04 | March | 2020 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

After the previous week’s run at Razorfen Downs, where we ran out of time with only two bosses down, I decided to do some ground work to make sure things went better.

To start with, we completely missed a quest giver outside of the instance. And we spent more time wandering around looking for instance, so I got out my druid and walked around stealthed in cat form to get the lay of the land until I was sure I could find my way directly to the instance.

I had also suggested on Discord that we pre-position ourselves over on Kalimdor if possible, and Skronk added that it might be a shorter run from the alliance flight point on the boarder of Thousand Needles and Feralas, so I tested that route as well.

We met an hour earlier than the previous Sunday afternoon, but I still wanted to get things under way as I was still not certain how long the whole run would take. The group met up in Theramore.

Ula – level 41 gnome mage
Viniki – level 40 gnome warrior
Moronae – level 40 night elf druid
Skronk – level 40 dwarf priest

Skronk and Ula had also leveled themselves up a bit over the week, so the whole group was past the level 40 mark. (But nobody has the gold yet to buy a mount.)

Everybody in Theramore

The first problem came up when we found that Moronae didn’t have the Feralas flight point. Fortunately, I had forseen this as a possible issue and had run Winki, my level 24 gnome warlock, down to the flight point and camped him there. So Skronk, Ula, and I flew from Theramore to Feralas.

Our dots on the map

Once there I logged Viniki out and Winki in, got in the group, and fired up the ritual of summoning.

I even remembered to have a soul shard on hand

Moronae was summoned and got the flight point while I swapped back to Viniki and we headed off to the instance. There was no trouble along the way. At the top of The Great Lift the Horde guard was dead already as we passed through, so we were unimpeded all the way to our destination area.

Leaving the Great Lift behind us

I was also able to successfully navigate us to the instance, taking a small side trip up the hill overlooking the path to pick up the quest we missed last time.

Overlooking the crude boar snout structure

Then it was into the instance, where we got ourselves prepped.

There was a question as to how we ought to proceed. We decided to go left again and follow the same path as before. However, we decided to leave Belnistrasz and his escort quest until the end. There was a bad feeling about that.

So off we went. Being better prepared and higher level, things went a bit more smoothly.

We were able to ring the gong for the Tuten’kash event without losing anybody. For the first wave we actually all stood so far at one end of the room that the wave of non-elites at the other ended were outside of our aggro radius and just hung out until we finished with the mobs at our end. They actually ran in a bit, then withdrew down the hallway it seemed, as we went to go ring the gong for the next round only to find no cog wheel when we moused over it. We had to go looking for them before we could get to the next round.

The round with the elites was a bit chaotic, but we got it done. And Tuten’kash himself was a simple fight.

Tuten’kash goes down again

From there we moved on through the Murder Pens and across the bridge to Mordresh Fire Eye on his pile of bones. This went almost exactly as it did last time, where I got a couple of pulls from the skeleton mosh pit before hitting somebody who aggro’d the whole pack and the fight was on. Ula AOE’d the skeletons while I ran up to Mordesh and hit him with my shield every time he tried to cast his fireball spell.

Smacking Mordesh

Without that he doesn’t do a lot of damage, so we were able to take him pretty easily.

He dropped the Deathmage Sash, which went to Ula.

From there we went back to the Murder Pens and took the path that starts up to the summit of spiral. There is a lot of trash on the way as well as the occasionally running skeletons. But the runners are non-elite, so we tended to just take them in stride.

We hit The Glutton on the way up. Or he hit us… or me… and he hits pretty hard.

The Glutton approaches

However, we had it in us to take him down. He dropped the Glutton’s Cleaver, a 1h axe that was much worse than the sword I got at the end of Scarlet Monastery, so we rolled on that as vendor trash. It was worth over a gold, which still seems rich to us.

We kept on around the spiral until we arrived at the summit and Amnennar the Coldbringer, the final boss.

At the top of the spiral

None of us could remember anything about this fight, so we just went at him.

As it turns out, he resists frost, which forced Ula to change up on damage, and spawns some minions, which we mostly just ignored, and knocks back the tank every once in a while, which could have gone really badly had I been kicked off the summit, but I happened to be positioned so his tent was behind me… in inadvertent but fortunate… so I just slammed into that. Also, he has some dialog.

Are you in the right expansion?

Even with all of that together he went down pretty quickly. He dropped the Coldrage Dagger. I was hoping for the plate helm he can drop, as I am still wearing the mail helm from Herod. I took the dagger, being the only one interested in it. The DPS is a hair lower than my sword (29.7 vs 30) but it can proc, which might make up for it.

Coldrage dagger stats

Also, a dagger looks like a sword when wielded by a gnome, while a sword sometimes looks silly.

Dagger vs Sword sizing

That pretty much wrapped things up save for the escort quest. So we tromped back to Belnistrasz to give that another shot. We were not feeling confident.

There he is in his murder pen

And, of course, things started off with an almost comedic blunder. The first time you speak to Belnistrasz you have to go through a series of quest dialogs before you end up with the go. But after you have gotten the escort quest, you basically just accept the quest he has up and it is off to the races.

