I thought a recap may be useful. This is what I remember from my group:
First we were totally lost. We didn't get the shadowforge key until after we had help from someone who knew what they were doing (Necrali and Durambar).
We stumbled through much of BRD just lucky we had a rogue. We initially skipped the interrogator who had the key for
Commander Gor'shak but got to him because Alram was eager to open every locked door he came across (he probably got several nice lockpick skillups in there).
I'm not sure how we ended up getting through the mob of enemies that came, I let forth a challenging shout at one point, but we still lost Nash as there were simply too many mobs and too much healing going on for me to hold aggro. I probably should have switched to battle stance and hit retaliation right after the challenging shout, but didn't think to. The only AoE used was shaman AoE AFAIK. Hunter was gimped because of the tight confines. I can only assume Rogoll, Gorkuk, Kosch, and the kitty were enough to power through them one by one. Miraculously Nash was the only casualty.
We continued on and ended up in the ring of law which we didn't have huge problems with. We had enough DPS to take the lizards down fairly quickly one by one. The boss mob, whatever his name was went down easy enough, but he was hitting pretty hard.
Then we wandered aimlessly while looking for the next place to go. It never occurred to me to cross the top of the arena and head back that way, which I guess is what we were supposed to do. We pretty much cleared all the area we could except for that area up there... spending a lot of time not accomplishing much except killing trash mobs that didn't drop much useful stuff.
We decided to just pick one of the shadowforge gates and work our way forward.
We were presented with numerous 5 pulls that usually included an Anvilrage Officer, a medic or two and the remainder were either Footmen or Guardsmen. These guys perpetually disarmed me, but reasonable focus fire helped me a lot. Because most of the party was melee, we took a lot of damage from the cleaves that the footmen and guardsmen did too.
We typically would sap the officer, focus fire on the medic and I'd pull the other guys away from the rest so cleaves were less of an issue. We had a couple wipes on these guys. Wipes occurred in two scenarios:
1) we ended up aggroing all 5 with no sap. I suppose this was a combination of not enough healing and the extra cleaving going on because the chaos didn't allow for quite the nice separation we would have on the more controlled pulls
2) the group had 2 medics. Self explanatory, the medics have like 10,000 mana, and they were healing a lot. We had a tough time keeping both of them stunned and/or silent and the fight was extended to the point where healer mana was gone.
In the future we should probably call for a little better silencing tactics (designate 1-2-3 for kick, shock, shield bash) as I think we were double or triple silencing and getting caught on cooldown.
Again we were lost and were going to continue down the path towards Incendius, but got distracted when we saw the huge Bael'Gar.
We wiped on an officer/medic/etc... group right in front of him, came back, mopped up the rest and took him on.
He was going down very quickly, and someone made a comment about him being pretty easy right about the time he spawned about half a dozen oozes that went straight for Nashkara. I think he fell again, but we emerged victorious.
None of us realized that we needed to apply the Altered Dragon Molt to Bael'Gar for the
A Taste of Flame quest. We all simply spaced on that one.
We went the other way down that hall, fighting more of those nasty 5 pulls, and wiped again at a set by the door out of that area as we walked through about the time they were patrolling back into the room. Gorkuk had some issue with not able to issue commands to the kitty, and that may have been the difference, as we ended up with only the officer left at the end, and he was down to 14% when Kosch finally went down. He made a valiant attempt, getting off a last second heal, but couldn't pull out the miracle. I'm betting he was praying for a triple crit windfury proc, but it was not meant to be.
After one more corpse run, and murdering the last remaining anvilrage officer, we started in on the elementals for Incendius.
I'm not sure if we used fire resist totems, but we probably should have. I didn't think of it, and I never heard it mentioned. As I went through my combat log, I verified that these guys do 100% fire damage, so the only benefit I was getting was the 10% less damage from all sources given by defensive stance. As a result these guys were hurting. Maybe for next week, I can get at least a few fire resist items for fighting these guys. Add in a fire resist totem and we may have an easier time. These guys weren't too tough, but the later elementals, the destroyers, were more deadly with their ranged fire attacks to everyone standing close enough.
