They said it couldn’t be done.  Well, I guess “they” is a little nebulous.  The fact is I thought it couldn’t be done.  PTD in the Black Temple?  The Unholiest of Unholies?  Yeah right.  Well, as I said recently, I was signed up to do just that last night.  I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about a raid invite as the one I got last night for BT.

Our alliance recently decided to change focus from strictly T4 and T5 raiding to more a mix of T5 and T6.  We’ve done the first couple of bosses in MH, and this week we started on Black Temple.  They went Wednesday night (a night this Part Timer can’t make) and downed Najentus.  So last night was a continuation, and we would be starting with Supremus.  Let’s get started with the rundown.

The area around the Black Temple is one I generally avoid.  Too many random nasties about, and I don’t like random nasty deaths.  About the only time I’m in the area is to do the Armament daily from the Isle of QD.  So most of the area was unfamiliar to me.  Heck, I didn’t even know HOW you got in BT.  It turns out you go through a hole in the side of the temple.  Pretty cool.  Here is a shot of the first thing you see.

Yeah, pretty standard looking cave area.  But this is the Black Temple, baby!  I even DISCOVERED it!  Excluding QD, I haven’t discovered anything since SSC about 4 months ago.  I was a little geeked up already.

Anyhow, as this was a continuation, we just ran through a few areas that had been cleared.  Here is a pic of where they say the first boss was located.

On we went, and finally started clearing trash before the second boss, Supremus.  I’m sure you’ve all seen trash before, so I won’t bore you.  There are some dragon dudes, some worker dudes, some other dudes.  We wiped once by pulling in the wrong place and getting oodles of adds.

After awhile, the trash was cleared, and I got to take some vanity pics while we set up for the fight.

First, PTD the Tree in BT, with dead mobs behind!

Next, a shot of the big bad himself, Supremus.

That’s one big, bad elemental dude. Scary. It turns out he hits for a LOT too!  We started at 8 PM server, and were scheduled to go to 12 AM, a four hour raid.  (A four hour raid. [Gilligan's Island Theme Plays])  Now, I won’t bore you with all the fight details, but I’ll try to sum up.

There are two phases for Supremus.  In phase one it’s a basic tank and spank.  Basically you need two tanks for the fight, one holding the aggro, and the other there to avoid this big, nasty hateful strike that does some 14k or so damage.  The healers’ job is to keep both tanks as close to topped as possible.  If either goes down, it gets ugly fast.

In phase two, Supremus basically randomly picks raid members to, well, pick on.  He targets one player and charges at them.  He charges pretty slow, so you can kite him around.  He does this for a few seconds before switching to another target.  What this means is during this phase everyone is pretty well spread out, and prepared to run if they are the target.  I found that for druids, Cheetah form is the bomb in this encounter.  Special thanks to Matticus for letting me know I could USE cheetah in this battle.  It made getting away from Supremus a piece of cake.  Also during the second phase, volcanoes pop up all over that do huge AOE damage.  If one pops by you, you better move, and fast.

That’s it.  The fight switches back and forth between those two phases at timed intervals.  One of the keys is the switch from phase two back to phase one.  At that point the tanks have to pick him back up FAST and the healers have to get back in position FAST and let loose the healing.  This is the real struggle of this fight, IMO.  Most of phase one and two are pretty easy when you know what to do, it’s the transition that can kill a raid.

Any how, 4 hours later, 10 attempts, and one re-clearing of trash later, Supremus was down.  Sadly, I was down too, but I took a pic anyway.  At fifteen minutes, Supremus enrages, and we killed him at 15 minutes and 1 second.  Wow!  At that point we were also down to one tank, one healer, and about 9 or 10 DPS.  It was CLOOOOOSE, but we got him!

And here is our celebratory pic, after myself and others were rezzed, of course!

And that about wraps it up! We are now 2/9 in BT, and it feels great. I’m so glad I was able to go, and I felt like an important cog in our success. The loot was a DPS neck and DPS leather chest. I actually considered the chest for off-spec, but didn’t take it. I’ll leave you with two other interesting pics I got. One is of the top of the stairs after Supremus, and a familiar looking statue. The pic after that is the room right behind him, which I did not go further into. It looks cool, though!

One other note before the pics.  You can raid casually. Your friendly neighborhood PTD is living proof.  You have to finagle to get it done, but you can.  I only raid ONE night a week, and I’ve now seen almost all of SSC and some of the Black Temple now too.  Don’t think that just because you’re a casual player you can’t raid.  Anyhow, enjoy the next two pics, and thanks for reading! You stay classy, World of Warcraft!