From Easy to Hectic

Karazhan! After this long, the place has kinda grown on me. The encounters are varied, the bosses (for the most part) fun. The trash mobs between Curator and Aran are still a PITA, though. Not because they’re difficult, but because there’s so much of it.

Anyway, it’s a breeze now. After having been in the place for a good number of months now (yes, we’re slow…slow in getting people keyed, scheduled, the list goes on), it’s been hard to adjust to new content, since it all feels so different.

We’ve downed Maulgar at this point, sure. And we can do it reliably…with a full raid. We spend so much time waiting…well, nevermind. Separate rant.

Back on topic, we’ve started ZA. Have the bear boss dead on night #2 (#1 was done as a test run, hoping it’d gotten better since we tried it on test, and went in with some subpar-geared peoples). Try #3 I think…it’s a simple fight, just a matter of keeping the tanks up through spike damage. Reminds me of the first couple times we downed the Curator, though…all my cooldowns, three times. And this is with all the buffs…12k mana, 1600-some +healing, 35% holy spell crit chance…it’ll get easier the more we do it I’m sure.

The gist of the fight…he starts off in humanoid form. He will attack the person highest on his aggro list, hitting decently hard. He will sometimes do a cleave which splits damage amongst those in front of him. So you have your main and offtanks stand in front, with the offtank just eating the split damage. He will also do random charges in this phase, running at someone and knocking them back as well as anyone nearby (so it’s important to spread the ranged people out, ideally he should only knock back one person). He will place a debuff on the MT that increases bleed damage by some high %. This is important for when he switches…

…into bear form. Your offtank should pick him up at this point, as in bear form he will do a mangle attack which applies a bleed debuff. This debuff will do tremendous damage if the tank has the bleed damage increase debuff on him from the humanoid phase. He does not cleave or charge in this phase, but he does hit harder and will periodically do an AoE silencing roar. It is important to have the tank topped off as much as possible to prevent death during the silence. And then…

…he will switch back into humanoid form, and commence cleaving and charging again. The MT picks him back up, and you proceed normally. It’s an endurance fight above all, as the guy has a freakin ton of HP.

My job was to heal the tanks alongside the two priests we had. A simple job, but quite stressful. It’s much like healing during High King Maulgar…spam FoL, toss an HL in here and there to keep your Light’s Grace(s) active…for when the emergency burst healing is needed.

After that we went on down the path to the Dragonhawk boss. Jebus those scouts are annoying…reminds me of Heroic Old Hillsbrad…anyway.

We made it up to the boss after quite a few wipes. He’s an interesting fight, shouldn’t be too much of a problem. We didn’t get him down then, but next time I wager we will.

51g total in repairs though, and only one Badge of Justice :(