Five Player Running Lower Blackrock Spire

[MongoJerry]

The Road to Highlord Omokk

After quickly dispatching the guards in the entryway, a party has two paths to choose from to get to LBRS. I have often thought it would be interesting to study the psychology and sociology of how habits, myths, and conventions are formed in on-line communities. (For example, how did the "Don't talk to the patrons in the bar!" myth form and spread?). In the beta, the convention was to go down the stairs, kill the two easy guards in like 15 seconds, and hang a right. In retail (on Tichondrius, at least), the convention is to go up the stairs and jump down from the ledge. This has the benefit of not requiring one to kill two easy mobs. On the other hand, it means that if something goes wrong on the next fight, all means of escape is cut off and emergency measures like fearing are not feasible. Oh, well. Most players never think anything is going to go wrong, so I guess people prefer to shave 15 seconds off their trip. If you do the jump down thing, make sure to kill the two roaming guards before engaging the mobs down the ramp (seen in the screenshot above) or else things can get messy.

The first task of the instance is to work one's way through groups of Blackrock orc guards to get to Highlord Omokk, an ogre warlord who is the first of three bosses Horde players must kill to complete the quest, The Warlord's Command, which is incidentally the first quest in a long quest chain that ends with Horde players getting their Onyxia key. The orc guards on the way to Omokk tend to come in two configurations. The first configuration can be seen in the screenshot above, where one can see a cluster of three elite orcs to the upper left and to the right of them, a cluster made of an elite Scarshield Raider who has two nonelite worg pets. Most of the time, the two clusters are close enough to each other that both clusters get pulled, meaning that you have to deal with six mobs at once -- four elites and two nonelites. However, on occasion they are far enough apart that they can be pulled separately.

The second configuration is a straight cluster of four elite mobs, and usually one of these mobs is a warlock, who can create a portal that summons an indefinite number of minions. It is important to always target and kill the warlocks first. Incidentally, hunting down and killing the warlocks in LBRS is important to player warlocks, since they drop both the book that teaches warlocks how to summon infernals and also these babies:



So, how do you handle the orc mobs? Well, you can use the standard technique: sap one mob, sheep another, kill the warlock first (if applicable), then the worgs (if applicable) to get the nonelites out of the way, then any other free elites, then the sapped mob, and then the sheeped mob. It works, but things can sometimes get a little hairy on those six mob (4 elite + 2 nonelite) pulls if players make some mistakes. Also, there are a few groups (usually guarding a chest) of five elites, and while the standard technique can work against them if the party stays focused, there's a better way that uses Mind Control.

Mind Control, you ask? Doesn't that take the priest out of the action? That's worthless, you say. And you'd be right, if one uses what I call the Weak Mind Control method.

The Weak Mind Control Method: The WMC method involves mind controlling a mob after a mob group has been pulled. Effectively, the method treats Mind Control like any other crowd control skill in that it reduces the number of enemy mobs attacking your party by one. Mind Control has an advantage over other crowd control skills in that the priest can now use the controlled mob to attack the other enemy mobs, but since the priest can't cast any spells while controlling the mob, the party also effectively loses its priest for the duration of the spell. When priests do this, the usual response from partymates is, "Just heal!" Warrior tanks don't mind tanking an extra mob if it means knowing that the priest will be actively engaged in healing him or her. Because of this, new priests quickly learn the mantra that "Mind Control is worthless" in group instance play, and they rarely use it for more than humorous purposes. But there's a much more powerful way to use Mind Control.



The Mind Control Pull: Mind Control is far more powerful if it's used during the initial pull. In this case, the other mobs will attack the controlled mob rather than the party, allowing the priest to crowd control multiple mobs at once. In the screenshot above, for example, Mind Control is being used to crowd control not one but five mobs. (I'm not counting the sapped orc on the right). What's more, all of the damage dealt by the enemy mobs is being directed at their own teammate, and mobs often start fights by using their most powerful attacks. (e.g. One of the orcs above is firing his arcane missiles at the controlled mob).