I was thinking about the original set, so just hit accept right away, only to find it was go time. Everybody else got the join message, and was able to get on the quest again, though Ula had a moment of panic when she found her quest log was full. She managed to clear that and accept. But we were going to have to buff on the fly as Belnistrasz marched on to the idol.

We got waylaid at the last corner by a pair of boars… I think that is just part of the event script… killed them, then caught up with Belnistrasz, quillboars already in progress beating on him. I pulled taunted one off and the other got sheeped and we were on our way.

Until Belnistrasz. A few spawns in I had clearly lost track of mobs and one of them killed him. At that point the event despawned and the quest showed as “failed” in our logs again.

There it is again…

It looked like the event was going to elude us again, though at least this time we did not wipe. We took a group shot at the idol as it seemed like that might be it for the evening.

The first final group shot

Skronk went to look up if it was possible to get things restarted or if Belnistrasz might respawn while we debated whether or not it was worth it to reset the instance to start again. The restart was voted down and the web seemed to indicate that if we waited a couple hours Belnistrasz might come back. We were wandering about when Skronk went back to the start point of the escort quest to find Belnistrasz was already back.

Woohoo! We got another run at it!

Forearmed this time, we got buffs, made sure health and mana was at max, cleared space in quest logs, and then set off with once more.

Another bite at the apple… or idol… or whatever

At the same turn we ran into the same two boars again… on script… but I ran on past and set myself up to grab the first mobs as they spawned, before they started pounding on Belnistrasz.

For all of the prep, we were still in the same hole as last week. Getting through this event requires burning mobs down fast, and with a four person group we are missing a person’s worth of possible DPS. So we started falling behind. We killed one elite and the non-elite boars that come with when the second group spawned. Ula kept one sheeped, but we were similarly back a mob when the third group spawned. And then the fourth.

At some point Moronae pulled aggro on one of the mobs… we were practically surfing the crowd of quillboars by that point… and died. Already behind with four, losing a DPS put us further in the hole. But I was determined to hang on for as long as possible. I pulled out all the tricks I could, tossing out any possible skill that wasn’t on cool down as rage was not at all an issue.

We were still going when Belnistrasz called the one minute mark, but it wasn’t clear how much longer we would last. Moronae mentioned releasing in the hope of running back to help, but the distance back to the instance was way too far for that. Eventually I succumbed, followed by Skronk and then Ula. We were defeated.

Everybody dead at the idol

I stayed put in my corpse to watch Belnistrasz get ganked by the mass of mobs.

Only he didn’t get ganked. Instead he announced that the ritual was complete… to those of us who had not hit the release button yet.

Ritual complete, op success!

Then he disappeared and the mobs in the room just milled about in a couple of groups. Those of us still in the room, dead though we were, got the quest update. We had apparently made it just over the time limit.

But we were still dead. We had to release and trot back to the instance. Once in we had healed up, buffed up, and got ourselves ready because, in the interim, the instance had started to respawn. We fought our way, group by group, back to the idol room. Fortunately that is not too far into the instance. There we saw the two groups of mobs still milling about. We took on one of them, but as we got to the last guy we got too close to the other group and pulled them by proximity.

Still, it wasn’t too bad. We burned them down and looked around the room. There was a brazier with a cog wheel on it when you moused over it. When we clicked on it, Skronk and I were able to complete the quest and get the reward… but Morone and Ula were left out. The “complete” button was not activated for them. They apparently released just before the quest update and missed it. Erf.

We seemed to be done. I had thought there was a boss at the end of the event, but the room was clear. The quest from outside the instance did not get any updates, so we decided to skip that and call it a night. We took a second group shot around the brazier.

The second final group shot

Then we recalled and turned in the one remaining quest that came from the cathedral in Stormwind. That was about it.

A little later on, after I had dinner, I went back and started looking up the Belnistrasz event. We were supposed to fight Plaguemaw the Rotting. When I went to look for screen shots of him, he didn’t seem to look much different than the other mobs, so it is possible we killed him him the mix and didn’t even notice. The only hint was that we got the Swine Fists off of one of the mobs, or so I seem to remember. That is a drop from Plaguemaw. But I don’t have any screen shots to really back that up and Ula hadn’t been running video. The closest I have is this shot after the fight.

Corpses around the brazier and idol

In looking at screen shots on the web, I think the corpse in the foreground might be him. But it is hard to tell. It might not be him.

So maybe we killed him. But if we did, it didn’t register very much.

Once more, Ula rolled up an excellent video that shows a lot of what I have described.

I like to watch these after I write up my post to see how they line up. I am surprised at how infrequently I need to change my post after seeing the video.

And so it goes. We have now done as much Razorfen Downs as we are likely to do. The next item on the list is Uldaman. That means so research to find the quests, a trip to the Badlands, and probably several runs at the whole thing, as it is one of the dungeons with a side-door and a step up in levels such that the starting mobs are likely gray when the group is on par with the Archaedas, the final boss.

Finally, a list of past posts about our runs at Razorfen Downs: