Lord Lakmaeran, Raid Encounter

[MongoJerry]

ADVENTURES OF NERIAD: Lord Lakmaeran
Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Healer Rotations

Last night, while preparing to write up the adventures of Neriad and friends completing the Stormwind raid event, I logged on to briefly check up on the followup quest to that event to see if it was worth mentioning in the writeup. Within 30 seconds of logging in, however, I received a whisper from Connacht:

Connacht: Want to help us kill a level 62+ named in Feralas? It might have some good loot.

I didn't care about loot, since I figure that our beta characters are going to get wiped at retail anyway, but I'm always up for a challenge. I was also curious, because I thought I knew Feralas fairly well, and yet I couldn't think of any level 62+ nameds in the area. So I told Connacht I'd come. I figured that I could swing by Feralas, help kill the named, swing up to Winterspring to look into that followup quest, make a few notes, and then head off to bed.

I accepted Connacht's invitation to join the party and quickly noted that I had in fact joined a raid rather than a normal 5-man party. That threw me for a second, because I had pictured some normal level 62 elite named out in the wilderness. But then perhaps this guy was really tough, and maybe Connacht wanted to get a 10-person party together for some extra firepower. I checked the raid screen and saw that I was the 18th person to join the raid party, and Connacht was continuing his recruiting efforts. This wasn't a simple farming run on a named boss. This was a raid event on a raid boss I'd hadn't heard of. My curiosity was peaking even as my dreams of a full night's sleep were diminishing.



Feralas, on the west coast of Kalimdor, is far away from just about everything, particularly if you are an Alliance player. However, it is a beautiful zone and a major elf town, Feathermoon Stronghold, resides there. Like the Hinterlands, about half the quests for Feralas seem to come from outside the zone, which often leads to the mistaken impression that there's not much to do there. In consequence, the zone tends to be nearly empty of players. There are in fact a fair number of quests in the zone, though, and the zone is fun to explore. Every twist of the road or curve of hillside seems to reveal a new ruin with its own character. At some point (maybe at retail), I'd like to make a Horde character and see what quests Horde players get in Feralas, since there is also a major Tauren town in the zone. Incidentally, you can see on the map a region called The Dire Maul. It's an enormous cluster of ruins, complete with a Roman Colosseum-like ruin. A passage off to one side takes you do an instance portal -- to an instance that is not yet implemented, of course.

Our target resided in a valley in the middle of the Isle of Dread, the island just to the south of the island housing Feathermoon Stronghold. I kicked myself for not having explored the Isle of Dread more thoroughly in the past. I knew there was more than just nagas there!



The valley is home to dozens of level 60-61 elite chimaeras, and the target boss was Lord Lakmaeran, the lord of the chimaeras. Connacht did a great job of organizing the venture, and one of the best things he did was recruit Kronos, a warlock, early on. When Kronos got to the valley, the raid settled into a system:

1. Connacht continued to recruit players for the raid.
2. The other assembled members of the raid helped kill chimaeras one after another to help Kronos get soulshards.
3. Whenever Kronos got a soulshard, he would summon one of the players Connacht had recently recruited.
4. Rinse and repeat as needed.



One of the nice things about this system was that it gave the group something to do while waiting for the raid to get filled out and assembled. In fact, people got so enthusiastic about killing chimaeras that Kronos had to ask the group a few times to slow down and not kill chimaeras until he got close enough to cast Drain Soul, which would allow him to actually collect a soulshard off the chimaera.



Slowly but surely, the raid grew until finally we were ready to take on Lord Lakmaeran.



Lord Lakmaeran casually flies about the northern end of the valley on the Isle of Dread. I understand that this whole venture to kill Lakmaeran started with the remnants of yet another doomed expedition to kill Onyxia. The remnants decided to try to take on a little more possible challenge. They had thought like I had that he would be fairly easy by comparison but after their smaller group had gotten destroyed 3-4 times, they knew they would have to assemble a full raid to take Lord Lakmaeran down.

Lakmaeran has three powerful nature damage attacks. The first is a lightning shield that clobbers melee attackers. The second is a wide-field aura that does about 300 nature damage per tick. And finally, he uses a nasty chain lightning attack. This guy's AoE attacks are nasty nasty nasty, and the group would be need to be ready to deal with them.



For the first attack, we organized ourselves in the default configuration most people have been using -- basically making each group of five act as individual parties. In other words, each party was composed of a a warrior, a priest, a secondary healer, and a couple of damage dealers whenever possible. The groups with more warriors in them might get extra healers, but essentially the various classes were spread evenly through the different 5-man parties that composed the larger raid group. After this experience with Lakmaeran and the other raid events I've been involved in over the last few days, I think this configuration is going to quickly go the way of the dodo bird.

Looking through my folder of a over a hundred and fifty screenshots taken during this adventure, I was at first surprised to find that the above screenshot was the only one I had taken during the first battle. Then, I remembered what happened. I was assigned to a group of four (the fifth member of our party ended up leaving right before the battle started) that included a rogue, a mage, and a hunter -- none of whom I had ever played with before. I don't know if the others were inexperienced with raid parties or if the problem was a matter of a lack of trust between players who hadn't partied with each other before, but whatever it was, our 4-man party ran into difficulties quickly.

The raid charged forward to attack Lord Lakmaeran, and I set myself at a distance that was far away from Lakmaeran and yet close enough to cover our rogue with heals. At first things worked smoothly. I reasoned that the way to answer enemy AoE attacks is to meet them with AoE heals -- that is Prayer of Healing. I got a couple of Prayers of Healing off, but then the third one didn't heal our rogue at all. I thought that was strange, so I targeted him with Flash Heal and it turned out that he was out of range. He later told me that as a rogue he wasn't used to being covered by priest heals and so had followed his instincts by flashing and running -- in a direction away from me. As I tried to move in range of the rogue, the hunter and mage got pummeled by the Lakmaeran's aura and chain lightning and as they tried to move out of range of those attacks, they moved in opposite directions from each other and both away from me. The result at one point (as I could see it on the minimap) was a nearly perfect equilateral triangle with vertices that were so far apart that it was impossible for me to be in healing range of any more than one person at a time. If you want to piss off your priest, do that. Naturally, two of my party died quickly, and after running around ineffectually, I just said, "forget this" and started selecting and healing random players in other parties. At least I felt like I was accomplishing something.

While I doubt that any other parties in the raid group had as many difficulties as my group, I suspect that all of the groups had some communication and coordination issues of the kind that any group made up of strangers would face. The raid group had only taken off about 40% of Lord Lakmaeran's life when it was finally and soundly defeated.



Still the group was hopeful. First, taking off 40% of his life was a whole lot better than what people had experienced in their Onyxia raids, so we at least knew it was possible to kill him. Second, we may have had problems, but they were fixable problems. In my group, for example, we spoke calmly about how to coordinate and stay together so that I could provide healing to the entire party. ("If you want my heals, stop f***ing running around!"). Third, Airetnas made a great suggestion for how to deal with Lord Lakmaeran's lightning shield. If mages would cast Detect Magic on Lakmaeran, then his Lightning Shield buff would be revealed, and priests could then dispel it. It was a simple and yet brilliant observation, and a small test attack on Lakmaeran showed that it worked. Removing that lightning shield would greatly decrease the pounding that the melee attackers were receiving.

And so with that in mind, the second battle began.