Confronting Coren Direbrew

Saturday found us short a member of the team again.  This time, however, it was Earl who was down with the flu. (Though not that flu.)  That left us with:

80 Priest – Skronk
80 Mage – Ula
80 Warlock – Bungholio
80 Paladin – Vikund

With just the four of us on, we thought we might have a shot at Coren Direbrew in Blackrock Depths, part of the whole Brewfest celebration.  Slaying him is not only one of the achievements required, he also has a number of nice drops including the Great Brewfest Kodo and the Swift Brewfest Ram.  We did not get a shot at him last week because of the mis-matched timing between the start of Brewfest and the update to the instance servers.

So we flew off to Thorium Point and started assembling outside of the Blackrock Complex.

Gathering up... Red sky at night?

This time around, sure enough, there was the easy transport system that delivers you straight to the The Grim Guzzler Bar within Blackrock Depths.

Enter the Mole Machine Perilous

Once there we found Coren.

Coren and Friends

Coren works like the Headless Horseman during Hallow’s End.  You need the daily quest Insult Coren Direbrew, given by the Brewfest Spy, in order to start the fight with him.  Each person in the party can get the quest and speak to him in turn, so we would had four tries at him lined up.

Vikund took the first turn, speaking to Coren and starting the fight.

The fight kicked off.  Coren has three helpers to start with and more arrive in the Dark Iron mole machines during the fight, but they weren’t a big deal.  Vikund, a retribution pally, was hanging tough with Skronk healing while tossing out the area effect damage to keep all the adds pointed at him.  The fight seemed to be going well.

Then when Coren was at about 15% health and all looked good, Ursula Direbrew showed up, slammed a barrel on Vikund’s head, which stunned him for 8 seconds, during which the aggros then went after the casters, pulling healing off of Vikund who promptly died (because only Skronk’s undivided attention was keeping him alive), followed very quickly by the rest of the party.

Wipe.

We had had the presence of mind to have a soul stone up, so we got to revive there in the instance.

We decided just to give it another go, since Coren was at 5% when we wiped, so we felt if we could just tough it out he’d go down.

Skronk talked to Coren this time, the fight went well, Ursula showed up, the barrel went on Vikund’s head, and we wiped again.

We needed to do something different, but we were not sure what. We took a quick break to think.

Ula got ears while AFK - Note our smoke marker

For the first two fights we were arrayed around the room and any hostiles that got loose from Vikund’s AE damage were a serious distraction because there was no way Vikund could go reclaim them.  So we decided to stay close together during the fight in the hope that this would minimize strays and keep things focused.

Quickly during the fight it was noted that Coren has his own AE attack, so the casters stepped back a bit, but stayed as close as they dared, and it all came together.  The barrel went on Vikund’s head again, but everybody was close enough that he could get Coren’s aggro back once the stun passed, healing stayed on target, and Coren went down.

No nice mounts for us, but Bung got the Mithril Pocketwatch for his troubles, and we all got the achievement.

So we thought we had this dialed in.  We had one more fight to go… and we wiped.

The same story as the first two tries, the barrel went on Vikund and the wheels came off.

If there had been the five of us, this fight would have been no problem, but with four we were on the edge of our abilities.  Still, we got the achievement and a nice drop.

That did not take us very long, so we decided to run up stairs and get Bung the Jenkins title.

This took us two tries.  The first time we ended up doing it in very much the Leeroy fashion, running around disorganized and never quite getting the 50 whelps killed during the 15 second window.

So we stepped out, reset the instance, went back, marked a spot to meet up again, then sent everybody out on a specific path to gather up some whelp to be brought to the center and killed only when we were all there to unleash the AE damage.

That worked out nicely.  Bung got the achievement and the title.

And after that we were sort of done.  We talked a bit about gear, as Bung was a bit concerned that Recount showed Vikund doing a lot higher DPS during the Coren fights than he was doing.  Part of that was that Vikund got to AE a lot to hit all the adds.  But the other part was that I have been trying to gear up Vikund a bit more using honor points and champion’s seals and whatever else to improve his damage output.

Which lead Bung, Skronk, and Vikund to go out and run a Wintergrasp before we called it a night.  Those Wintergrasp weekly quests are the best source of honor ever.

We’ll see what we end up doing this coming Saturday.  If Coren is still up on Saturday night, I figure we will take the opportunity for five more tries at him.  Otherwise it will likely be the Caverns of Time: Culling of Stratholme on the agenda.

Or if Coren goes quickly, maybe both.