Incendius went down fairly easily, because I had read that he did a knockback attack, and positioned myself accordingly. He knocked me back as I was pulling him back to the group in the hall. If I had not read that, I'm pretty sure he would have punted me over the edge and into the lava, as I wouldn't have thought to re-position myself.
Where incendius was standing was The Black Anvil. This is where I will need to go to Blacksmith any of the items I gain access to through increasing my reputation with the Thorium Brotherhood. Unfortunatley the bars are smelted in a different part of the instance entirely... pretty far away from the anvil. How convenient.
We crossed the lava and low and behold we came upon the mob we needed for the shadowforge key quest. How lucky we were.
We killed him, and looked around. we didn't know if continuing on the path would bring us back to where we came from because we had picked the lock to the gate. It may be that going along that path would lead us back to the instance entrance through the path we were supposed to take to the shadowforge key boss, or if it would be a path that took us to a part of the instance we needed for another quest.
The confusion, coupled with the other group's issues, cause a couple people to call it a night. I'm not totally clear on what happened with Octord, but I believe he had some computer issues. Xame / Yuri was also having connection issues. However, they apparently knew what they were doing, as they had the shadowforge key, something that we didn't have yet (we had ironfoe, but didn't know where to turn it in to get the key).
So Kosch and Rogoll called it a night and we added Necrali and Durambar.
Since they seemed to have a clue about the instance, we were able to get the shadowforge key in short order and then activate the mechanism that unlocked the path to the higher level part of the instance ( the bar and Lyceum and eventually the Emperor). We had previously found this path, but it was blocked because we didn't have the shadowforge key needed to rotate the hallway to allow passage.
We started encountering much more difficult elites. Anvilrage Marshals (which can heal) and Captains. Nothing was too difficult, about 3 or 4 pulls. Stuff we could handle. Occasionally a Destroyer Elemental that had the fun AoE attacks. Elementals were always first to go down.
We came to a room where we had a choice to go to the left towards General Angerforge or to the right towards the rest of the instance. We couldn't back down from Angerforge standing there staring at us. Even though we didn't yet have the quest to kill the General, we went for it. The quest comes in the third part of the KILL ON SIGHT series of quests. We had only completed the first part.
Angerforge is guarded by 4 non-elites. We looked at the situation, first thinking the non-elites were elites. As we realized they weren't elite, we gained confidence and attacked.
We took out the non-elites and were focusing on the general. At around 25% for General Angerforge, he called in reinforcements. 2 medics and some other non-elites. Wow, this sucked.
Chaos erupted, but Angerforge was already on his way down. It took some time to get some focus on the medics, and we couldn't fear because there was a small group in the far corner that we had decided to leave there. We were afraid fear would cause them to add.
Eventually we overcame the numbers, but I recall a close fight. My memory is fading at this point in the night, as it was getting late for even myself. We made it and Angerforge had a completely craptacular drop to greet us with. I think it was a level 51 green axe or something.
Next time, I say we skip him unless we're up to the quest to kill him.
We headed down to the Manufactory next and this place was pretty fun. At least I had fun. Tons of non elites with the occasional elite golem thrown in. Mostly just run around slaughtering the little non-elites. The only danger is runners (and we did almost have a breakout) plus one fight which is two elite golems + a few non-elites.
Once the room had been cleared, we could go for the golem lord Gargamel... I mean Argelmach. He was guarded by two elite golems. Durambar went for the golems and the rest of the group was to focus on Argelmach. This fight went well thanks to the fact we had two tanks and two healers. Argelmach bolted straight out of the room, presumably to try and find some of the golems and non-elites that we had killed just before. The golems were on Durambar, so he stayed and tanked with Necrali, while I followed Argelmach and caught him with an intercept. I hamstringed, but he didn't seem to go anwhere once he realized there were no reinforcements.
