Schooling Scholomance

[MongoJerry]

ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Schooling Scholomance, part VIII, Hall of Secrets and The Coven

After killing Raz Frostwhisper in the Laboratory (with a fireball), we went back upstairs to the Viewing Room and took followed a side passage to the Headmaster's Chambers (shown above). The chambers have a total of six side rooms -- three on each of two levels. In order to bring out the headmaster, Darkmaster Gandling, one must clear out all six of these side chambers. Luckily, each of these chambers has a miniboss in them, making this area a great place to find loot.

The central room has a few wandering skeleton guards that can be cleared prior to going into the side chambers. (You don't want them adding at the wrong time during a big fight). It seems that the lower rooms are easier than the upper rooms, so we now tend to do the lower ones first. However, we didn't know this at the time, so we started with the upper rooms. In the end it doesn't matter, of course, since one has to clear all six rooms anyway.



The side chamber we started with was the Hall of Secrets, which involves what our warrior, Kupeludo, describes as "the most difficult pull in the instance." It seems that no matter what you do, you're going to end up with a dozen mobs coming after you.

The bad news: You have about a dozen mobs chasing after you and they hit *hard*.

The good news: They're non-elite and they're slow.



The best way to handle this pull is to start it off like any normal area-of-effect pull. The puller shoots the mobs, runs back through the door so that the mobs get in a nice tight bunch in the doorway and then the characters with area-of-effect spells start blasting away. Unfortunately, this has the effect of making the mobs chase after the aoe spellcasters, and the mobs have enough health to withstand the initial aoe barrage. This brings us to the second stage of the fight: kiting.

In our case, we used Kronos, our warlock, as our bait. He was the perfect choice, because he had almost as much health as our warrior (6k+ health!) and because the mobs were chasing after him anyway. Kronos proceeded to kite the mobs around the upper level of the central chamber. These mobs are slow, so one can actually run away from them. Meanwhile, the rest of the party picked out single targets and finished them off. I believe Kronos also added some extra aoe damage along the way as he could. Slowly but surely, the mob pack was whittled down.

After the initial mass pull, the rest of the mob groups in the room were pulled in smaller numbers and dispatched easily. Then came the big moment. The big bad daddy of them all: The Lorekeeper. We kill the Lorekeeper and get:

Nothing.

Well, ok, some cash and runecloth. I've heard that when he does drop a Scourgestone, the Lorekeeper drops a Minion Scourgestone. He seems to be the one named miniboss in the area whose loot table isn't that of a named miniboss. In fact, he doesn't even have the loot table of an elite mob. I don't know if this is a mistake or is intentional, but it was disappointing either way.



The next chamber we came to was the Coven. The mobs here are pretty tough with a mix of humanoid spellcasters (make sure to have shadow resistance buff on) and skeleton guards. I don't recall having to use any special tactics for these fights, though. Most pulls involve two humanoids and 1 skeleton, so it's a pretty standard shackle the skeleton, sheep one humanoid, kill the remaining humanoid kind of thing.



The one cool part of this fight is that the spellcasters can turn into Dark Shades for a time and they hit like crazy when they do.



Instructor Malicia is the named miniboss in this room and she fights like the earlier spellcasters. There doesn't seem to be any way to pull her separately from one of her minions, so we usually sheep the minion (seen on the right in the picture above) and focus on Malicia.

The biggest trick about this fight and indeed the entire room is that the spellcasters cast a nasty "timebomb" curse. After 60 seconds, the curse will explode for over 2k damage. This shouldn't be a problem. After all, mages and druids have the ability to remove curses and 60 seconds is plenty of time to work with. In fact, druids in general are great about removing such curses in plenty of time. However, there is a significant problem if you are in a group that is counting on a mage to remove curses. How do I say this diplomatically? Let's turn to the numbers. For several months I kept strict account of the number of times a mage in my party dispelled a curse without prompting. I would go so far as to wait for 15 seconds *after the fight was over* to give the mage the opportunity to remove a curse. The end result was an astonishing 50-to-1 ratio of mages who would not remove curses without prompting to those who would actually remove curses without prompting.

So if you are coming up to the Coven in a party that is depending on a mage to remove these nasty curses before they explode on you for 2k damage during the middle of a heated battle, I suggest that you politely mention that in the upcoming room there are mobs who cast a nasty curse that needs to be removed. This'll give your mage(s) a chance to perhaps place Remove Curse on one of their hotkey bars or even port to Ironforge to go get training in this spell that they've "never needed before" (this actually happened in one of my Sunken Temple groups). And if you're in one of my groups and you see me calling out "decurse," please don't take it personally. I'm just going by the numbers.



Instructor Malicia dropped these set gauntlets, which look like excellent gauntlets for a shaman. (Read: useless to an alliance party). We'll see soon that such set item drops seem to be a theme for the minibosses in the Headmaster's Chambers.