After the priest mind controls a mob, the party's mage should sheep one of the other elite mobs. This both keeps the controlled mob from dying too quickly and also makes it so that the party has less to deal with in the unfortunate case that Mind Control breaks early. Then, mobs who are attacking the controlled mob should be pealed off one at a time and killed. A good tank will have no difficulty tanking single mobs at a time, and if the party has a secondary healer to provide an occasional heal, so much the better. After all the free mobs are killed, the party can then kill the sapped, controlled and sheeped mobs one at a time.

Incidentally, if you let a controlled mob get killed by its mob teammates, it won't drop any loot. So, I usually release a mob with a sliver of life left and then Mind Blast it to finish it off. Also, Mind Control causes a huge amount of aggro, so if Mind Control releases early, the previously controlled mob needs to be taunted by the group's warrior or sheeped to get it off the priest.

By the way, in the top righthand corner of the screenshot above, you can see a trogg walking around. His name's Warosh, and he asks adventurers to help recapture his mojo by killing Highlord Omokk, placing his head on a pike, sticking the pike in a tribute pile later in the instance, and killing the ogre boss, Urok Doomhowl, who has Warosh's mojo. It's a very difficult event, and I'd like to attempt to five-man it at some point. However, all of the members of our party had already completed the quest in previous raids, so we ended up skipping it.



You can see the pikes for the Urok Doomhowl quest lying against the wall in the background in the screenshot above. (I love this action screenshot).



With a little bit of luck, skill, deception, and brute force, our party made our way through the orc parties to the ogre section of the instance. This area is actually comparatively easy, since the ogres come in groups of only two or three. Sap, sheep, and kill. No sweat.



The only thing to watch out for here is that after the initial ogre guards, you'll come to a narrow stone bridge. At this point, someone in the party will likely yell, "DON'T FIGHT ON THE BRIDGE!!!!" The ogres have the ability to knock players back, and if you get knocked off the bridge, it's a long way down.

In a bit of foreshadowing of things to come, you can see a group of spiders in the upper left part of the screenshot above and another group of ogres standing above the doorway. Being able to play at the more leisurely pace of a 5-man group has given me a better chance to look around and appreciate the architecture of the dungeon and see how the instance wraps around on itself three-dimensionally. Although we can see the spiders right there, they come much later in the journey, and the ogres you see above the entranceway are actually guarding the tribute pile near the end of the instance where one can summon Urok Doomhowl. There are lots of places to jump to skip portions of the instance, but most of those tricks are beyond the scope of this journal which is detailing the adventures of a group who actually wanted to run the entire instance. I'll leave the details of most of those tricks for someone else to describe.



Past the stone bridge is Highlord Omokk's chamber. Here, I mind controlled one of the ogre guards. There was no tactical reason to do this, but I was having fun. When you mind control an ogre, your camera angle shifts so high up that even taurens look tiny.



At the end of the chamber lies Omokk himself, along with his two bodyguards. The obvious tactic is to sap and sheep the two bodyguards, and kill Omokk. However, we instead sapped one bodyguard and mind controlled the other. Omokk hits hard, so I let him and the bodyguard duke it out until the bodyguard had a sliver of life left. Then I released the bodyguard, killed him with a Mind Blast, and the party proceeded to attack Omokk. When it comes to Mind Control, give a priestess an inch, and she'll take a mile.

Omokk himself hits hard and knocks players back, but the fight isn't difficult.



Omokk ended up dropping the Belt of Valor, which we practically had to force our warrior, Bort, to take. He kept saying he had a better belt and that the Valor set bonuses aren't that great. And we kept telling him that he might end up getting the rest of the set someday and that maybe the set will get better in a later patch. He hemmed and hawed, and we finally had to tell him, "Bort, just take the damn belt, will you?" "Well, ok." Sheesh.

Highlord Omokk had been vanquished, and it was now time to tackle the Smolderthorn trolls and kill their leader, War Master Voone. And, oh yes, it was time to search for that elusive Devout Belt.

UP NEXT: Neriad and the Quest for the Holy Belt