Our plan for the Thanksgiving holiday was to try and get in a couple runs at Blackrock Depths in WoW Classic since we all had most of the week off. And then, of course, the week slipped on by so we fell back to what we all learned in college, which was to cram things in at the last minute.
Who said you don’t learn life skills at school.
So on Saturday afternoon we did our tour with Marshal Windsor, which was yesterday’s post, and late Sunday afternoon we went back in to see if we could knock out another dungeon quest or two. Our group was:
- Viniki – level 56 gnome warrior
- Skronk – level 56 dwarf priest
- Moronae – level 56 night elf druid
- Ula – level 55 gnome mage
Looking at the map and the quests, we picked a couple of likely targets.
The first on the list was Bael’Gar. He is number 11 on the map and sits alone at one end of the Dark Iron Highway, so we were not going to catch him on the way to anything else. So it seemed like an easy plan to go after him.
After that we figured we would see if we could run back up to the other end of the Dark Iron Highway and catch Lord Incendius, number 10 on the map. I am not sure why these two bosses need a highway running between them. It was probably part of some pork barrel appropriations bill in the Dark Iron legislature or some such.
We formed up out at Thorium Point once more and ran to the instance. Inside, the Dark Iron Highway is easy to get to as it is just through the gate off to the left and straight down the tunnel.
The highway is close and you can even see Bael’Gar standing in his spot up the way. The tricky bit is that the highway is home to a number of groups of Dark Iron dwarves who roam about in packs of five. The key to getting through this was mastering those groups.
Their composition followed a standard pattern:
- 1 – Officer
- 1-2 – Medics
- 1-2 – 2h axe wielders
- 1-2 – guards
The officer ended up being the most annoying member of these teams as they can cast heal, they have a stun attack, and they prefer to sit back out of melee range and shoot the healer.
Medics are healers. Having two in a group made them extra annoying, but most groups only had one.
The 2h axe dwarves seemed normal at first, but they have an AOE attack. There were usually two in each group and their combined AOE meant that Moronae took a bunch of damage at times and had to step out and heal up.
Finally there were the guards, which were just normal melee NPCs. Easy enough.
Adding to that, there are about a dozen of these groups of five along the highway, including one group off to either side of Bael’Gar, and several of them march about or change positions, so you have to keep an eye on your surroundings.
And then there was getting ourselves up to speed. Several of us had been playing retail WoW a lot over the course of the week, and the play style is very different. We had a bit of warm up time to get through. So there were issues… and one wipe… as we ramped ourselves up and tried out some variations on who to sheep and who to kill first.
In the end, the best plan seemed to be to sheep the officer who, as noted above, was the most annoying in those groups, and kill the medic or medics first, then the guys with the AOE axe attacks, then then guards, and then finally the officer. Not sheeping the officer had a nasty tendency to get Skronk dead, causing Moronae to use his combat ress, so we stuck with the plan that kept Skronk alive.
Aggro management was the tricky bit. With four mobs on me and not a lot of AOE options… I have an AOE debuff that gives me a tiny bit of aggro and an AOE attack that doesn’t do much more and which will pop the sheep if he’s too close… there was some running back and forth between Skronk and I as his heals would put him over the aggro line now and again. If his fade skill was up, that was good enough to send mobs back to me. But if it was on cool down, then he had to run to me or I to him… the latter being slow because, among their other tricks, somebody in these groups kept hitting me with hamstring… so I could use my single target taunt or whack on whoever was giving him problems.
Anyway, we eventually got into the swing of things and cleared the way to Bael’Gar.
His fight went pretty smoothly. He hits hard, but not that hard. He summons a non-elite red blob every so often, and we just turned to kill them whenever they showed up. And every so often he shouts then lets go with a fire damage AOE attack. Skronk and Ula just stayed out of range, while Moronae ran for it when the shout came. I sat and took the hit. Skronk had given me a fire resist potion before hand, which helped. The one time I was a little low on health after a shout I put up my shield wall ability and it seemed to absorb the hit for me. Then Bael’Gar was down.
He dropped the Rubidium Hammer, which nobody wanted, so it was a roll-off to see who got to vendor it for the 4 gold.
Well all used the black dragonflight molt from the quest on his corpse, which got us the Encased Fiery Essence, which is what we needed to turn in to finish the quest.
Then we turned around and headed to the other end of the highway, where several more groups waited for us.
We were able to bypass one group handily, but ended up clearing out the rest just to be safe. There is one group that actually walks through the giant doors at the end of the highway, so once again you have to be aware.
Through the doors there is an open area and a gate guarded by a pair of fire elementals, with three more pairs down the hall beyond them.
The elementals are linked, so you get them both no matter what, and they have a ranged attack, so you have to go get them. That just makes crowd control a little annoying, since we don’t have a warlock to banish them. The first pair is the toughest as they are far apart, but the hallway beyond them narrows so each subsequent pair is closer together, with the last two in easy melee range.
And beyond them is Lord Incendius.
Skronk had given me another fire resist potion before we got to the elementals, but I held onto it until we got to this fight.
The fight itself wasn’t too bad. We had a bit of luck with it. Skronk read after the fight that he has a knock back, so the suggestion is that you pull him back in the hall so the tank won’t get punted into the lava surrounding the platform. I happened to align myself so that when the knock back came, I landed safely on the ramp to the platform. I chose that alignment just so I wouldn’t accidentally back up into the lava, so it was a happy moment when I found it was a good choice. And so we won.
We got our update for slaying him, some loot that was also going to get vendored, and stood on the black anvil to take our victory shot, there not being much left of the boss after he passed.
Then it was time to turn in the two quests we had completed. Ula was going to portal us to Stormwind so we could fly to Morgan’s Vigil, but she was out of the reagents required. So we stoned back to Ironforge instead. The inn happens to be right next to the reagent shop, so people stocked up and then we took the bird out to Burning Steppes.
One turn in was there in the camp. More stuff to vendor plus some exp. The other was back in the cave where we had to fight the dragon four times, once for each of us for a drop, with a 10 minute timer between fights back when we were doing prep for the instance.
That was a bit more exp and another item to vendor. It also got us down to just four quests left for the instance.
The hope is that we can knock those out in the next run and be done with Blackrock Depths.
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