Thursday night, our group’s off night. We try to get together, but it isn’t as firm a commitment as Saturday night, being a “school night” and all that. Still, we got the full team on last night.
Blintz was getting a little bit ahead in exp, so I decided to pull out one of my other level 40 range characters to play. Vikund is my paladin, and the oldest character in WoW that I still have. (I made a dwarf before Vikund, but deleted him and went the human route.) With this group we decided to go back and hit RFD again. This was our starting lineup for the night:
41 Mage – Ula
40 Warrior – Earlthecat
40 Priest – Skronk
40 Paladin – Vikund
39 Warlock – Bungholio
I wasn’t sure how much of the instance we would end up doing, but I grabbed the quest “Bring The Light” with Vik, just in case we got that far.
We did our usual assembly, ported in the people who were still remote, and fought our way into the instance.
Once in, we had the left/right choice of paths to follow. Since we had not finished the escort quest with Belnistrasz, we decided to go left and hit that.
We fought our way in. Having Vikund as an off-tank changed up the way we worked some, with Bung able to summon a damage pet rather than a tanking pet.
We stopped and did the spider fights at the gong, finishing off Tuten’kash relatively easily. He dropped the Silky Spider Cape that went to Bung on a roll.
Again we detoured before the pens to take our Mordresh Fire Eye and his skeleton mosh pit. This time I took a screen shot of the skeletons in full force.
Peeking in on the skeleton mosh pit
As before, we managed to pull a couple off with our first try, but the second time around we got the whole skeleton mob. Earl and I ran out to face Mordresh on his bone pile while the casters mopped up the non-elite skellie followers.
Maneuvering on that bone pile, especially if Mordresh decides to try to back off a bit, can be a bit of a challenge. I got stuck on things several times durnig the battle. But, in the end, Mordresh was overcome by our might. This time around he dropped the Deathmage Sash, a nice caster item that Skronk took on a three way roll-off.
Then we headed to Belnistrasz. We had a hiccup here. Vik had not been part of the last effort in RFD. Belnistrasz gives you a mini quest first, before he gives you the escort quest. Everybody else in the group had done the mini quest already, so when the one of the group accepted the quest, off he went, before Vik did the lead-in. Ooops. No huge loss in the great scheme of things, but a word of warning for the next time you head that way: Make sure everybody has done the lead-in (Scourge of the Downs) before anybody accepts the main quest (Extinguishing the Idol).
This time at least the quest ended successfully. We were in less of a panic this time around. We kept calm, kept the aggro off of Belnistrasz, and got through his stage without much problem.
Once that is done, Plaguemaw the Rotting shows up. A short battle later and we looted the Swine Fists off of him. Nobody really needed those, so they were rolled on to sell to a vendor. Here we are over Plaguemaw’s corpse.
Plaguemaw defeated
Now we were done with the left hand side. We got a slightly late start, but it was still only 10:45pm. So we decided to take the right path, if only to see if we got one of the rare spawns for once.
We had a problem with that first fight on the right, the one with the five elites. Skronk has a general policy of not putting up the skull raid icon, which denotes the main target, until we are ready to go. He slipped this time and put the skull up first while we were still sizing up the battle. Suddenly a frost bolt shot out from our team and struck the targeted mob. The fight was on!
It was actually a fun fight. There was a bit of panic as we tried to keep all five elites under control. I let the side down a bit initially. Having played a rogue in all of our instance play so far, I was used to being satisfied holding one mob, since more would usually do me in. A bit into the battle I realized that I ought to be holding some more aggro, so I went chasing the other mobs around. I was too late though. Ula went down and so did Bung. But after that we got things under control and dispatched the last of the bad guys.
Fortunately the penalty for death is so light in WoW. I’ve been in other games where such noobishness on my part would have gotten me screamed at. In our case though, everybody was revived, healed, and off we went.
We got to The Glutton, who again was wandering our way when we arrived in his area. He was a quick fight, but only gave up the Glutton’s Cleaver as a drop.
On we went.
We got to where Ragglesnout, the rare spawn should be. He wasn’t there.
Well, that did not leave us too far from the main boss. Just another 10 fights, give or take. So on we pressed. Up and around the spiral until we once again reached the top.
Amnennar the Coldbringer stood before us.
Another fight we were ready for. We knew about his spectral summoning now. We also knew that the specters would fade as soon as Amnennar was slain. In we rushed! All of us focused and unloaded on the Lich Amnennar. The fight, for a boss fight, was short and violent. He went down, his summoned help faded, and we stood again victorious at the pinnacle.
But Amnennar had a last laugh on us. His drop was the Coldrage Dagger. A perfect weapon for Blintz. But Blintz was not there. Nobody wanted the dagger, and we could not even disenchant it, since that is another of Blintz’s talents, so we rolled to see who got to sell it to the vendor. Ula won that.
And so we were done, all the Razorfen Downs quests seen to their end. Vikund did get to turn in “Bring the Light,” which netted him a nice sword upgrade, the Vanquisher’s Sword.
Having a paladin along changed the group dynamic a bit. While we lost a single damage dealer, we gained some healing, a back-up resser, and a nice damage shield aura that ended up being nearly 10% of Earl’s damage inflicted. Since there are plenty of undead in RFD, the paladin’s usual bane of “no ranged attack” was mitigated.
And so we look towards the Badlands and Uldaman for our next instance adventure.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 