Affliction Guild

The past 2 weeks have seen Affliction opening up several cans of “Whup” and “Ass” and mixing some potent margaritas with the resulting mess. After getting our slavering masses attuned to Mount Trashmobs and Black Ezmode, we set about exploring the instances and introducing several bosses to Run’s after-action “action”. (if you know what I mean. If you don’t, GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN!)

We’ll start off our recap with Mount Hyjal, wherein Blizzard figured that “traveling to the past” is of course completely synonymous with “fighting wave upon wave upon wave of undead”. Clearly. While the idea of traveling back to the Battle of Mount Hyjal and teaming up the combined forces of the Horde and Alliance to defeat the evil of the Burning Legion and the Scourge with the help of Thrall and Jaina and their ridiculously retarded entourage in a series of staged battles consisting of eight waves of increasingly more annoying trash blessed with abilities they use on your entire raid with glee leaving you wondering “why on earth would Blizzard put this shit IN here? WHY!?” while at the same time being infinitely more difficult than the bosses they precede and inexplicably respawning any time you may happen to wipe even though you killed their stupid, stupid asses two minutes earlier and eventually lead onto a not-very-fun-filled boss encounter each of which contains a silly gimmick which once mastered enables you to zone in and collect your loot while wishing “some of the most powerful demons to ever walk the earth” a good day and handing them a future wish-list for drops SEEMS like a good idea at the start, after the initial wow factor (haha!) is gone it’s about as much fun as it was reading through the entirety of that sentence and nearly as entertaining as the pun in the last line.

Anyway.

Mount Hyjal - once you get used to the trash - is a somewhat entertaining instance. It is filled with fun moments like fighting alongside Jaina Proudmoore, who it seems founded the Cult of the Suicide AOE’ers, as well as Thrall, who turns out to be a complete noob because he’s DPS’ing with Stockade Pauldrons and can’t tank to save his life. Literally. While spamming Seed of Corruption and hoping like hell a Pally hits you with a BOP before you die seems to be the order of the day on the trash, the boss fights are slightly more dynamic and memorable.

Rage “Please take my loot and stop hurting me” Winterchill is reminiscent of a Karazhan encounter. Get a PVP trinket or some healers with fast reflexes and loot falls from the sky, along with “Don’t forget to loot your vials!!1one” messages in raid chat.

Anetheron is slightly more challenging, in that instead of slamming your PVP trinket button, you need to spread out around him to minimize the number of people who get to experience his severely advanced case of halitosis. If you can master the ancient art of remaining 10 yards away from your neighbour at all times, and hit whatever buttons it is that you use to DPS, more free loot falls from the sky, along with “Oh shit, I forgot to loot my vial!!!1one” messages in raid chat.

Next comes Kaz’Rogal, a slightly tougher fight because it involves relying on other people not to kill you. For those that don’t know, Kaz’Rogal slaps a spiffy gold star on the entire raid which gives you that special “teacher’s pet” feeling but also sucks your mana right out through your nostrils. Should you not have any mana left, the gold star will self destruct, killing your ass and anyone around you. This requires (a) spreading out (b) chugging mana pots and (c) exploding the hell away from everyone else when you finally do go supernova. Oh, and if you’re a melee class (d) anticipating the imminent demise of enhancement shamans who have forgotten that they use mana and subsequently explode on the entire melee group and the tank. Oh and (e) running the hell away from enhancement shamans that have exploded and miraculously didn’t kill the ENTIRE melee group, only to Ankh, explode and finish the job.

The fight is twice as hard as a warlock, because since you can never run out of mana if there’s still a healer standing, the only thing that can kill you here is dumbass raid members that didn’t keep an eye on their mana and suddenly realize that they’re about to get crapped out on vent. So as a lock, your life is infinitely tougher because you have to (a) spread out (b) lifetap more than usual and (c) dodge last-minute suicide bombers killing everyone in their path in their haste not to kill anyone. However, as soon as it was discovered that a small amount of shadow resistance cheeses this fight completely, Kaz too fell to our overwhelming trash re-clear angst and was molested by Run.

Last but certainly not least on our quest to get the hell out of this instance as soon as possible was Azgalor, another Pit Lord in the long, distinguished line of Pit Lords who look exactly the same. Azgalor seemed like he would actually offer up some form of resistance by wiping us consistently, mostly due to the age old problem of people’s survival instincts not kicking in when playing WoW. Much fun was had by all watching various people melt in the apparently harmless Rain of Fire, a boss ability they could easily be forgiven for falling victim to because they had never, ever encountered it before. But, a bit of reading up and re-strategizing later and Azgalor fell like the rest of the instance, into the eager arms of Run.

The raid breathed a collective sigh of relief at this point, as it was now time to venture into Black Temple, which contained less trash that stayed dead. Our first challenge here was High Warlord Naj’entus, one of Illidan’s top generals who apparently pulled the short straw when they were dividing up the prime office space. We found him in a dank corner of a sewer, mumbling something about maintaining #1 position for weeks to get his blues while casuals these days just had to grind AV.

We knew we were in for a treat when we discovered that this fight too required people to spread out. We also squealed with absolute glee when we found out that Naj’entus is quite fond of impaling people with giant sea shells - and your only hope of survival should this happen to you would be the people around you, who are tasked with pulling it out before the hermit crab inside eats your brain. Grim times indeed.

Much hilarity ensued as people hugged each other and died together in icy tombs, while the melee chained parried blows onto the MT and raid members continued what they were doing in blissful ignorance of the fact that not five feet away, their buddy’s brain had become the main course for a hungry, hungry hermit crab. Eventually though, the fight’s mechanics sank in and Naj’entus was dispatched to trade war stories with Davy Jones and yearn for his Vengeful Gladiator kit.

Next came Supremus, who the Mages were thrilled to find out is very, very similar to Thaladred, in that when he isn’t trying to beat the tar out of the MT, he chases down a random target in the hopes of beating the tar out of them, too. Easy enough you’d think, except that Supremus also spawns ninja volcanoes which pop up out of nowhere with cries of “Ni Hao!” and spew blue lava all over the place. Oh, and blue fire. Stay out of the fire. No seriously.

Once we had discovered that sometimes other people’s strategies not only don’t work for us, but are completely retarded, we proceeded to deliver a swift kick to where Supremus’ groin would be if he actually had one and two-shotted him.

Off we went to face the Shade of Akama. It seems that at some point during the last couple of months, Akama decided to take up engineering for the overpowered crafted helm. Along the way, he created the Gadgetzan transporter and used it, causing it to backfire and create an identical but evil version of himself. This evil twin then decided it was high time to enlist in Illidan’s army but failed the entrance exam. They don’t take kindly to that kind of thing over there, and so Illidan had the shade banished by Yet Another Group of Dark Channelers, whose sole purpose in life appears to be dying first in any given end-game encounter. Which they did. But, only after we had wiped to an untimely invasion of adds because someone, somewhere decided that “for the fiftieth time, don’t talk to Akama!” couldn’t possibly apply to them.

This fight is easier than most of the trash in Hyjal, and Akama’s Shade was brought into the daylight soon after we had the strat down. We also advised Akama to start doing the daily quests for the Shattered Offensive as soon as 2.4 hit, so he could get into Sunwell and grab himself the upgraded engineering helm pattern.

And that’s it for now. We’re currently working on Teron Gorefiend, who seems to be the last of the mindlessly easy bosses and should die as soon as people learn to click a few buttons while moving.

Big grats to Affliction for the kills these past couple of weeks - and I’m sure we’ll be seeing several more shortly.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 3:30 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.