27 | October | 2023 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Returning to the Pit of Saron after many years, I was amused to discover (or maybe rediscover) that there is actually a location within the instance with that name… an actual pit… and that it isn’t exactly an important part of the experience. It is more of a local geographical feature that lends its name to the area.

I could probably come up with a few better names for the instance, having run it again, and ones that didn’t have the unfortunate acronym of “PoS,” but we’re more than a decade too late for that. Also, “Saron” is awfully close to “Sauron,” such that I am surprised Mordor hasn’t been after the place for trademark infringement. But here we are in 2023.

Anyway, we got the group together… well, we were all logged in and in a group, I am not sure how close together we really were. But it didn’t matter. We had made the trek to the instance location already. Having checked that off of our list we decided that just using the dungeon finder to pull us all there was a fine option. But first we took a little time out to take on the Headless Horseman.

A Hallow’s End diversion

I was a little bit nervous as to how we would do, if only because my runs up to that point had been dominated by DPS with 5K+ gear scores who were putting out more that 4K single target damage. That will spoil you pretty quickly. But I need not have worried. We were up to the task and took down the horseman without any issue. There was no mount drop… that happened the next day… but a few nice items were obtained. There were pumpkins and tricky treats enough to go around, and the achievement for throwing up was accomplished by one and all.

Wrath Classic Hallow’s End – 2023

Once we had cleaned up from that, it was time to take the Dungeon Finder ride to the Pit of Saron. You don’t even need to go back home, you can just chain run instances from it. And so we popped back into the instance, right where we had left off last week… with one small difference.

Uhm, where is Jaina?

We were kind of expecting to see Jaina Proudmoore standing around where we left her. We all still had the quest that said to speak with her. We poked around the area without much luck. Then we jumped through the portal behind us, thinking we might have left her back in the Forge of Souls last week.

But, in a bit of Dungeon Finder comedy, jumping through that portal doesn’t send you back to the Forge of Souls, it puts you back out in the world where ever you happened to have been when you were scooped up by the it. There was, for me, no Jaina at the Argent Tournament in Icecrown, as an example.

Fortunately you can just use the little eye icon on the mini-map to teleport back into the instance, so we all returned and were discussing what we might do next when Jaina and her Alliance minions finally showed up… just a little late as usual.

We spoke with her and watched the opening floor show which included the dialog between her and the final boss, Scourgelord Tyrannus, who taunted us, laughed at our folly, and played the villain to the point that I expected him to twirl his long mustache, kidnap Jaina, and tie her to some railroad tracks.

Jaina gave us a side task to keep us busy, but even freeing the Alliance captive only takes so long and pretty soon we had done that and cleared our way up to the first boss, Forgemaster Garfrost.

The forgemaster awaits

After last week’s first pass fiasco with the Devourer of Souls I made a point of at least glancing at the boss fight mechanics before we went in… but by the time we had gotten there most of what I had read had fallen out of the back of my head already. So for Garfrost offered something not very helpful about hiding behind saronite boulders before we just went after him.

There were, in fact, boulders. I am not sure if hiding helped. We beat him in the end though, so it wasn’t an issue, but I am pretty sure my pre-game talk didn’t add much to our plans… nor did me shouting something about a huge saronite boulder when Garfrost finally threw one at us… and missed. He dropped Garfrost’s Two-Ton Hammer, a 2H mace which went to me because we found out that, at least in Wrath, not EVERYTHING in a hunter weapon. They can’t train 2H maces it seems.

That done a bit more of the story had to play out, then we were pressed to go get Tyrannus, but first we had to stop by and take on Ick & Krick, the next boss pairing. My memories were a little more helpful here in that they at least came up with the obvious “don’t stand in the pools of poison.”

That seemed to be advice enough, at least for normal mode, and Ick was soon down with Krick pleading to be spared. Jaina pulled up once the fight was over to question him.

Krick pleads his case… also, a poison pool in the background

He got out his lines, then Tyrannus flew over on his dragon and one-shotted Krick, laughed and taunted us a second time, then flew off. Jaina helpfully pointed us towards the single obvious path to the cave, on the other side of which lay Tyrannus.

We worked our way up to the cave, clearing some groups of mobs, one of which dropped the first real upgrade of the instance.

