Schooling Scholomance

[MongoJerry]

ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Schooling Scholomance, part XIV, Jandice Barov

Today, I received a lovely note from the folks at Blizzard that said (paraphrasing), "Thank-you for your assistance in testing World of Warcraft, but you have been having far too much fun playing your hunter. We are therefore going to take down the servers for several days to make sure that you sit down and finish your dang Scholomance journals." At least, that's how I interpreted the letter. I don't want to disappoint the folks at Blizzard, so let's get cracking.

The story so far is that on the second day of the patch that introduced the Scholomance instance, a group of players set out to see if Scholomance could be beaten with a group composed only of five players. (At the time, it was common to run Scholomance with raid groups of around ten players). Having accomplished that, some members of the party turned in one of the quests and ended up getting a surprise "PvP" quest to assassinate an NPC in the middle of a Horde outpost. Having then completed that task and having each received a nice trinket as a reward for their efforts, several members of the party went to turn in another quest to see if they would get another quest series continuation. Those members returned to Eva Sarkhoff, who stands just outside the Scholomance entrance, to let her know that they had killed Doctor Tholen Krastinov and burned the remains of her and her husband as she had requested. Indeed, there was a followup quest. It turns out that Krastinov was merely a servant of the even more cruel master, Kirtonos the Herald. To summon him, the group first had to obtain a bag containing the Blood of the Innocents, which could only be obtained by killing Jandice Barov in the depths of Scholomance.

I groaned when I saw the quest continuation. I knew at some point I would get a quest to kill Jandice Barov, but that didn't mean that I had to like it when I got it. I had already had several bad experiences in the basement room leading to her and had begun dubbing the chamber, "The Room from Hell." Weeks later, having been through that room a few more times, I don't find it as scary or as frustrating as it use to be. But, it's still the most challenging and time consuming room of the instance to get through.

Soon after Kupeludo (warrior) and Lem (rogue) helped me kill Alexi Barov, the NPC who stands in the middle of the Bulwark that we needed to assassinate to complete that PvP quest, Kronos (warlock) came on-line. I asked him if he'd like to join us in continuing the assault on Scholomance by going after Jandice Barov.

Kronos: Who do you have so far?

Neriad: Kupeludo and Lem

Kronos: Ew, a rogue!

Neriad: Yeah, I know. What can you do?

We then picked up Keimon, a second warlock, and set off.



Jandice's room is a large basement hall with three wall segments in the middle that divide the room into four rows. One can choose to go along the left or right walls, and for some reason, going along the right wall seems to be the easier path.

There are three kinds of mobs here. First, there are the elite diseased ghouls whose bodies erupt in poison gas clouds when they die. Then there are the slow non-elite scooby-doo mobs (at least they look like what scooby-doo ghouls always seem to look like) who like to pop back to life after being killed the first time. And then finally, there are the non-elite Risen Aberrations which are skeletons who hit hard. So, every pull is composed of one or two elites combined with several non-elite mobs. This screams for the tactic whereby the elites are shackled and the non-elites are killed with area-of-effect attacks. The only trouble is that the Risen Aberrations are immune to fire, cold, arcane, and shadow damage (and nature damage?). So, other than paladin holy attacks, they're immune to all AoE attacks. You have to kill them one at a time.

The most critical issue in handling this room is pulling it correctly. The mobs constantly shift and move around at different speeds. Pull them correctly, and you can get one elite and 3-4 non-elites, a fairly easy pull to dispatch. Pull them incorrectly, and you'll get two elites with about eight non-elites and likely get wiped. In addition, the room has a fast respawn time, so one has to move forward at a steady pace. In fact, the respawn rate is fast enough that I suggest that if a group ends up having a partial wipe, involving multiple resurrections and buffing, that it might as well move back to entrance stairwell and start the room over. You don't want respawns appearing on top of you while fighting a pulled group of mobs. Luckily, Blizzard developers have said that they have tweaked the respawn rate in the front area of Scholomance because of the many complaints about its current setting, so hopefully this won't be as much of an issue after the upcoming patch.



Once we finally got to the end of the room, we fought Jandice Barov herself. She's a tough one, but I don't recall having any major problems fighting her. (The screenshot above shows the Servants of Barov trinket at work. It summons three servants of the house of Barov to come Cook, Clean, and Fight for you. It's so much fun).



The only particularly special attack Jandice Barov has is that she can split into multiple illusions of herself, but the illusions can be destroyed quickly with area-of-effect attacks.



Jandice dropped this sword for us, which many players goggle over. In addition, she dropped a green Hyperion Helm of the Boar. Hmmm... both a green and a blue item in addition to the quest bag. Well, it wasn't worth the time or effort of working one's way through the basement room just for that, but at least we got a couple of things other than the quest item from killing her. But wait! There's more!



Along the wall near Jandice is a torch switch that opens a gate in a room upstairs that contains a special chest that for us contained two more top of the line green items. Before you say, "Bah, how junky!" Keep in mind that some green items are better than many blue items, and for some equipment slots (especially for rogues), green items can be the best items in the game. Plus, those green items from the chest are bind on equip, so if no one in the party can use them, they can be given to alts or sold at the auction house. One of the items we found, for example, was a set of Nightmare Armguards of Agility -- +15 agility leather bracers. None of us could use those bracers, so I asked for them to give to my hunter alt. After I had asked for items for my hunter a few times, however, I started getting teased by the party that "hunter" was really a codeword for "Auction House." For example, we might find some green cloth gloves with +int and +spirit on them, and they'd start saying, "Uh, yeah, my hunter could use those." My hunter's lvl 46 and named Pandarus. Look him up! Grrrrrr...



Keimon had to leave after we killed Jandice, so we summoned in Orodruin, another warlock, to replace her. One of the nice things about having two warlocks in the party was we were able to take turns porting out (or /stucking and rezing at the spirit healer) and talking to Eva Sarkhoff to get the next part of the quest series. As expected, the next quest asked us to use the Blood of the Innocents to summon Kirtonos the Herald, the big boss man himself.

UP NEXT: Kirtonos the Herald