Schooling Scholomance

[MongoJerry]

ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Schooling Scholomance, part II

After our first abortive attempt at clearing Scholomance with a 5-player party, we reassembled after a break. While many players might get discouraged by the failure of the first run, it was refreshing to see that confidence was quite high for our next run. Each time that we had wiped or had nearly wiped in the first run, we had found ways to handle the problem and continue forward. It was becoming clear that the instance was definitely doable with a 5-player party. All we needed was practice.

We found a replacement for our paladin, so our group ended up looking like this:

Kupeludo: lvl 60 Warrior
Kronos: lvl 60 Warlock
Lilisi: lvl 60 Paladin
Neth: lvl 60 Mage
Neriad: lvl 60 Priestess

It would be difficult to find a better combination of character classes for this instance.



Scholomance starts adventurers off on a wooden entryway with a railing that overlooks some of the later parts of the instance. It has four guards that can be pulled in pairs. Shackle one of the pair, kill the other, kill the shackled one, pull the other pair, shackle one mob, kill the other, kill the shackled one. No problems.

At this point, one is supposed to open the iron gate in front of you and continue. However, I'd like to point out again how this entrance area overlooks some of the later parts of the instance. If you jump down, you'll die almost instantly from the mobs that surround you. However, this ability to jump down is a nice little piece of instance design on Blizzard's part. If the party has already opened the door to the Viewing Room and then wipes at some later stage of the instance, the party can come back to the instance, jump down, run into the viewing room, and get back on its feet. (More details on this technique will be described later). If you're wondering what some of this stuff I've said means, don't worry. You'll see. The bottom line is that the entrance hallway seems to be designed to allow a party that wipes deep inside of Scholomance to recover without having to clear out all of the massive number of respawns in the first portion of Scholomance.

Also, the design of the entrance hallway seems to allow for some tricks to "skip content" and get to the rich miniboss area of the Viewing Room quickly, making Scholomance the most farmable high-level instance for a 5-player party. But for now, let's pretend that we don't know this information and proceed the way the instance was designed.



Through the iron gate is the first real room of the instance, The Reliquary. It has various bookshelves and tables, and the mobs are a mix of skeleton guards and humanoid spellcasters. I and others in my party consider this room to be the second most difficult room of the entire instance. (Second only to the room with Jandice Barov). It has two things that make it difficult. First, the spellcasters like to fear players into other mob groups. Second, the respawn timer is wickedly fast. The first problem can be handled fairly simply. Have the puller pull mobs back into the entrance hallway. That way, when people are feared, they won't run into other mob groups and wake them up.

The second problem, the respawn timer, is the more difficult one to deal with. The Respawn Monster is an ever present insidious mob that can mess groups up long before respawns actually start appearing. Knowing that the Respawn Monster exists causes so many groups to do stupid things like not waiting for roaming mobs to get out of the way to make pulls safer, not taking out patrols when they could have killed them easily, or trying stupid stuff like Mind Soothing or stealthing past stuff. Or non-pullers get anxious, move out of the entrance hallway into the Reliquary, and end up getting feared into extra mobs, wiping the whole party.



The nice thing about the Reliquary, however, is that typically you don't have to deal with most of it. The door to get out of the room is right next to the entrance stairway, so one only has to pull 3-4 mob groups to move out of the room. Unfortunately, there is one not-so-minor item way in the back of the Reliquary: The Deed the Southshore, a quest item. One Scholomance quest is to get four deeds that are scattered throughout the instance, and this quest leads to a very fun followup quest that has a fun quest reward item (more on this later). If you still have to do that quest, you don't want to skip getting that deed.

So how does one handle this room? My advice: very carefully. Don't let the Respawn Monster psych you out. Remember this: If you do not wipe, you have enough time to carefully pull and kill enough mob groups to the entrance hallway to allow people to get the Deed to Southshore. The problem isn't necessarily the Respawn Monster itself. The problem is that people get psyched out so much by the Respawn Monster that they end up doing stupid stuff.

However, there is a catch. If your group has just one full wipe or two partial wipes along the way, it's game over. Do not attempt to beat the Respawn Monster, because you will lose. After one wipe occurs, so many additional wipes get added on top of the first one because people try to "beat the respawns" and end up doing stupid stuff. My advice: accept the loss and reset the instance. You're right at the start of the instance. It'll cost you at most 10 minutes to recover. If you wipe once, it's better to just reset and start over carefully than experience another two or three more wipes as you battle the Respawn Monster.

Good luck on obtaining your Deed to Southshore. It's the most difficult of the deeds to get.