As I mentioned in the Stormwind Stockade post, we were skipping straight ahead to Gnomeregan, bypassing Razorfen Kraul. This was, in part, due to Ula demanding that we face something challenging lest her video recaps of our adventures get dull. We cannot depend on Skronk falling off of things every time to liven up a run.
So it was to be Gnomeregan, with the group capped at level 29 according to the MOTD in guild chat and the pinned notice in our Discord.
Not that we were in danger of getting too far ahead. When the designated time came on Sunday afternoon, our lineup was still mostly at level 28. We were:
- Ula – level 29 gnome mage
- Viniki – level 29 gnome warrior
- Skronk – level 28 dwarf priest
- Obama – level 28 human warlock
- Moronae – level 28 night elf druid
We met up outside the bank in Ironforge to get ourselves together. With an eye towards getting things rolling as quickly as possible I brought my warlock, Winki, to the bank to use the summoning skill to bring Obama and Moronae to us, since I could see from the guild roster that they were strewn about the map of Azeroth and there was no need to waste our limited time on travel.
Summoning before the bank
Still, it took us a while to get sorted and to get all of the quests shared out. Like the Stormwind Stockade, Gnomer has its share of quests.
Most of the quests
We had to trot down the hill into Kharnos in order to pick up an additional one, and I am not sure we got them all. There is quite a list. But once set there, it was off for the instance.
Through the snow to Gnomer
Which is a bit of a trot. And Gnomer is also one of those instances where the elite mobs start before you get to the portal. But that is fine. Troggs are for killing.
And more so once inside. Clearing troggs is a bit like clearing Defias in the Stockade. They hang around in groups and you get the occasional walker… well, runner… passing through, though the runners are at least non-elite. As tends to be the case, the mobs on entering the instance were lower level than us, but that changed as we moved further in.
Moving further in though… nobody brought a map and it had been ages since we had been in Gnomer, so we moved through the instance in what was probably not the most efficient method. But we didn’t fall off of anything, which is a hazard.
We found our way to Emi Shortfuse pretty quickly and ran through her event.
Emi starts us off
The end of that event had no drop. I was kind of hoping for the gauntlets that are a possibility, but we were denied.
Afterwards there was some question as to where to go. I had some recollection of jumping off the ledge to get to the Viscous Fallout boss, but I wasn’t sure that was the best idea. So we decided to just clear our way through to where ever, including that platform in the middle.
Fighting on the high platform
The fact that you can fall off of high places in Gnomer was a bit of a reminder about how things have changed. I recall being in instances in later expansions and finding all sorts of invisible walls that would keep you from falling off into anything.
Given that we all needed a ton of drops and a bunch of the “Coke machines” that are scattered throughout the instance for quests, taking the long way around and killing as we went seemed like a reasonable approach.
At one point we came out into a room that we had to clear and things started getting out of hand. We don’t have anybody who can quickly stop troggs when they start to run… the wind up for druid root is a bit long… so there were a couple of adds from that. We were also fighting on a sloped section of wall with some open doors to other rooms, which ended up in a proximity pull or two. I hope Ula got Skronk falling into one of those open areas on video. The fight seemed to be getting out of hand but we somehow managed to come through it without losing anybody.
Taking a breather after the fight
From there we found our way into the safe zone, where we used the vendor and played with the machines.
3 silver for a piece of lead? At least it gives exp on the first try
After that we carried on to the floor area where the Viscous Fallout lives. We were careful pulling mobs, clearing out a large area around the doorway before venturing in.
Pulling ooze back from the main floor
And then, as we were taking on one of the slimes the Viscous Fallout wandered up behind Moronae and the fight was on. I honestly thought it was just another elemental, and the fight went pretty fast. But, it turned out we had another boss down. He didn’t drop the shoes, which all the casters were looking for. Instead he had the staff. It is a nice staff, but not what people really wanted.
After that we cleared our way back around to the out door and into an area I have heard referred to as “the gauntlet” in the past. It is a long corridor with a walkway up on the left side, both of which had mobs wandering around. You have to pick one or another to travel down to get to the next area. The comedy comes when you’re in one and get close to the end of the other and pull proximity aggro and get a few surprise adds.
