that we get spammed with messages informing us that someone has declined the group invite and we're being returned to the front of the queue. Is our bad reputation spreading already? My boyfriend suggested that they kept offering the slot to the same tank, who didn't want to join a run where the first boss had already been downed. The death knight started to giggle insanely, and the hunter expressed a burning determination to finish no matter what. "I didn't get saved to this for nothing!"

Finally... an undead warrior joins us. He, too, is of the completely silent variety who doesn't even return greetings. However, he turns out to be one hell of a tank, picks up all the mobs with ease and then keeps them, and we manage to down Marwyn without anyone dying. Orca Hunter's Harpoon drops, much to the delight of the hunter. At this point I was glad that someone got something out of this run, as I was starting to feel increasingly embarrassed about the whole affair, as if it was all my fault.

I was hoping that we'd be able to one-shot the escape from the Lich King after all that, but ended up wiping on the fourth wall (Is anyone else ever overcome by an urge to make jokes about breaking the fourth wall whenever that comes up?) because the dps overlooked a caster at the back and was wondering why the wall didn't come down.

I fully expected the tank to drop out at that point, but he stayed and actually spoke, telling the dps to ramp it up a bit! Oh. My. Gawd. Let's just say that we finished smoothly after that and it felt exhilarating.

Thank you, undead warrior tank, for being the guy who made it happen in the end.

Thank you, dps death knight, for being the one guy who stuck with us throughout this whole adventure and for shrugging off all the wipes with a sense of humour.

Thank you, hunter, for also being determined to stay until the end.

Throughout these three runs we ended up being grouped with no less than sixteen different people, seven of which were tanks. That's nearly a third towards "The Patient" as it is, though I think it only counts the people with whom you actually finish the instance for the achievement. Anyway, screw you people who have "The Patient" after two days and drop out of any party as soon as the slightest thing goes wrong. You clearly have no idea what patience is anyway.

Disclaimer: I might have missed a wipe or two somewhere and I'm not entirely sure I got the order of tanks completely right either. Apologies in either case, after the fifth tank it all got a bit fuzzy.

First impressions of the new five-mans

One of my guild's mages poked me tonight because he wanted me to help out in Halls of Reflection, and was horrified to find out that apparently I was the only person on the server who hadn't done any of the new five-mans yet (and thus wasn't attuned to HoR). Taking pity on me, he logged on his death knight tank soon afterwards to take me on a tour of the new instances. Since we were also feeling confident, we decided to go for heroic mode straight away.

In the end our group consisted of me on my priest, a feral druid main, death knight alt (who is quite well-geared), a pretty well-geared warlock alt and our main tank's crappy mage alt. And I do mean crappy, he's still in his levelling greens for the most part. Funnily enough, before we managed to rope the feral druid in, we wanted to pug a dps using the dungeon finder, but it wouldn't let us queue for heroic Forge of Souls because mage alt's gear was too crappy. Fear not, puggers, Blizzard won't inflict fools like us on any pug. Well, I thought it was kind of amusing anyway (if also sensible). Still, nothing prevented us from attempting heroic mode on our own.

Just to be clear, the following contains spoilers.

The Forge of Souls

My main impression of the Forge of Souls was that it's vast and kind of empty. The first boss, Bronjahm, wasn't particularly memorable to me either. Still, as a healer I had no reason to complain, as there was enough random damage going around to keep me busy. It was also enough damage to kill mage alt a few times on trash, as his health was very low even with buffs.

The second boss, Devourer of Souls, was pretty cool and a nice flashback to Black Temple's Reliquary of Souls. He also has an interesting ability called mirrored soul, which causes damage that he takes to be transferred to the party member he targetted, so if your dps isn't on the ball they might just end up nuking their own allies. Death knight tank tried to explain the boss's abilities as best as he could, but forgot to mention the evil death ray coming from the feminine face at certain intervals (called wailing souls), so I promptly got caught by that, died and we wiped.

While the rest of the party ran back, I spent the next ten minutes circling Icecrown Citadel on my ghostly gryphon, trying to find the instance entrance again. The warlock eventually took pity on me and came back out to guide me inside. On our next attempt we beat the Devourer of Souls without too much trouble, though two people still managed to get caught by the death ray (just not me this time).

Pit of Saron

We continued to the Pit of Saron (What kind of name is that anyway?), which turned out to be a big quarry outside. A sizeable group of Horde NPCs joined us there and promptly got wiped out, just to be raised as undead right after. So basically they are admitting that the Argent Tournament was pointless? Since this was exactly the kind of scenario it was supposed to prevent, wasn't it? Just saying.

