We had just one five person dungeon left in Wrath Classic and, in my mind, it should have been easy. All three of the final dungeons, released with the Fall of the Lich King update, are somewhat short and are used as story telling vehicles more than anything else.
The Halls of Reflection… not that big
Even after my discovery in writing last week’s tale of our run through the Pit of Saron that our group hadn’t actually done these dungeons until Mists of Pandaria came out and we decided to return to WoW after the rejection of Cataclysm I was still thinking, “How hard could it be?” (Going back to that post, we were already in the second zone of Cataclysm, so had likely geared up into the next expansion, and a couple of us were already level 81.)
This thought was bolstered by the fact that we managed to get through the first event in the instance while totally unprepared. I mean, if we could do that, we must be ready, right?
Or maybe not.
We started off first by doing another run at the Headless Horseman. That ran well enough, though I am not sure that is saying much. Then we went straight from there to the Halls of Reflection, where Jaina showed up and we were able to kick off the first event… once I had goofed around a bit at least.
Mugging with Frostmourne this time
After that we set ourselves up. Shintar mentioned in a comment on the last post that one way to keep the waves of the first event together was to go to one of the niches on side of the event to draw all the mobs together. And we were standing there at the instance line with an obvious niche on either side of the hall. That seemed to be the spot. So we set Jaina off to do her thing.
There it is Jaina, go do your thing
Then we fell back to the niche on the left… and a pair of great big doors closed between us and the area where the fight takes place.
We were on the wrong side of the doors and the question was, “Now what?”
Fortunately the devs put a check in there to detect if there were any players actually in the battle and after about 30 seconds everything had reset itself and the doors opened up again. We wandered around a bit, but figured the correct niche was one of the ones off of the main open area.
I set off the event again by stepping to close to the Frostmourne altar and we all scurried over to the niche to the left.
On the plus side, being in that niche did, in fact, group everybody up onto us. That worked as advertised.
The downside was that in such a confined space our DPS struggled to keep things going. A hunter needs range and the mage and warlock kind of like to be able to see what is going on. It is all the same to me when tanking, I can barely see the fight anyway
In the second wave Beanpole went down and then we struggled to keep things together, running flat on mana and options during the first boss and down we went.
So we went back in and the consensus was that the DPS couldn’t fight in that little space, so we were back to the entry way and the tank running around trying to contain the ranged mobs in each wave.
Off we went again, and in the second wave I lost track of one mob and it ran behind me, out of my sight, and killed Beanpole. Warlock dead again. Well, we don’t just give up, so we carried on but were slowed down enough that we couldn’t get off a ress between waves. They come at fixed intervals. We kept on going and made it all the way to the first boss, Falric, and managed to bring him down.
I quickly got off a ress on Beanpole in the lull after Falric and was able to sit and eat for just a moment before the next trash wave came at us.
More running about ensued and I kept asking if any mobs had leaked through, our team seeming somewhat reluctant to call that out. We made it through the trash waves and did not have too much trouble with Marwyn, the final boss of the event. We made it.
Both bosses down, event over
We had now made it as far as we had last week. We did get another good drop, the Frayed Abomination Stitched Shoulders.
Something for the clothe wearers
After getting ourselves set back up, we headed on to the next mob, which was the Frostworn General, whose big surprise is summoning a ghostly copy of the party to fight for him. It turns out we’re not that tough and he and his minions were done on the first go without much drama.
Consecrate grabs them all
That done, the next destination was Jaina who was vying with the Lich King in his chamber at the far end of the long hall.
The Lich King has plans for us
Jaina, who shows at 5% health at that moment, has other plans. She puts the Lich King in an ice block and shouts that we have to get out of there.
We’ve gotta get out of this place…
And then everything stops because Jaina and the Lich King are so polite that nothing happens until you interact with Jaina and confirm that you are ready to leave. Then begins what in my head I think is going to be “the easy” part, where the Lich King just chases us down a path where we face a few ice walls that requires us to defeat a wave of mobs in order to advance until we get to the end and the deus ex machina occurs and we’re done.
What could possibly go wrong?
Here comes the Lich King
The Lich King casts a spell on himself that gives him a deadly cold AOE aura and starts slow walking after us. As we hit the first ice wall that is thrown up to block us, Jaina says we need to hold off the Lich King’s minions while she burns down the wall… and it takes exactly as long to burn down the wall as it does to defeat the wave of minions.
The first wave is easy. There are some annoying non-elite ghouls and two elite mobs, an Abomination and a Witch Doctor. Pieces of cake, we knock them down and done.
The second wave adds some more mobs, and now we have five elites to deal with and it takes more time. We manage it, but the Lich King closed the distance.
The third wall and wave is actually two waves sent from the Lich King, elites in both.
Finishing off the first round as the second approaches
But we were too slow with the second set and the Lich King wandered up and one-shotted Jaina and the whole party went down… except for me.
I am not sure how that worked. It must be that pally passive… I forget the name… that saves you from a killing blow. I was at a sliver of health, but the event seems to have reset just before I died. The Lich King lays down that million point hit and goes away.
So I had a bit to eat and revived everybody there. As we were sitting down to bring our health and mana up to max and wondering how this is going to play out after a fail, we hear Jaina yelling her “He’s too powerful!” routine.
Who is yelling in the middle of our picnic?
It felt like we were really close, that just a bit more would have gotten us over the line. We seemed to be at the last wall, just steps from the final area where everything is resolved, so we walked back up to find Jaina waiting for us. Set to give it our all, we set Jaina in motion and… had a full wipe at the same point.
Time stamped 10 minutes after the previous pic, exact same spot
Then we all had to get back to the instance, get set back up again, run up to find Jaina, and start it all again.
This ended up the same as the first run where somehow I survived with just a sliver of health. I ressed everybody, we talked a bit about what we could do to make this come together and started doing a bit of reseach as to how we might approach this fight. There wasn’t much out there, and that which we did find was not encouraging. The top comment on WoW Head was basically “this is difficult,” something we had already guessed.
We gave it one more shot, this time trying to take the Witch Doctor elites first then the abominations, but it was to no avail. The order of mobs wasn’t changing the equation because the mobs were not killing us. The Lich King was catching up to us every time, which means we were not killing the mobs fast enough. We’re in no danger of the waves killing us, so changing order of mobs didn’t move the needle. It is just that we cannot bring enough damage to bear to finish them before the Lich King gets within striking distance.
This is kind of bringing me down. I was hoping for this to be the bow on the end of Wrath Classic, the last bit to complete the experience, because I am definitely feeling like I am close to being done with Northrend for now. I am starting to look forward to whatever Cataclysm Classic might be.
But I don’t know how we bring things up a notch to get past this final barrier. We’ve done all the easy gear upgrades and we aren’t going to suddenly start raiding… not that we’re geared for it. (A raider friend on Discord said he thought the dungeon was easy, but he is also doing the final ICC raids so is pretty well geared.) And we’re probably as good in this moment as we’re ever going to be going forward.
We’ll try again. We were already looking at some possible changes to squeeze out a bit more damage. But I am not sure there is an easy answer for us.
We are, however, getting close to wrapping up the wand collections for Hallow’s End. That achievement feels within our grasp now.
Hallow’s End is all we get
We’ll take the wins we can.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 