Originally we were not going to try Wailing Caverns this Saturday. One of the team was going to be out of town so we thought we would push it off at least one night and perhaps to the following week.
Because of this, I did not get on the computer until a little after our usual start time of 10pm, having spent the evening watching a movie with my wife. When I logged on to WoW, just to see if anybody was around, I found most of the team there and ready to explore WC.
So I shouted, “Hey! Me too!” Fortunately our warlock was one of those about, so I got a summon to the group rather than having to travel from Stormwind to Ratchet.
The lineup for the night was:
22 Warlock – Bungholio
22 Priest – Skronk
23 Rogue – Blintz (me)
24 Mage – Ula
This instance took longer than I thought it would. It is rated a little lower level than Deadmines and with the four of us at the high end of the recommended levels, I was correct in thinking it would not be a desperate battle in general.
However, we did not know the instance, which meant we took time finding where we needed to go. Also, WC is bigger and not as linear as Deadmines, so there was a lot more travel along with the deciding where we needed to be.
We also had some bad intelligence. We entered with the belief that WC did not respawn, except for the slimes roaming the place. We found out that WC does, in fact, respawn. This meant that our decision, after killing Lady Anacondra, to clear the way down to Naralex in anticipation of having a clear run to him later was flawed. By the time we had slain all of the other named mobs and were on our way back to the Disciple or Naralex, the whole route to Naralex had respawned and we had to clear it again.
There are not a lot of useful details from most of our crawl through WC. We used Bung’s voidwalker as the tank. When we faced a pair of casters, Ula would sheep one. If we faced three, I got to sneak in and use my sap skill. I had not actually used sap before, but it worked very well. I have put all my skill points into subtlety, so I never got caught sneaking up and sap seemed to last about as long as sheep.
Lady Anacondra, Kresh, Skum, Lord Pythas, Lord Serpentis, and Lord Cobrahn all went down in battles that were not very dramatic.
They also did not drop many items of interest. We got two rare shields, but they were both bind on pickup and we did not have any shield happy classes with us, so they ended up getting disenchanted. Lady Anacondra was probably the most disappointing, dropping a pair of common shoulders.
Our big drama was in our battle with Verdan the Everliving. We slew Lord Serpentis and his two minions pretty easily and we were eager to keep going and knock off Verdan as well. When Skronk put a raid target icon up on Verdan, it seemed to be out of scale. The icons are usually bigger than the mobs head by a large margin, but on Verdan it was tiny. But it wasn’t the icon that was not to scale, it was our own perception. Verdan is huge.
Still, he was only level 21, even if he was a named elite, so we sent Mezzmon in after him with me trotting along in stealth mode to get behind for a garrote opening.
Verdan hits hard, so he is to scale for his offensive capability, which is big. Mezzmon’s hit points dropped fast. Skronk started laying heals on him while Bung and Ula were unloading their offensive spells on Verdan. This set up the next chain of events.
I got behind Verdan and got my garrote off, but then Mezzmon went down. All of the casters had built up a lot more aggro than I had, so Verdan began to run around in a game of “stomp the casters” while I ran behind him, back stabbing when ever I could.
Bung went down, then Skronk, then finally Ula. But they had done their damage. By the time Ula went down, Verdan was down to under 300 hit points and I was as yet undamaged. I did not need to take a potion of use my health stone. I just chopped up what remained and, two weeks in a row, I was the last survivor of a fight.
Skronk used his soul stone to revive, then ressed Bung and Ula up. At that point we were pretty much out of named mobs to kill and so we tried to find our way back to the Disciple of Naralex in hopes of a quick last fight as it was getting late.
We ended up jumping off of a couple of cliffs before we found our way back to a location we recognized, which was the water where we picked up Kresh. Following that back we got our unhappy surprise. We found that all of zone before that point had respawned. We would have to fight our way back to the Disciple then all the way to Naralex with the Disciple in tow.
It was about 1am at this point and there was a feeling that perhaps we should just call it a night. But this close to the end, we decided just to rough it out and see how far we could get.
We fought our way to the Disciple, spoke to him, and then began to escort him to Naralex.
I hate escort quests. Partially because they are slow, but partially because the NPC you are escorting can behave erratically. The Disciple, in the true tradition of escort missions in WoW, walked into bad situations, proximity pulled extra aggros, attacked sheeped mobs, and failed to assist or engage with several groups of mobs that were all over us.
Still, somehow we kept him alive until we got to Naralex. He got in a fight with several serpents that we arrived just in time to assist with, then he disappeared. We almost missed the emote from Naralex that indicated things were still going forward. Then a group of non-elite slimes began to wander around where Naralex lay. We watched them for a little bit while we healed up. Then, deciding that nothing was going to happen until we killed them, we killed them.
Then Mutanus the Devourer wandered up on shore. The last fight was at hand. In went Mezzmon and the fight was on.
I slept through a lot of the fight.
I must have been causing a lot of damage, because Mutanus kept turning around to me and putting me to sleep. Skronk had his dispell magic handy though, so I got enough wakey-wakey to keep me in the battle most of the time.
Finally Mutanus went down. He also dropped one of the better items of the night, one which we could actually use, the Deep Fathom Ring, which Ula won.
We took our end-of-instance screen shot. Here we are by the corpse of Mutanus the Devourer.
Mutanus
[This was a difficult screenshot to take as two of us saw Mutanus facing this direction while the other two said his corpse was facing the other way.]
The screen shot was taken at 1:45am, so we had been in WC for quite a while. Yet we still had a bit to do. As part of our time in WC, we wrapped up a few quests from Ratchet and The Barrens. We wanted to turn those in before we retired for the night. And here we had a little more trouble. We went back to the entrance and left the instance. Unfortunately, by nearly 2am Pacific Time, the usual Saturday night crew of level 60, who had cleared the route into WC for us, had gone to bed and now the route to WC was fully populated.
So we tried to run for it. I made it, using my second potion of the night and my health stone. Bung made it as well. Skronk died however, and Ula fell in that hole on the cliff side of the bridge right outside the instance and ended up just going back into the instance. The warlock summon came in handy again. Skronk angelled back to life at the grave yard and met us at one of the quest givers where we summoned Ula to us.
Tired, we wrapped things up, logged off, and headed to bed. I took one detour out into the back yard, in the 46 degree weather in my sweats and a T-shirt to watch a couple of meteors from the Orionids. Once I saw a really good one, I headed back in side and went to sleep. Time: 2:30am.
Our next target is Shadowfang Keep, but we may do Wailing Caverns one more time for our warrior.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 