Uldaman – Round 2

Back together after a taking a month off, the Twilight Cadre Floating Instance Club was finally back together for another run at Uldaman.

Not that we hadn’t been somewhat active during February. We got on in smaller groups and advanced into Uldaman for some more boss fights. But now that we were all together again, we wanted to go for the big fight, the last guy, Archaedas. The group that formed up in the Badlands for this venture was:

44 Mage – Ula
44 Paladin – Vikund
42 Warrior – Earlthecat
42 Priest – Skronk
42 Warlock – Bungholio

It turned out that this group was a bit light for the fight we intended, even though everybody was at least level 43 by the time we got to Archaedas.

We went in the back door of Uldaman, slaying the Obsidian Sentinel, then began working our way towards out foe, fighting through dwarves, bats, troggs, and finally some of Archaedas followers. The battles into Archaedas were manageable. We did lose Ula once as the stone dwarves who make up much of the yard trash on the way to Archaedas, while not elite, are immune to sheep or freeze effects. Ula’s AOE attacks to clear them away brought a bunch down on top of her and she could not immobilize them with ice and run away.

Well, that sort of death is an annoyance, but we managed.

There are a good 10 or so of those fights between the The Hall of Crafters and Archaedas himself. And then you find yourself at the door of the big man himself.

We stopped, refreshed our buffs, got up a fresh soul stone, and walked in to face the coming conflict.

The Archaedas fight is different from any previous boss fight I have experienced.

Archaedas is a large stone statue in the middle of his room. Immediately around him, if I counted right, are six stone guards, also in statue form. Around the edge of the room are 44 stone dwarves, also in statue form. And, at either side of the room are two large statues, the vault warders.

When you enter, everything in the room is a solid statue. Before Archaedas is an altar. Three party members must activate the altar, at which point Archaedas comes alive and the fight begins. Here he is in the middle of the room of doom:

The thing is, as the fight progresses, Archaedas activates, awakens, or otherwise sets in motion the other statues in the room.

For the first part of the fight, he activates the stone dwarves around the edge of the room one by one. They are not elite, and while they come alive one right after the other, they are not a big deal to handle.

As his health gets down to about the 2/3 point, he brings the six stone guards into play all at once. Again, they are not elite, but six guys, plus the regular stream of the outer ring dwarves, can make for something of a challenge while Archaedas is beating on you.

At the 1/3 health point, Archaedas wakes up the vault waders on either side of the room. These two are elites and quite a bit of work. They come at you while the outer dwarves keep showing up one after another.

This is the sort of fight where you have to have a plan beyond “there he is, get him!”

Our order of battle was Earl, Ula, and Skronk on Archaedas. Vikund, Bung, and Bung’s voidwalker Mezzmon on the cast of thousands, with Bung dropping DOT spells on Archaedas when he had the chance.

The fight started off easily enough. Earl, Ula, and I activated the altar, Earl got right on Archaedas, and I went to ringside to watch the dwarves.

A beam of light comes from Archaedas to activate his minions, so you can see who is coming. Bung and I were able to chew up the dwarves without problem while the rest of the team chopped on Archaedas and kept Earl alive.

Even when the six stone guards came alive, we did okay. As a pally, Vik cannot taunt worth a damn, but he managed to keep some of them off of Earl.

Then we hit the vault warders stage and things went awry. Those guys are serious and they run right after whoever is attacking Archaedas.

I managed to get one on me, but things were starting to fall apart. Mana was low, aggro was lost, Earl went down, and then it was pretty much over with Archaedas at about 20% health.

Here we are, corpses on the floor. You can see the 1 hour timer has started for my lay hands spell:

Here is the kicker. When you fail this fight, the whole room resets and you have to kill everybody all over again.

Skronk activated the soul stone after all the statues were back in place and we got ourselves back together and considered out options.

We decided to swap, put Vikund on Archaedas and Earl on the trash because Earl can taunt stuff off of people much more effectively, while Vik could get seal and judgement of light going for some regular healing, backed up by holy light.

This seemed to run at least as well as our other plan. But, in the end, we faltered at the same point, when the vault warders came at us. Then Bung went down, followed by Earl, Ula, Skronk, and myself.

And there we lay, on the floor, while the room reset. It was after 11pm on a Thursday night. Work waited for us in the morning.

We released back to the graveyard. I was tired so I revived via the angel and recalled, though I really could have just run back to the instance and saved myself a little money on repairs.

We were close in our efforts, but not quite close enough. We need another level or two across the board before we can be assured of victory.