At the end of my last thrilling recap, we left our heroes high up in the Blackwing Lair. Although I wasn’t present for Thursday, the group managed to get down one new boss, the drake Firemaw, who is capable of insane amounts of area damage with his flaming breath.
Tonight we returned to a fresh version of Blackwing Lair. We struggled on both of the first two bosses, Razorgore and Vaelestraz, though a big problem was the constant disconnects that 3-4 players (some with very stable ISPs) experienced. We eventually got them both down, though we used up a lot of our available time — the guild went to Molten Core on Tuesday, so this was our one shot this week for BWL).
We did hack our way through the suppression rooms with great speed and took down Broodlord on our first try. That dude hits really hard – he killed our main tank three times in the fight.
Following Broodlord are a few interesting trash fights with “Technician Packs.†These are mixed groups of orc casters, drakonids (the bipedal dragons) and hordes of goblins throwing grenades. These are fairly technical for trash pulls since each mob can do something different. We had time for one shot on Firemaw, but we were tired and I had never done the fight before, so it wasn’t a great effort. I expect next week we’ll get him and wouldn’t be surprised to get a shot at the next boss or two as well. For starters, we were down 3 of our best rogues (Laeus, Sharted, Blackcat) who probably account for 13-15% of raid DPS all by themselves.
From a guild raiding perspective, one of the challenges we are dealing with now is the sheer number of instances to run. It’s hard to really call Molten Core or Onyxia complete, since they drop the tier 2 legs and helmet to go along with the other 6 pieces that drop in BWL. But since BWL alone can take two nights, we’d be looking at a third official raiding night to be able to fit it all in, which I suspect is more than our semi-casual guild can support. For now we are going to try alternating MC and BWL on different weeks and hit Ony every time she is up. It’s sad that what was once an awesome battle against Onyxia is now tedious for just about everyone. Sadly the game design forces you to keep fighting her over and over in order to get the 40+ helms the guild needs. That is 20 encounters minimum, and likely many, many more (we’ve had one warrior hat drop for instance).
L00t:
[item]Nemesis Bracers[/item] – Frak
[item]Netherwind Bindings[/item] – Dplezz
[item]Waistband of Wrath[/item] – Barflez
[item]Judgement Belt[/item] – Escian
[item]Judgement Sabatons[/item] – Studboy
[item]Judgement Sabatons[/item] – Nemorama
[item]Helm of Endless Rage[/item] – Rooke
[item]Maladath, Runed Blade of the Black Flight[/item] – TrinTodd