Behold, the Coffin Nail wand

It is rare to get a drop that both casters, Beanpole our warlock and Ula our mage, want. But this wand was an upgrade for both. Beanpole won the roll and we carried on to the tunnel.

Here is where a lack of clear memories got us in trouble. I had it in my head somehow that you could just run through the tunnel, avoiding the falling ice, and that at the far end if everybody got out you were set and could avoid a series of set piece fights. And, that could still be the case. However, we didn’t come through the tunnel very cleanly at all and somebody died and then all the mobs chased us up onto the platform where, because we hadn’t all arrived, the event didn’t end with Jaina showing up and it ended up with a wipe.

I went looking to see if I was right in my memory, but almost every guide to the instance goes straight from Ick & Krick to “now you’re facing Tyrannos,” ignoring the tunnel, save for a rare few that just mention “don’t let the ice fall on you.”

So we went back and just fought our way through. It wasn’t exactly difficult, but it felt like the labor intensive way to solve the “getting there” objective.

Also, don’t let the ice fall on you

That done, we were up on the final platform where there was a bit more dialog and mustache twirling before Tyrannos told us we were doomed! DOOMED! He had summoned an army of the undead that would swamp us. At that point Jaina says she and her team will hold them off while we go fight Tyrannos.

Ready for the big finale

Again, my grasp of the fight mechanics up front was limited. Sometimes you get a red beam and have to get out of the way, some times you get a green beam and you have to stop all damage and healing… or maybe it is the other way around… and you don’t want to step in the big white dragon splats hitting the ground. But it was normal mode and we muddled through by running around in a panic and occasionally taking time out to fight the boss. We won. Achievement earned.

The Pit of Saron

There was a bit of a speech from Jaina, then she suddenly yoinked us… and only us… back into the cave while her small army of NPCs was left behind to die in some minor apocalypse out on the platform where we fought Tyrannus.

“Yoink” is the technical mage term, right?

At that point we were done. We could have called it. But having had to wait for Jaina to show up this week and now having a quest on hand that was to follow her and speak to her in the next instance, the Halls of Reflection, we figured we could just follow her in there and take care of that so as to skip the awkward wait next time.

We stopped for a quick screen shot with Jaina, since she was in our group shot last time.

Jaina is just one of the team now… kind of surprised how tall she is…

Then it was into the Halls of Reflection where we checked in with Jaina. Beanpole said something out telling her we were ready and she wandered into the center of the first big room where Frostmourne hung suspended.

Then the Lich King showed up for his part of the scene.

Behold, The Lich King has another speaking part!

This was all fun and games. We knew HE wasn’t the first fight here. So I went up and mugged for the camera with him, made rabbit ears over his head, and generally goofed with him. And then he got to the end of his script and something popped up on the screen about 1 or 10 waves.

Wait, what did you mean by “bring their corpses?”

And then it was on. The first wave of five elite mobs, each of a different class, moved to attack and we scrambled to come together and figure out a plan. It was a bit of a pain because each pack was two melee and three ranged so I had to run out and collect the ranged mobs, which were always spread out, while keeping the melee mobs on me. Not the hardest thing in the world, but a bit of a work out and it was easy to lose track and find one of the ranged mobs hitting the healer.

We got through the first set of waves, which then unleashed Falric on us. We beat him and then it was on to another set of waves with the same mix of mobs until we made it to the last wave, which unleashed Marwyn on us.

Despite not being ready and possibly not even being buffed up and all the running around and confusion, we managed to finish the event.

That actually yielded me a shield upgrade.

The Splintered Door Shield

The base stats were just a minor upgrade from the PvP shield I had purchased with Wintergrasp honor, but the equipped stats were all right on my list of needs for tanking and a much better mix that the resilience and crit stats I had been working with.

Also, another Coffin Nail wand dropped during that fight, so Ula got one as well. The main disappointment for me was that the model wasn’t a Cruella Deville length cigarette plus holder. A “coffin nail” means something else in Azeroth.

At that point if I had had the time, we could have probably just moved on and finished things off. But I couldn’t recall how long the rest of the instance event really was and my wife was home from her afternoon and it was dinner time, so we called it. But we had our glimpse into the Halls of Reflection.