Five Player Running Lower Blackrock Spire

[MongoJerry]

THE FIREBRAND ORCS

Just outside the door to the troll lounge is a ledge where one can jump down to a safe corner that connects two corridors filled with Firebrand orcs. The worst that can happen when you jump down is that you might land on a solitary orc patroller who passes through there. Not a big deal. By doing this, we ended up skipping about eight to ten orc and troll groups. (None of the troll groups contained shadow priests -- I checked). Like I said before, after spending all that time clearing all those trolls in Tazz'Alaor, our group was ready to skip ahead a little bit.

Firebrand orcs come in clusters of varying numbers under their little red huts. The clusters are close to one another, the orcs run when they're low on health, and some orcs wander between the groups. In the screenshot above, for example, a Firebrand Invoker is leaving a group and wandering over to another group. After spending some time with the second group, the Invoker will return back to the first one. One of the many things that can go wrong in this room is that a sapped or sheeped mob could break, aggro a wanderer who is halfway along toward returning who in turn yells and aggros the full cluster of 3-4 orcs the wanderer had just been visiting with.

When talking about this corridor, I feel like I'm caught in a bind. I neither want to oversell nor undersell the danger. Most of the time, you're dealing with three or four orcs, and the fights are straightforward. Although the orcs here hit harder than the ones upstairs, this is hardly an "OMG! We're gonna die!" place. However, it is a place where Things Go Wrong ™. Pulls can go wrong, crowd control can go wrong, runners can get away, and people can accidentally back into mob groups behind them. The bottom line is that the primary danger here is the danger of getting adds. As long as players are somewhat careful, however, there's no reason for a wipe to occur here.

I don't have any magical tricks for dealing with orcs here other than what most players do regularly. However, here are some reminders and tips anyway:

• Watch for wanderers when pulling.<>
  
• Rogues, when sapping, try to sap a mob far enough away from other mob groups such that if/when you lose stealth, it doesn't aggro a second mob group. Vanish, obviously, if a second group does aggro. You probably know all this already.<>
  
• Mages, don't sheep pull. Instead, pull the mob and then sheep. You don't want a sheep to wander into a second group of orcs.<>
  
• Pull mobs as far back as possible, so that runners have further to go before they can get help.<>
  
• The majority of orcs here are spellcasters, so they need to be counterspelled, silenced, shocked, or otherwise interrupted to get them to come to you.<>
  
• Use all means necessary to slow down and/or prevent runners.
  
  
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• Priests, the biggest danger of the Firebrand orcs is a nasty debuff that increases the fire damage taken by the target (I believe the darkweavers cast it) combined with the invokers' fire attacks. The debuff can be dispelled, but it's easy to skimp on debuffing when one is concentrating on quickly healing partymembers. The trouble is that the debuff gets cast a lot, and the it stacks, even though it just looks like one icon next to the person's picture. One time, I moused over the debuff icon on someone and saw that it was increasing fire damage by 1000 points per hit. Ouch. You have to try to get rid of those debuffs as quickly as possible -- especially the ones on the main tank who'll be taking most of the pounding from the fire attacks.<>
  [st]
  
  
  The first LBRS party made it through the corridor unscathed, but both the second and third parties wiped here. (Diest's guildmates at the Amazon Basin should appreciate this screenshot, as there's a running gag among them that Diest causes all wipes. I don't recall what specifically caused this wipe, but I'm sure he must have done something). The second party recovered via a warlock's soulstone. The third party should have recovered via our shaman self resurrecting and then resurrecting the party. However, our shaman was "flat out of ankhs," the reagent shamans must carry with them to be able to self rez, so we ended up having to release and run back to the instance. The front of the instance had respawned. However, after killing about five mob groups near the entrance, we were able to find a spot where we could jump down and get back to where we had died.
  
  <RANT>
  
  What is it with shamans not carrying ankhs on them? I swear it's an epidemic. It's to the point where some players playing other classes carry ankhs on them just in case their parties' shamans don't have any at the start of an instance run. Heck, I actually saw a Molten Core raid stopped dead in its tracks, because three shamans didn't carry ankhs on them. The shaman self resurrection ability is an incredibly powerful group recovery tool, and that any high level shamans wouldn't have ankhs on them for an instance run is unfathomable. The question should not be, "Do you have ankhs on you?" It should be, "Why aren't you carrying 20 ankh's on you?" I mean, I always start with twenty Sacred Candles so I can buff people with Prayer of Fortitude during a run, and after a run is over, I always stop off at the reagent vendor to restock my supply. Why can't shamans do the same type of thing? And don't give me this warlock-soulstone-resurrection-sickness-bug boloney either, because the rare times you are partied with a warlock, you'll usually be with a priest who'll be the one who's soulstoned anyway, and if push comes to shove, you can hand your ankhs to a partymember for safekeeping.
  
  </RANT>
  
  
  
  Thank-you, I feel better. Now, where was I? Oh, yes, lower Blackrock Spire. The corridor opens into a larger room. There's a handful of wanderers and patrollers here that should be carefully picked off (e.g. the wanderer that our rogue, Saito, is going to pull in the screenshot above when she comes back toward us), but luckily you can skip the large group of orcs on the right. Most groups pull the group on the left and squeeze around to the left, being careful not to aggro the larger group on the right. If you do this, just make sure not to accidentally back into that group while fighting mobs up ahead.
  
  
  
  At the other end of this room, one comes to the end of the Firebrand orcs and the start of the spider lair. There are five orcs spread across the path here, but in fact they are split into two clusters that can be pulled separately. The insidious part of this battle is that if people get too enthusiastic about pulling mobs, they can end up backing right into that great glob of orcs that the party had skipped just a moment ago. Sap, sheep, and kill here, and don't get too carried away with making a deep pull.
  
  Normally after this fight, a party would be done with Firebrand orcs, but Aixelsyd had a special request. He asked us to kill the Firebrand Pyromancers who hang out in a small alcove that can be seen to the right in the screenshot above.
  
  
  
  In this alcove, there are three clusters of three orcs, and each cluster has a pyromancer in it. The front two clusters are so close to each other that they come together, making the first pull a six mob pull. (I have an untested theory, however, that if you sap the orc in the first cluster that's closest to the second cluster, then maybe the second cluster won't get the "yell" and won't aggro). It's a tough fight. After sapping and sheeping, winning is mostly a matter of keeping one's cool and always assisting so that everyone is attacking and killing the same mob at once. The potential reward for killing the pyromancers, though, is definitely worth the effort if you are a mage specializing in tailoring.
  
  
  
  Thottbot lists a recipe drop rate of 3.3% per pyromancer, while Allakhazam lists a drop rate of about 1%. We're dealing with low number statistics here, so those two numbers are comparable. Considering you get three chances per run, that's a pretty decent drop rate for an epic recipe. Also, remember how the party in the third run was able to jump down to the area with the Firebrand Orcs after its wipe after only killing a few mob groups at the start of the instance? Well, if a mage had some friends who were willing to help him or her, that recipe looks eminently farmable. It's certainly more farmable than the comparable priest and warlock recipes which only drop off Balnazzar and Darkmaster Gandling, respectively.
  
  But luckily for Aixelsyd, he didn't have to repeatedly farm the pyromancers, because the recipe dropped for him off the first pyromancer we killed. So that was the second epic item (if you want to call the recipe itself an epic item) that had dropped during our run. Our party was feeling pretty good at this point.
  
  
  
  All we had to do now was kill a few spiders.
  
  UP NEXT: Spiders