As the title no doubt gives away, we did manage to complete the Lunar Festival meta achievement and gained the Elder title. How we got there is a tale of its own.
We left off last time having been thwarted in our attempt to get to the elder in Utgarde Pinnacle, having been unable to defeat the third boss in the instance, Skadi the Ruthless.
Here’s Skadi!
So we did some experimenting before our next group effort. The first thing was to scout the other two dungeons that held elders, Gundrak and the Halls of Stone, to see if we had just one problem or three.
It looked to be just one problem, as three of us (four characters) were able to jump in and find the elder in those two instances.
In Gundrak, if you are careful, you don’t even need to fight a boss. We came in on the right side of the map, the entrance closest to the summoning stone, and walked by the first boss, clearing trash as we went, and ended up finding the elder behind the second boss, the Drakkari Colossus.
Behind the Drakkari Colossus to the left
Standing back, we hit one of the elementals with a ranged attack, not sure how that would turn out. To our surprise, the elementals all disappeared into the Drakkari Colossus, leaving the floor around him empty.
Daring to hope against hope, I tried walking around the very edge of his area, hugging the wall, to see if we could just slip by. And we could.
At the elder behind the boss
Of course, having done that we couldn’t just leave quietly. We had to see if we could take the boss as a four person group. We managed, but just barely.
I survived… good thing I can ress
Over in the Halls of Stone we had similar success. We did not have to tangle with any bosses, finding the elder up one of the side passages.
The elder just within draw distance in the side excavation
That accomplished, we turned our thoughts back to Utgarde Pinnacle and Skadi.
We did another three person/four character run at him, but this time we replace Wilhelm, my level 77 paladin with Irondam, my level 80 Death Knight to see how that would work. We were able to get to Skadi with just four characters, which seemed like a good sign, and Irondam held up pretty well, being level 80. I had to figure out how to tank with him, having really only solo’d him up to 80.
At Skadi we were defeated again, but we seemed to be doing better. We had to get this done during the week because I was going to be gone over the weekend (off to Vegas for my wife’s birthday), so we picked a time last Thursday night to get all of us together.
In the mean time I went off to read up on how to spec and glyph and play a Death Knight as a tank, since I had basically just picked things that seemed interesting while leveling up. The DK is over powered enough that you can get away with that.
We got together on Thursday night with this plan. The group would go in with Irondam as the tank. Meanwhile, I had parked Wilhelm just outside the instance.
Irondam with his Kalu’ak harpoon leading the party in
If we were able to get to the elder, Irondam would leave the group, log out, and I would log Wilhelm in, be invited to the group, then run through the cleared section of the instance to get the elder.
If we made it.
Oh, crap, the title. I guess I can’t really build up much tension. Yeah, we made it.
Potshot reported that healing Irondam was much easier once I did the respec and glyph update… and learned to play a bit. I have read that protection paladin is actually the best tank in the game, but a DK isn’t far behind, and one that is two levels ahead has an advantage. Also, in the test run he got three nice upgrades as drops, meaning he wasn’t just wearing quest reward green drops this time around.
That together got us to Skadi without too much effort.
At Skadi we at least knew what the mechanics were and the flow of the event. That was a serious step up from our past runs. We opted not to do anything fancy, so just fought our way up the path collecting harpoons as we went. We even got to Skadi on our first go, but his whirlwind attack took out Ula and Bjorid, which cut our DPS pretty hard, so we went down before we could defeat him.
The healer and the warlock couldn’t close the deal
During that I did figure out that death grip would taunt Skadi off of the DPS while he was whirlwinding away, so the next time around I was able to use that. And the next time around was a success, with Skadi defeated.
Whirlwind this
That opened the door to a set of stairs we had to fight our way down, but we could see the quest icon for the elder on the mini map. He was below the stairs.
Irondam gets his first coin from Elder Chogan’gada
At that point Bjorid and Fergorin got the meta achievement and the title, Potshot having done the legwork already for that moment. The rest of us still had some work to do… the first of which was logging Wilhelm in to go grab the elder.
Then we ran back to Gundrak with Beanpole, who had missed our previous venture there. We let him sneak around to grab the elder, but in walking back his minion moved straight through the boss and set him off, so we had to fight him… and we wiped. We were not ready.
We then ran the Halls of Stone, which gave us all the elders from Northrend dungeons.
After that there was some remedial work on my part back in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms as I finished up the other dunegon elders. I died in Zul’Farrak because I had half the instance trained behind me after I got the elder and then got dismounted. A couple dozen mid-40s mobs can bring down a level 78 paladin.
Maraudon was probably the most annoying, but I found my way there, slaying the princess along the way to get the achievement for the instance.
Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire were both pretty doable.
The elder in Blackrock Spire visible
Then I made my way over to Stratholme for the last elder on my list and the achievement.
The Elders All Found
And that was that. Now the Lunar Festival is over we can get back to… wait, is it time for Valentine’s events already? Okay, we might be going there next.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 