The Crimson Halls

A bit before I went to sleep last night I was chatting on ventrilo when I heard the news – Blood-Queen Lana’thel was killed. It was kind of sad (but expected) as I had high hopes for the boss and the whole wing. It turned out to be as easy as I feared. It’s a bit disappointing as I liked both of the fights really much on the PTR, Blood Princes being my favorite so far. Maybe there will be more blood flowing around and young Draculas in hard modes.

 

There is very little to tell about the new wing and our first day there. We have been preparing for Assembly Winter which will start in two days. To be able to provide the audience with the most interesting content the game has to offer we had to make a lot of adjustments to our raid groups. We ended up doing three 10-mans and one alt 25 Icecrown Citadel on Wednesday. I tanked one of the 10 mans which had the privilege to go first and scout the halls. We got a bit more insight into the Blood Princes mechanics. Stuff like don’t stand in the wrong place or don’t get your balls swiped off.

We spent like 40 minutes afking on ventrilo while waiting for the other group to finish their 10-man. .Growing tired of waiting for the other group we decided to pull the 25-man trash with two tanks, one healer and three dps. It took freaking 10 minutes to kill 4 mobs. Tuutti saw the chance and came on his warrior to farm some souls of them poor damned.

Finally we had the whole alt raid in the instance. We one shotted everything up to and including Blood Princes. I really loved the encounter and the mechanics and was looking forward to see if the 25-man version is harder than the 10-man we had already done. It was actually easier with a lot bigger fail margin with all those combat resses. I really love the chaotic feel the fight has and the need to position the raid correctly. Somehow I get the same feeling about Blood Princes as I got from Kil’jaeden. Unlike Kil'jaeden tho, we ended up one shotting the boss.

 

Blood Queen was just like I remember her from the PTR – very little room for personal failure. Sadly we had a lot of those in our raid; we could have done a lot better. We lacked dps due to biting fails and hit the enrage timer. We ended up making a strict list of “who bites whom”. Our guild master Sejta also put the debuffs on his raidframes and calmly stated “I’m watching you”. After that we had no problems with the fight and made a perfect kill straight by the book. I really must say both of the Crimson Halls bosses are have excellent design, fun new mechanics and the promise of freaking hard hard modes. Good job Blizzard, you have entertained me.

 

Ps. I discussed this entry with Arx and he said that while they are normal mode bosses, it’s sad that some bosses are nowadays good when we one shot one and wipe a couple of times on another. He has a point there. I’m wondering if I’m actually losing my grip here!

 

-xeno