The Investigation of Blackrock Caverns

This past weekend we took our first run at a Cataclysm dungeon, the first dungeon on the list, Blackrock Caverns.  And here we run into some real “we didn’t play Cataclysm” aspects of our WoW Classic experience.

We have been messing around with Cataclysm Classic since it rolled out, which has meant, to a certain extent, dealing with Blizzard trying to get the whole experience running.  Slowly but surely they have gotten the whole thing on the rails.  Meanwhile we’ve been out doing some solo work to upgrade gear and get to know the place and our classes.

We were not wholly unprepared to play our classes or as a group.  We had done a couple of Wrath heroics as a warm up of sorts.  But doing Wrath dungeons with Cataclysm specs and gear… not exactly a test of our abilities, given we had done those as heroics already with Wrath gear.

I had heard rumor that the dungeon difficulty level had been ramped up, Blizz being unhappy with how people waltzed through Northrend instances.  And I had even heard tale that Blizz decided to launch Cataclysm Classic at a patch level where they might have dialed back the initial difficulty a bit, though not as much as they did later in the expansion.

All of this, however, was purely theoretical knowledge for us, as we did not do any of these dungeons during the original run of Cataclysm.

Sure, technically our group did, in fact, run Blackrock Caverns… but we ran it in December of 2013, which was back at the half-way point of the Mists of Pandaria era.  And if you read my write up of it, we fumbled though the place pretty much on luck, new specs, and the place having been nerfed.

I did not even read that write up before we launched into our first run, in part because I hate to spoil surprised, and in part because it didn’t look like we were even going to get together last weekend.  We all had things going on.  But at 3pm on Sunday we all managed to log in to Azeroth.  It was time to do something.

But we had to do it fast, because Liftkit had a hard deadline so we only had about 2 hours together as a group.  Being all there, we decided that we ought to take a crack at the first dungeon on the list, and with time being short we gave up on walking to Blackrock or using the little transport over in Mount Hyjal.  We just opened up the dungeon finder and had it whisk us away to adventure.

Dungeon Finder Express please

The group was a spread of levels, but we figured that wouldn’t be so bad.  Everybody had trained their skills and sort of figured out what mastery meant to their class and all that.  The group we went in with looked like this:

The list

Our layout was:

• Wilhelm – Protection Pally
• Fergorin – Holy Paladin
• Kharageenan – Frost Deathknight
• Ula – Fire Mage
• Liftkit – Demonology Warlock

So pally tank and heals and an array of DPS options.  A fearsome group, and all the more so as the instance has you done diving helmets as part of the shtick.

Lookout world, here we come

We got ourselves setup as well as we could remember.  Buffs changed a bit, and Warlock health stones now heal a percentage of your health rather than a fixed amount, but the conjured mana strudle was still sweet.

We took the first couple of trash fights well enough and managed to work our way into a big room where the first boss, Rom’ogg Bonecrusher, wanders around the place, while small groups of trash hang around doing whatever it is they do.

The open area while the boss wanders…

Instinct said that we should clear the trash before getting involved with the boss.  And that went well enough until we went too far clockwise in the room and took on the two guardians at the door the led out of the chamber.  It turns out those two are essentially unbeatable, because if they were not you could totally bypass the boss.  So, first wipe of the afternoon.

These two will take care of themselves

So we let those two be and went back to the rest of the room where, with the last group in the corner, we got the boss by accident and wiped again.

There we are, all over…

And then we finally took on the boss when we were ready… and wiped again.  His chains of torment and the follow on short range, hard hitting AOE meant we had to show some care.  We considered this while Fergorin went off to negotiate and automotive deal out on his driveway.

Waiting for capitalism to take its course

No deal was achieved, though neither party would rule out the possibility of a future deal being possible.  But that meant back to the boss where, on the third try, we managed to step out of the AOE and stay alive long enough to burn him down.  One boss down, and a quest turn in… which we had to go back to the quest giver at the start of the instance for Fergorin to turn in because the in-flight quest mechanic bugged out on him.

He did, for his trouble, get a nice mace out of the deal as our first boss drop.

Hits hard and heals well…

On defeating the boss, a big NPC named Raz the Crazed was unleashed and ran down the hall deeper into the instance, taking out the two unbeatable guards.

Raz didn’t clear all the way to the next boss, though we didn’t have much problem getting through the trash that remained.  It might have been better had Raz cleared boss #2, Corla, Herald of Twilight, because things did not go so well for us with her.

How hard could it be?

We just did the usual “there she is, get her” routine and things ended with a wipe as there was clearly a mechanic in play that we needed to know about.  However, we didn’t quite figure it out on the first run.

With Cataclysm there is now a dungeon guide included with your happy meal, and so we consulted that.

The Hitchhikers Guide to Dunegon Runs…

The guide is good about possible drops and boss abilities, but less so when it comes to tactics.  We gave it another run, hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle, with the same negative results, all of us dead on the floor.

This is one where I went back to my post about our 2013 run, only to find out we were so OP that we just half-assed it, ignore the mechanic, and powered our way through.

So we had to do some research which involve reading a couple of guides and looking at a video or two in quick passing, but the concept of what we needed to do wasn’t really crystal clear to us.

Tell us once more about these beam and what they do?

Honestly, we couldn’t decipher where the beams were coming from and who needed to stand where.  We had at least discovered the beams and something about standing in them until you get to 80 somethings stacked on you, then you have to step out, let them drop off, and step back in.

Unfortunately, somebody couldn’t see where the counter was when we tried it again… the counter being largely theoretical until we were actually in the fight… and they got a stack of 100 on them and turned into a baddie, changed sides, and attacked us.  Can’t fault them for wanting to be on the winning team I guess.

And by that point Liftkit was out of time and had to go.  So our recon in force into Blackrock Caverns was at an end.

The rest of us had a bit of time, so we made over to Dalaran and, once we figured out how to de-tangle ourselves from the Dunegon Finder mechanics… it turns out “leave instance group” gets you out of that but doesn’t drop group like you fear it might… we went over to Violet Hold and did a heroic run at that just to see if we could pick up something nifty on the transmog front.

That was easy…

That netted us the guild achievement and a couple possible items and made us feel a bit better about ourselves.

Anyway, we shall return.