Dire Maul West – Round 1

Saturday night found us ready to go finish up Bungholio’s quest for his epic mount in Dire Maul West.

I suppose, technically, we already had a round in Dire Maul West, but a ten minute peek hardly counts. So we got the line up for the night together:

60 Warrior – Earlthecat
61 Warlock – Bungholio
61 Mage – Ula
61 Paladin – Vikund
61 Priest – Skronk

And, then, Blizzard got in the way.

There seems to be something going on every few weeks at 9pm Pacific time (midnight Eastern) on Saturday night. We have had a number of instance nights start off with us unable to log into the game. This night, Earl got dropped and could not get back on for a good 45 minutes.

The rest of us thought we might as well make a start at clearing our way into the zone while Earl waited to get connected.

Unfortunately, I do not tank much as Vikund, and when I do, I am not very good at it. Without a warrior’s taunts, it takes me a while to build up enough aggro so that the casters can let loose.

So we died a lot. Actually, by “we” I mean “the casters” and by “the casters” I mean, primarily, “The mage.”

Poor Ula.

Not that anybody was spared. We managed a full wipe at Tendris Warpwood.

Shortly after that, when annoyance with the inept Paladin was starting to get real, Earl finally managed to get logged on. Then we killed another couple of mobs and hit some undead.

Of course, undead, along with demons, are the mobs I can actually hold aggro with. So Earl showed up just in time to keep me from displaying any competence.

Ah, well, we were glad to have him. There was work to be done. We had to get down into the depths and slay Immol’thar.

Which gave us another opportunity to wipe.

We cleared all the mobs roaming around Immol’thar’s chamber, turned off the last two pylons that hold up the force field surrounding him, and ran in to the attack. Behold Immol’thar!

We even had help.

There are some NPCs in with Immol’thar that will assist you.

Unfortunately, Immol’thar spawns these green eyeballs (as if he does not have enough already) that are non-elite mobs, which fly off and attack the casters. We did not notice them until it was too late. Down we went. You can see the eyeballs, as well as the NPCs, here:

With that knowledge and a soul stone, we were able to slay him on the second try. Skronk was in charge of catching eye spawns that got away while I laid down a consecrate every so often to keep them focused on me. We won.

At that point we had to do a special ritual in Immol’thar’s chamber to summon the horse that Bung would eventually be able to ride. The ritual seemed awfully… well… pink to me. The mysteries of Warlocks I guess.

We managed to wipe on this as well, as wave after wave of imps and death guards, who try to interrupt the whole thing, eventually wore us down and overwhelmed us.

With no soul stone, we had to run back from the entrance. There were a few respawns by that point, but we were able to get back pretty quickly so we could try again.

Only we did not have to try again. We apparently finished the ritual, as everything was ready to summon the horse and rider. We did that, defeated them, and completed that stage of the quest.

And while we were down there, we needed to knock off Prince Tortheldrin for another quest. That meant heading down to the library, killing him, then running around a bit more to finish off the quest. Once done, we took a portal back to Ironforge and got to admire Bung’s new mount.

Now Vikund is the only one left without an epic mount. Another Scholomance run is in our future.