Next we had to spend some time running around killing trash and freeing Horde slaves, and I seriously cracked up when one of freed slaves responded to my help with: "Have my babies." The Horde knows its weird slang, yo.

The first boss, Forgemaster Garfrost, was kind of annoying. He does some mildly damaging AoE all the time, and some big AoE every now and then that you are supposed to avoid by line-of-sighting him by hiding behind a lump of saronite. Which is all well and good, but in practice my party also ended up line-of-sighting each other a lot of the time, making it hard for me to keep everyone alive. While we one-shot him, it wasn't without deaths.

The Ick and Krick encounter was fun, but I'm starting to suspect that all boss fights that involve a gnome are simply automatically made of win. And I don't even like gnomes.

Afterwards we managed to wipe on some trash consisting almost exclusively of vyrkul casters who spammed mad fireballs and diseases. I reckon that using crowd control is prudent here.

The gauntlet leading up to Scourgelord Tyrannus wasn't too tough, though the boss himself certainly was. We ended up wiping due to me being unable to keep up with the incoming damage, though while talking about it afterwards it turned out that he too has a damage-redirecting ability, which essentially caused our dps to nuke our own tank. Once people knew to avoid that on the next attempt, the damage became much more manageable.

Then Horde NPCs came and cheered. Yay! Except then Sylvanas suddenly ported us away and everyone else got pwned. Sigh.

Halls of Reflection

We continued to Halls of Reflection, the last of the new five-mans. Sylvanas made a long speech and stuff happened with Frostmourne, which I might have enjoyed more if our death knight hadn't chattered away on Vent the whole time, saying how this was all really cool the first time but was bound to get tedious after so many runs. I pointedly reminded him that for some of us it was the first time and that I was trying to enjoy the show, thank you.

What followed next was probably the longest "boss fight" I've ever seen in a five-man. Five waves of annoying trash, one tank-and-spank boss, a brief pause to loot, then another five waves of trash and another tank-and-spank. It doesn't sound that bad on paper and I didn't actually time it, but I know that I used my shadowfiend twice and got innervated by the feral druid about four times, so in healer minutes the fight lasted a veeery long time. The rogue trash mobs were particularly nasty as they were fond of shadow-stepping behind a clothie. Unsurprisingly mage alt got one-shot more than once. Still, we managed to complete the event without wiping.

Afterwards we swiftly continued to the end of the hall, where Sylvanas was fighting Arthas, our feral druid charged him and was promptly one-shot. We laughed.

Next followed the infamous retreat to the airship, and damn it was intense. Basically you run along a relatively narrow ledge, and Arthas keeps erecting walls in front of you while slowly following you and sending undead armies to annoy you. Sylvanas gets the easy job of shooting at the walls while your party has to defend themselves against the undead. (I would have loved to trade places.)

There are four walls in total: The first one is easy to bring down, the second one a bit tougher but not too bad either, by the third one you'll start to sweat and if you make it to the fourth wall you'll likely be flailing and screaming by that point. Which is actually pretty cool if you think about it, I haven't had such an intense heroic experience in a while.

We had several wipes at the third and fourth wall respectively, but got better with each attempt as we adjusted our strategy. For example we found it wise to kill the casters before the abominations, since they put a lot of pressure on the healer with their shadow bolt volley spam. Getting wiped out by Arthas had a certain kind of amusement value as well, as he doesn't actually attack anyone in your party. He just walks up to Sylvanas, one-shots her, then looks at you lazily and wipes you by casting some mega spell with Frostmourne. You have to admit that it's got a certain amount of style.

Anyway, after five attempts or so we were squeezing ourselves against the fourth wall while desperately whittling down the health of the last abominations, Arthas' icy breath coming down our necks already... but just before he could kill Sylvanas we got the wall down and could make a run for it. And boy, I haven't run away from something in WoW with that much enthusiasm in a while.

Overall rating

I enjoyed all three of the instances, though the Forge of Souls was a little dull compared to the other two. I can see all of them becoming very popular however, as they allow you to participate in a nice little story and that's always fun. There's a reason Escape from Durnhole was the most popular BC dungeon by about a mile.

Difficulty-wise they are also quite tough and actually reminded me of BC heroics a bit. Halls of Reflection was definitely the most difficult one - and as much as I enjoy the new LFG tool, I don't think I'd want to pug that one on heroic just yet (though it's probably easier when you don't have to carry one dpser in greens).