Nighthold Continues!
- ryanjepson8
- Jan 21, 2017
- 5 min read
As promised in the last World of WoW post, Gul'dan dies! On Normal... Also, we tackle Heroic. Was it a wipefest? No, not really.
Apologizing in advance for the lack of in battle screenshot. Sort of difficult to fight and take pictures, so here's some random scenery. So, no guild drama this time. Well, at least not before the raid. And nothing too significant. Just the way I like it. The plan was laid out, and we stuck to it: Finish off Gul'dan , and then move into Heroic. The minor drama started after Gul'dan died. After the fantastic cinematic, everyone was able to cash their quest for the huge chunk of Artifact Power, as well as get the quest for their shiny new Manasaber mount. With a good chunk of us itching to get the mount, we went ahead and did the very brief quest for it. With this there were a couple of people who just wanted to get into Heroic NOW. After a few groans, sighs and "Can we just raid now and quest later?", which were ignored by the people who were actually doing the quest, we made our way into Heroic. Seriously, it was only like 5 minutes. Hold your bloody horses.
Gul'dan
Firstly though, the Gul'dan fight. Having only seen half of it in our last run, this time we got to finish it. It was pretty much at the expected difficulty after seeing how hard the other bosses were. Some new mechanics presented themselves, such as Bonds of Fel. This binds you to the ground and slows you down. You need run far enough away to break the binding, but if you do this by yourself, you'll take damage that will likely one-shot you, so you need a number of other people with you to spread the damage. Not too hard a fight on Normal.
Skorpyron
Onto Heroic. After taking care of some pretty easy trash, we met back up with Skorpyron again. In all honesty, this was still a rather easy fight. The fact that we were on Heroic now made people pay a lot more attention to the actual mechanics of the fight, and they were fairly straight-forward:
Stay in the middle area.
Don't get hit by stun that boss fires in front of him.
Hide behind shards when shockwave fires so you don't get blasted into the outside of the room.
AoE down adds when they pop up.
First boss down.
Chromatic Anomaly
Next was Chromatic Anomaly, which was still pretty simple on Heroic too. Another quick run down of the mechanics:
Don't stand in swirly stuff on ground.
Kill add that spawns.
Dodge line of things that comes from the middle of the room.
I mentioned the time flowing mechanic in my last World of WoW, but here's a little more detail. Basically, close to the start of the fight, the boss will slow time, making CD's, casts and buffs take or last a lot longer as a result. At the middle point of the fight, time is normal and then toward the end, time is sped up. I absolutely love the end of the fight. Everything just feels so much better at a faster speed. I really wish the game just played at this speed! Ah well. 2 down.
Trillax
Our first heroic wipe! This was a really cool fight though. I was surprised at how many mechanics there were to this fight, considering it felt really simple on Normal. Pretty sure we must've just ignored them all or something.
Kite boss around the edges of the room Ursoc style.
Eat the cake that the boss throws out.
Make sure all cake is eaten so that adds don't get to it and explode.
When boss goes into middle of room, go with him.
Make sure you stick to his sides.
Run around in circle when he casts his face/ass beam and starts spinning around.
HE CHANGES DIRECTIONS RANDOMLY. Don't get caught out like I did.
He took us just over 8 minutes to kill, which felt like a long time. Nice to see some longer fights though. Seems like there's a few of those here in Nighthold.
Spellblade Aluriel
Now this one was pretty tough. Took us 4 attempts to get her down. This was also a case of us pretty much ignoring the mechanics on Normal and then getting wrecked when we had to actually worry about them on Heroic. The fight mostly revolved around add management in 3 different phases while keeping up a solid DPS stream on the boss and positioning yourself correctly.
Frost is first. If you get the frosty thing, pair up with the other person who has it and explode for some reason.
Boss spawns a big frost circle that pulls you in. Don't get caught in it, as you'll freeze when you try to get out of it.
Frost adds spawn. Aoe them down.
In the fire phase, lines appear between some players and boss. Don't cross them.
Explosions happen and adds will spawn where they went off. Try not to stack them as they get damage buff.
Kill said adds.
Arcane phase. Don't get hit by arcane orb things.
When boss casts arcane rain, raid runs to other side of room as a group.
Arcane adds spawn where rain dropped. AoE them all down before they get their cast off.
This all repeats once more before enrage, which we actually hit on our 3rd attempt. A tricky fight for sure, but if the raid is paying attention, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. The idea of this on Mythic freaks me out a little though.
Krosus
This is as close as you'll get to a Patchwerk fight in Nighthold. Thankfully, even though we wiped a few times, it's one of the simpler fights in the raid. A nice break after the last fight.
He fires a beam that alternates between left and right. Easy to dodge. Don't get hit.
Slams melee area for big damage. Doesn't really affect me as a mage.
Third slam destroys a portion of the bridge. Stay still if you want to die and be unrezzable.
Casts a bomb/orb thing on a random player. Only ranged I think. Run it to the back on the bridge.
Random swirly things appear on the floor that need to be absorbed (like Death Blossom on Mythic Eye). If they're not absorbed, adds spawn.
That's it really. Just a DPS check with a few simple mechanics to worry about. Nice to get some revenge for Tirion.
Star Augur Etraeus
Well, it was the end of the night and one of the main tanks left, so we didn't really get to give this a proper try. Gave it a few shots with an alt main tank, but they were a tad fruitless. Might have had time to down him if we didn't spent time pissing around with the Manasaber quest. Maybe the other guildies were right all along.
Trash!
The trash between the first few bosses weren't too much to worry about. One of the mobs before Anomaly fires a death beam that can mess you up if you get caught in it. Trash before Spellblade and Krosus was quite painful though. A fair few deaths on some of the packs. Can see these getting somewhat annoying and I'm pretty sure it's only going to get worse.
That's all for this week. We'll be skipping Normal next week so should get another 3 or 4 bosses down in Heroic, hopefully.
Next post: We start watching strat videos to deal with trash!
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