Noobing Molten Core

[Hedon]

The day had finally come!
Since I started playing WoW in the European Final Beta and set my virtual foot in the Shadowfang Keep Instance and enjoyed the hell out of it, I was determined to visit one day the holy grail of instancing in WoW, the Molten Core.

It was a mellow saturday night on the Kil'Jaeden (EU) server and I was waiting for the zeppelin from Ogrimmar to Undercity to arrive, as I received the tell I have been dreaming about since those days of final beta:


[Slaanesh]: "Hey there, do you want to join a MC raid tomorrow?"

I must say I reread the line again just to be sure that I wasn't dreaming indeed .

[Me]: "MC? Sure count me in"
[Slannesh]: "Fine be on 3. p.m. tomorrow"
[Me]: "I will be there"


Let me explain a bit the situation on our server. There isn't a real big hardcore raiding guild on our server so far, resulting in MC raids being still a very rare event on Kil'Jaeden(EU). In fact Luciferon had not been slain up to this day this particular raid had started, so it was a big event indeed.

I would like to think, that I had been chosen because of my exceptional playing skills (I had done some instances with Slaanesh before), but the truth is probably that the pool of lvl 60 priests is very limited, so that they were happy about every priest who could make it ;)


So I logged in the next day and was promptly invited to the raid group and flew to Kargath. In Kargath (the staging point of all groups and raids headed to the Blackrock Mountain instances series), I had a deja vu from the days I had played "Saga of Ryzom" where we raided the Prime Roots to get access to other continents. What I mean is the joyful anticipation that precedes such a big event, when the raid members meet, final preparations are made, raid subgroups are formed and organisational orders are issued.



Used to the organization of raids in "Saga of Ryzom" it was all very similiar "Voice Rights" were only given to to the raid leaders to and sub group leaders, all other raid membes could listen to the conversation and act upon voice orders, but had their microphones muted. Also only those people people with voice rights had the right to write into the "raid channel", all other members were confined to the "group channel" to discuss tactical details. This is necessary to ensure that the raid channel doesn't get spammed and the voice channel doesn't become absolutely confusing.

After frantically organizing materials for some repair bots in the last minute, we all set out to Blackrock Mountain.

There are two ways to enter the Molten Core. You can make your way through the BRD, at wich end there is the green portal to MC, or after you have been there once and collected the item for the "Attunement with the Core" quest, you can take the short way and jump through the window left of the High Elf (who also isues the attumenment quest) which stands at the lower floor of the Black Rock Mountain central hub, right there where you take the the entrance to the right if you head to BRD. Of course if you have not the attunement quest finished you will just take a rather painful and probably deadly dive into the lava.



As we trickeled through the portal and were gathering on the other side, people had another chance to take a closer look at their fellow raiders. This is were I took this screen of the "Sisters in Faith". It was funny because the two priests were all like "omg, we look almost exactly the same".



But after the small talk was all done and final bio breaks were taken, it was time to get serious. There were "things" at the end of the short tunnel and their time had come. The raid leaders gave final orders "You are aware that those things in here have very high fire resistances? I don't want to see a single fireball flying"

As neither of us had great experience in MC (the raid leaders have only been there one time before themselves) our strategy was pretty simple. We had two designated main tanks, a priest in every group, in the group of the primary of the two maintanks an additional druid, and the rest was basically assigned to be damage dealers. When everything worked out, it looked something like this.




A thing that I noticed there as priest: A lot of the inhabitants of MC have the nasty habit of dispersing magical debuffs on raid members. As a priest you have to decide wether you want to dispell those debuffs, thus risking not being able to heal for a full second because of the global cooldown, or keep on healing for the tradeoff of not dispelling, which decreases the debuffed members efficency or deals additonal damage. Theoretically one shoud have priests just dedicated to dispelling, and others to concentrate on healing.

Another thing that had caused frequent problems were rougues. Not being able to absorb large amounts of damage like warriors, but being prone to get hurt through AE because they have to move into melee range, they are quite difficult to handel for healers, putting an additional strain on their timing issues and mana pools.


We weren't really that bad at those first pulls, and people were already making remarks like "Hey this is going really well, considering it is a pick up raid" etc.
Every time I hear someone saying something like this in an instance, I know doom is not far away. And indeed then came the doggies from hell, or ancient core hounds, if I correctly translate the German name back to English.




Those beasts were much thougher to handle than those golems and elemantals before. Raid leaders were trying to instrcut the tanks to turn those away from the raid, so that they wouldn't AE all the people but this was apperently easier said then done. High time for Prayer of Healings, alternated with frantic shielding, squeezed in dispells, last fraction of second flash heals.

Anyway we managed the first couple of core hounds and were rewarded by our first epic drop, from one of those lava elemantal things. Of course this was accompanied by a wave of cheers from the raid.



I could translate the name and stats of this item, but i will leave it to your patten recognition skills to indentify it ;)


Unfortunatley this sould be the apex of our little expedition and things went badly downwards from this point on. Concentration suffered and we fetched some unnecessary adds.



As mentioned before, we had our problems with one of those corehounds, two of them devasted our raid in seconds. It was surreal to watch those fields on the CT-Raidassist panel grey out completely in less than a minute.



We never recovered from this wipe. I think I was rezzed three times just to be eaten by another corehound patrol. These patrols are really vicous, and there was no safe zone, to rezz and regroup the raid successfully. When then decided to take a corpse run and enter the instance anew.

One of the raid leadres mentioned we should next time install timers, for repop of patrols. Does someone of you has any experience with such things? Where does one get those, and how do they work?


Anyway on our second attempt, we made it to the bridge, behind those core hound patrols.




Just to be greeted by another one of our old friends. People panicked, concentration and discipline was at this very point already very low, some people backed up on the bridge and aggroed some golems, that stood somewhat right of it, and there we go: another wipe.





Once again no safe spot to recover, no discipline whatsoever left, we decided to make an end to our ordeal and ended our little MC adventure.




Things I have learned from our MC failure:

1.) Random pick up raids in the magnitude of 40 people simply don't cut it (big insight isn't it, considering the troubles one often enough has with 5 man instance groups).

2.) Unlike in many other instances recovery from wipe is very difficult, as you don't have safe zones and time to recover sucessfully (at least in the zone I have seen so far; it is perhaps possible if erveryone knows what to do and acts accordingly, but see point 1). Very much like traversing the prime roots in "Saga of Ryzom" knowledge about pathing and timing of mobs is key to sucessfully master this area of MC. This quite surprising because most of WoW Instances are rather static were you move from one pullto another without any significant time restraints (although in Dire Maul West there are also pathing and timing issues with patrols to consider).

3.) Fire resistance, nuff said.

4.) Dedicate some priests to dispelling and secondary healing (no shamans can't dispell magic like paladins do)

5.) We need a German Version of CT-Raidassist, because the English Version on top of the German Client doesn't display debuffs (some really sadistic devoloper also translated the internal script language for the German and French versions, so that debuffs are not identified because of their new German/French names by the English CT-Raidassist).

6.) Yes doing MC is insane, but I will surely do it again :)