Yours truly, PTD, has now set foot in both T6 instances.  You already know about my foray into the Black Temple.  Well, now I can scratch Mount Hyjal off my list of "Places to see before WoW shuts down."  I don’t mean that in a "I walked in and wiped to trash" kind of way, but more in a "I went there in a group and killed stuff" kind of way.

Well…actually…maybe that’s not entirely true.  I say this because, truth be told, we did wipe on trash Saturday - repeatedly.  But I’ll get back to that.

First, the good stuff.  Once again, I found myself all geeked up Saturday night as I entered a new raid instance.  I’m not one of those people who randomly set foot in BT or MH just to say I did, so it was all new to me.  The way that MH is set up with a central "hub" is quite interesting.  I really have no idea what the different areas are, as I just followed the crowd.  I know one portal went to a horde encampment, one went to a night elf place, and I think there was at least one more.  I’m not real sure.

Anyhow, they ran MH on Wednesday night without me and got through the first three bosses.  So Saturday night we headed for the Horde Encampment to take a shot at Azgalor.  For those of you familiar with that fight, you probably already understand my comment about wiping on trash.

Anyhow, I digress.

You find yourself in a little horde base, with a bunch of Tauren Warrior NPCs, some orcs and, the Coup de Gras, Thrall himself. 

One of the things I always enjoy in WoW is seeing familiar faces.  Like the quest that ends with Jaina Proudmoore making an appearance, for instance.  Or the Undercity, for another.  So I’m always excited when I see someone like Thrall in game.  Woot!

Anyhow, on to the fighting, eh?  For those of you unfamiliar with MH, this is how it works.  In other raids and instances, you go through a map, working your way through trash to a boss. In MH, you stay in one location, and the trash comes to you in waves, followed by a boss once you get through so many of those waves.

So, in this particular fight, there are 8 separate waves of a whole mess of tough mobs to fight, followed by the appearance of a boss, Azgalor.  We got all buffed up, and the raid leader started to explain the encounter and the waves we would have to deal with.  Well, the problem is that there are 8 waves.  Each wave is a little different.  In other places, like SSC, you explain the particular trash mobs you are about to fight.  You rinse, move on, and explain the next pull.  In this situation, we kind of had to go over 8 different pulls.  Exhausting, to say the least.  In fact it really wasn’t possible.  So the RL tried to sum up, and we started it off.  Hell, I just have to know who I heal, really.

That shot is of the first wave incoming.  Big green nasty Abominations and some Necromancers.  Oh boy.  Already these guys look scary.  Not only did they look scary, they hit HAAARRRD.  So hard, in fact, that two tanks went down on the first pull within about 2.5 seconds.  Ouch, we were not prepared for that.  So we wiped it and started again.

On the second try, we did a little better, and lasted a little bit longer before we had to wipe it.

By the third try, we had a decent handle on it.  There was kiting, there was CC, and yeah, there was a lot of healing.  If there’s one thing I learned about the Azgalor trash, it’s that the fights are very FRANTIC.  The waves come from different directions at different times, there are assorted mob types to worry about, and they can be tough to take down.  I found myself kind of all over the place most of the night. 

Here is a combat shot of the gargoyle wave for reference.

I know it doesn’t look all that hectic, but I couldn’t really take a screenshot whilst flying around the battlefield now, could I? 

So we kept on trying, and we kept on wiping.  One of the other issues with MH is that if you don’t get through ALL the waves, you have to start back at the beginning after the wipe.  It’s not like other raids where the trash will stay dead.  Every time you wipe, whether it’s the first wave or the sixth, you have to start back at wave one.  Ouch babe.  Very ouch. 

We managed to get pretty good at the first few waves, through wave five, to be exact.  In wave six you get a whole mess of nasty, shadow bolt throwing caster types in the form of Banshees and Necromancers.  They all come at once, and they can focus fire and kill just about anyone VERY fast.  They beat us around like red-headed stepchildren.  They took us out to the woodshed.  They ate our children, in the parlance of Mike Tyson.  In short, they beat us down.  The next shot shows how wave six ended for us, every time.

Yup, that’s me.  Taking a dirt nap, along with everyone else.  We’re scattered, but there are 25 corpses about.  It was nasty, it wore us down, and we never got past that sixth wave.  So we did that a number of times, I’m not sure how many, and we aren’t getting any better.  If anything, we’re regressing.  We start fairly late, so when we are having a bad night things can spiral pretty quickly.  We ended up calling the raid about a half an hour early since we stopped making progress. 

Oh well, that just means it’s time to research and prepare for the next time we’re there.  No love lost for WoW, that’s how it goes when learning new content. 

I look things up later only to find that wave six just happened to be the wave that ate many a raid’s lunch.  Surprise, surprise.  So though we never saw Azgalor and wiped repeatedly on trash, at least I know a LOT of people wipe on that same trash.  I found an interesting technique involving banishing a previous mob and NPC help, maybe we’ll try it next week.  Regardless, I’m sure next time we will be better prepared, with a winning strategy.  I can’t wait. 

That’s all for now.  Next week is BT week, so maybe I’ll get to see ANOTHER totally new boss.  I just love that!  Oh, and if you have any advice for MH and that Azgalor trash, feel free to drop your wisdom in the comments.  Thanks for reading!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Casual Play, Casual Raiding, Raiding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.