Monday 1 December 2008

Azjol-Nerub

Azjol-Nerub is how dungeons really ought to be - and is also a complete nightmare.

It's potentially quite a short instance, consisting as it does of two bosses preceeded by trash waves, followed by a final boss, so it may well prove to be a popular instance for farming at heroic level.

It's a refreshing change from instances where you slowly work your way through a room full of mobs a handful at a time, each waiting their turn to be slaughtered. The trash for the first boss is on a timer, so if you kill a group too slowly you have problems getting mana back before the next, and so on to the inevitable conclusion. The second boss is similar, in that he works his way towards you.

It took the group I was with several wipes, some respecs and changes to composition before we got through to the end though. We started off with a well-geared but low level (72) warrior tanking with a death knight DPSing and myself healing with my 32/0/31 grinding spec. The tank and DK then respecced to swap roles with myself respeccing to a fuller healing build which gave me Earth Shield - 22/0/41. This worked better but we still had lose casters causing damage and far too much inbound damage in general. We then lost our two plate wearers who coincidently were replaced by higher level equivalents (this time both level 74) and managed to clear the place. It was still rather touch-and-go in places though, and I had to blow a number of potions to make up for the lack of drinking time between waves. I didn't have any problems with the "potion sickness" debuff though - perhaps this is only confined to raids?

At the end of it all I got two more blue quest rewards that replaced old epics - but at least I've not yet replaced an epic with a green.

My other conclusion for the weekend was that elemental dps really is a bit dull. I was doing a quest to kill 30 undead which turned out to be kill 10, drink, repeat. Due to the way the mobs of that quest spawn there wasn't even interest to be gained from travelling to find the next group. From a character point of view I prefer elemental to enhancement, but the constant lightning bolts are rather repeatative. Perhaps Lava Burst in a few levels will make things a bit more interesting.

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