He wasn't too bad, but apparently he has an instant 1100 damage lightning attack that I'm not sure we saw. We cleaned up and got what I thought was the best drop of the night. A very good drop anyway:
Second Wind . It's the only drop that made an impression in my mind. I don't think there was much else even worth mentioning.
Necrali expressed how late it was, but we were close to the bar, and I pushed to continue so we could investigate the bar. Patrons were yellow to us and we could interact with them. We accepted what looks like a pretty crazy quest, considering you have to return to the bar again to turn it in:
The Love Potion. It requires killing giants in Azshara in addition to getting something from Un'Goro Crater, then coming back to BRD. Talk about a pain in the ass... A decent reward for cloth wearers though, but I have a feeling this is one quest that is taken by many who pass through BRD, then dropped a few levels later.
We saw Ribbly Screwspigot and Necrali said something that I don't think Ribbly liked very much. Ribbly and his friends straight up slaughtered Necrali, then headed for us. Ack! Well, Nash combat ressed Necrali and we (barely) killed Ribbly and his friends, then we decapitatied him and packed up his head at his family's request.
We saw the kegs of thunderbrew lager, but didn't activate that quest, we went upstairs and spoke with Plugger Spazzring, and bought him out of his ale and some other stuff.
We started placing the ale on the floor and the patrons of the bar would walk towards it and to their death as we cleared as much of the room as we could. Some of the patrons made it to the ale and would drink it. But with the 10 we had, we cleared most of the area around Plugger.
More ale was on the table there, and as soon as we picked it up, Plugger started attacking us. We downed him easily and now the entire barful of patrons were red to us. It seems they disliked us killing the bartender. Not a terrible surprise I guess.
We used the remainder of the ale to pull the rest of the top floor of the bar and all that was left was Phalanx and his buddies. Quite a difficult group with one destroyer, Phalanx, and three High level anvilrage officers. I'm not sure what the proper tactic would be on this group. We mind-controlled one of the officers, and I'm not sure if he broke early or if he was totally slaughtered by the other 4 elites in no-time flat, but chaos erupted. I believe we killed everyone but Phalanx, maybe an officer was left, I'm not sure, but we wiped and called it a night at this point.
So to review...
Quests completed:
Commander Gor'shak: Nashkara (?), Conc, Gorkuk, Rogoll, Kosch (? I think Kosch never turned in Pyron and may not have received this one)
KILL ON SIGHT: Dark Iron Dwarves: I hope everyone got this one done, they should have
The Last Element: Necrali (?), maybe others. Most of us I think have this about 1/2 or more done. Just depends on luck of the drops from elementals
Disharmony of Flame: I think everyone finished this one
Dark Iron Legacy: Everyone except Kosch and Rogoll, they have Ironfoe, but need to get to the statue to turn it in
Ribbly Screwspigot: Necrali, Durambar, Gorkuk, Conc, and Nashkara (?)
Rise of the Machines: The same 5 as Ribbly if they had enough of the Elemental drops.
Quests that should have been completed, but weren't:
A taste of Flame: Luckily this is near the entrance, and with the Shadowforge Key, should be a quick complete
Heart of the Mountain: Apparently this quest is done near where the statue for the Shadowforge Key turn in is. It will be necessary to go back there again for Rogoll and Kosch to get their keys anyway. We should have enough of the coffer keys for two groups to do this quest. Need 10 total keys, and the last unlock should be a tank (because it triggers the event). I think Conc has 4 or 5 of the keys, so I assume we have plenty of keys.
I have no idea what to do against Phalanx + 3 officers + one fire destroyer. Seems like a difficult fight no matter what. Any ideas?
Conc / Concillian -- Vintage player of many games. Deadly leader of the All Pally Team (or was it Death leader?)
Terenas WoW player... while we waited for Diablo III.
And it came... and it went... and I played Hearthstone longer than Diablo III.