Here is where we ran into trouble. At the start we went into the wide section, eschewing the walkway, mostly because there was a “Coke machine” sitting there waiting for us. The pair of mobs next to it didn’t seem like much of an issue.
And then we got a walker as an add. Then an alarm bot showed up and called for help before we could kill it. And then somebody strayed too far left and we got a proximity pull from the walkway. And then another as a walker on the walkway joined in as well. Things were becoming a bit chaotic.
Fight in the gauntlet
At one point, with my taunt on cool down yet again… that is a long 8 seconds to wait… Skronk went down. That was fine, he had a soul stone, we could still pull this out. But then we had to have a discussion about whether or not we wanted to “blow” the soul stone on a fight with trash mobs. I was very much on the “yes, revive yourself and heal me now please!” side or the discussion, and he did use the soul stone. I suppose Moronae could have used his combat ress as an alternative, but we didn’t really have the time to bring that into the debate.
Also, all of our buffs took the opportunity to drop during that fight, just to add to things.
And yet we lived. I figured, after that previous fiasco in the room with the sloped wall, that there was a good chance of us pulling through. Despite being older and rusty and not very well coordinated (I’m pretty sure the voidwalker ran off and pulled another add on its own) we are still not as bad as we were back when we were doing this as a group for the first time in 2006.
Once we recovered and got buffs back up, we decided to take the walkway forward. Its narrow confines had more mobs and would keep us marginally less likely to get proximity adds from the big open trough. We still managed it, but we never ran into a situation quite that bad again.
Through the gauntlet, we ended up in the big room that had the next boss, Electrocutioner 6000, in the middle. We just had to make our way around the room to the ramp up to his platform.
Around the platform, working on gnomish aircraft, are groups of five or so gnomes linked together. They are all non-elite, so the idea was to pull them, group them up, then do “fire & ice” so the casters would burn them down. And that sort of worked. There were a few hiccups. Amongs the groups there is the occasional elite mob. The pathing for the gnome groups is still as broken as it was back in the day, which makes getting them all together awkward if you try to pull them through one of the areas they refuse to enter. And, frankly, mage AOE wasn’t as OP effective as I recalled, so we had to get in and chop down individuals.
Still, we managed, nobody died, and we made it to the ramp and laid eyes on the boss in not too long.
There he is
Despite the Electrocutioner 6000 being a few levels above us, level 32 to our mostly level 29 group, with only Ula having hit 30 so far, the fight with him was short. There are no special mechanics, it is just a “there he is, get him!” sort of fight that went very quickly. Maybe our DPS isn’t all that bad. The main complaint was that I pulled him into a dark area on his platform, so the fight wasn’t going to look good on video.
Over the corpse on the dark corner of the platform
The Electrocutioner 6000 dropped the Lagnut ring, which went to Skronk, it being spirit and stamina focused.
At that point we had been running for about 2.5 hours and there was some spouse aggro developing for a couple of us. We started a bit late in the afternoon and dinner was ready for some of us… I had to pause the group at one point to call in a Thai food order for my wife to pick up on the way home from a listing where she was holding an open house… and pointed reminders that there was food on the table were coming. So it was time to call it for the day.
Fortunately, the Electrocutioner 6000 dropped the workshop key, which lets people come in the other entrance, bypassing the initial bosses.
They key
So we were set for our next run. We recalled back from that platform.
…after playing on the planes
So Gnomeregan will be a two-parter for us. Maybe a three-parter if we decide to finish off all of the quests. I don’t think we knocked out a single one. As for next time, the level cap for the group was raised to 30, since Ula was already there. We will pick up where we left off next time.
Ula has posted two short videos from our run. The first covers entering the instance through the Emi Shortfuse event.
The second takes us through the Electrocutioner 6000 fight.
Among other things in this video, you can see the Viscous Fallout wandering up on us, the fight in the sloped room, the chaos of mobs showing up in the Gauntlet, the pathing issues I mentioned, and how quick the Electrocutioner 6000 fight and why we took the fight in that dark corner. (Hint, proximity pull again!)
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