I’m doing a bit of catch up here, but that is fine. The last time we left off with the instance group, we had done a run at Drak’Tharon Keep, finishing it off with just four of us… which meant we had to go back and do it again with the whole group.
The group lineup for the afternoon was as follows.
Today’s lineup
Amazingly, we somehow managed to forget almost everything we learned on the first run through Drak’Tharon Keep, so got to relearn a few things, like not standing in the summoned pool of black gunk or you’ll die.
I will contend that the first group of mobs after King Dredd is bugged. The troll death knight doesn’t patrol like he is supposed to, so you get him and the four other mobs and the death knight heals them up and… we wiped.
Fergorin with the soul stone and the ress
But then after that he starts his patrol path and you can pull the group you started on, finish it off, then pull groups in reasonable numbers until you’ve made your way around to the final boss.
We managed to get through that fight without any major issues… I think it is just an easy fight despite the special mechanics… and were done and jumping down the platforms on the back side of the instance in about an hour.
Drak’Tharon done again
Which gave us some time to do something else.
Next on the list for dungeons was Violet Hold, which is back in Dalaran, so Ula spun up a portal and got us there.
This way to Dalaran
If we couldn’t remember our foibles in Drak’Tharon Keep even a week down the line, what were we going to remember about Violet Hold, an instance we hadn’t run since the summer of 2009? That was a while ago. (Also, looking back at that now, I had forgotten that whole period of time when my client would crash whenever I was in Dalaran.)
The map of the city
Well, I did remember where to get the key, though I suspect that has come up more recently for some reason. Anyway, the guy in the Violet Citadel across town will help you out.
You speak to him, get the quest, run over to the Violet Hold, talk to a guy outside there and you have the key. Easy peasy.
After that though, we were a bit at sea… I felt like it was some sort of event, maybe a random boss order… but we weren’t going to look it up or anything. We plunged right in.
And it was event, with waves… there was a counter at the top of the screen tracking them… and what seemed like a random boss every six ways. We can do that.
We ran after the different portals that spawned one at a time, hitting the Portal Guardian and anything that came our way, keeping it together. We made it through six waves and got a boss. Moragg was coming for us.
Moragg unleashed
Moragg wasn’t a tough fight and when we brought him down he coughed up a nice set of shoulders for me, a pretty big upgrade compared to what I was wearing.
Shoulderplates of the Beholder
After that we carried on with the next wave… and then somebody was shouting something and everything despawned and the even was over. We were kind of at a loss as to what happened, but Beanpole asked if those guys with the lasers attacking the door we came in through might have had something to do with it.
Oh yeah… up at the top of the screen, near the wave counter there was something about portal seal integrity, which was now at 0%. A few more memories of the instance came into blurry focus. I had seen a couple of mobs walk past us rather than attacking us. Clearly that was bad.
So we stood there for a bit until we figured out how to start the whole thing over again.
Everybody escaped I guess… our bad
Once we got that sorted… the first NPC respawned eventually… we were back in business, this time with an eye out to keep any strays from getting to the door.
We got through the first six waves again and this time around… we got Moragg again. Well, at least we knew him. And he obliged by dropping the same set of plate shoulders. Fergorin could have used them, but passed by mistake. They went to Ula to disenchant.
We kept up with the next set of waves without too much effort, always on the look out for a sneak. We managed to get ourselves to the next boss encounter, which was Ichoron.
Ichoron arrives… Moragg’s corpse is still hanging around…
Ichoron turned out to be a bit of a chore. He has a mechanic where he disappears and a bunch of water elementals spawn, then he shows back up and if the elementals get to him they seemed to be healing him. We were making headway, but it was slow going. And that was when we found out that the waves were on a timer.
The next portal opened and some more mobs joined the fight while we were still struggling to burn Ichoron down. Things were getting out of hand.
We managed to finally get Ichoron down, and I did a quick loot, which yielded yet another pair of plate shoulders, but these much better for Fergorin, our holy healing pally.
Those are some healing shoulders
There wasn’t any time to celebrate that drop however, as another wave had showed up and we started losing people as we got blindsided by more mobs.
We wiped, but then there was the question of whether or not to jump back in, which you could do, or wait for things to end and start over.
We managed to pick wrong, but the afternoon had worn on by that point. Once things had reset once more, we picked up our stuff and went back out to repair. It was time for me to go, leaving the Violet Hold as yet unconquered. But at least we ended up with some sense of how the instance runs. We’ll see if we remember it when we get back there again!
The Ancient Gaming Noob 