Rockstar and Karazhan Part 4
Monday night’s Karazhan raid was relatively quick to form. Seraphyne and Armandeluz were on board from the beginning, and Radiantys was of course ready to roll when we needed to bring in a third healer. The evening’s goals were to drop as many of the remaining bosses as possible. Only three were left…Netherspite, Prince Malchezaar, and Nightbane. We were trying to decide who to go after first. Trivia decided to leave it up to Amrys, a newcomer to the instance. She decided on Prince.
I was pretty optimistic about Prince, because we had done so well on our previous attempt against him. On our previous run, we had gotten him into phase 2 on the only try we made. This time, the combined mana pool (buffed) of our healers was about 36k, and they were ready to heal.
On the first attempt tonight, we got to phase 2 once more. However, a moment into phase 2, I died and that was it. This was extremely strange to me, as I reviewed the numbers from Grim Reaper and inspected the combat log manually myself. I was hit a few times for a few thousand damage each, sure, and then Seraphyne hit me with a 7500 critical heal. That brought me to 93% of my 15k health. I was then hit for 3700 by Prince, and died. I followed all of the numbers in the combat log, between the flurry of hits, to the critical heal, to the single hit by Prince after that…I was at 50% of my health when I “just died”. I’m thinking this is some type of bug. My threat was way up, there was no way someone had passed me in threat and stuck me with Enfeeblement. There’s nothing really we can do about it, except try again.
On the second attempt, we wiped quickly. Infernals immediately dropped into positions that were not lucky for us, and several of the group died. The good news is we had our first quick-thinking rotation of the tank and the DPS group. It was handled really well.
Subsequent attempts were much better. I felt I was choosing good times to pop Last Stand and Nightmare Seeds during phase 2. It’s hard to feel flurries of damage coming, but I guess that’s all just part of the luck. At times my health bar was topped off. At times I was down to 2000 health and thought for sure I was going to go down. It’s really nerve-wracking seeing that bar, I try not to look at it too much…I’m sure the healers are even more anxious about that bar. On one occasion we were able to enter phase 3 for a short bit…we got Prince down to about 27% on our best attempt.
At this point, we’re able to take Prince Malchezaar into phase 2 pretty consistently (as the DPS group is more and more comfortable with moving into and out of range). We’re able to get Prince into phase 3 at times. We’re getting Prince down to about 30% at times, and the battle is lasting 3 to 4 minutes on solid attempts. I feel very good about our chances next week.
Without any success on Prince, we decided to move to Netherspite and at least give him one shot. This would let the newer people have a chance to see these color beams in action. There are a lot of things to pay attention to in the Netherspite fight, so the more chances you get to see what’s going on, the better.
Trivia led a long pre-fight talk. This was my first chance to handle the red beams (obviously). Predictys and Rockstar would be sharing red beam duty. Now, I’ll be honest here. The tank is supposed to “dance in and out of” the red beam to minimize the debuff. I was strafing left and right for the entire duration of my portal phase, but I seemed to be “in” the red beam at all times. I’m pretty good at moving out of the Void Zones when they open up, but there are others who need to definitely work on that. I also hope everyone is bringing bandages to look after themselves during the banish phase.
We gave the fight a shot. Tanking him from the red beam is pretty fun…though like I said, I didn’t appear to be able to move out of the beam. The portal phase felt really short. We were able to get Netherspite down to about 75% over a couple phases…then miscues picking up the green beam resulted in Netherspite healing himself to full health. And that’s no good. When he regains that much health, we’re very unlikely to down here in the allowed time (the enraging limitation).
When it was all said and done, we lasted a little over 8 minutes and had again brought him down to 75% health. This is pretty good I figure, for a first attempt, including at least 4 raid members who had never seen this fight in action. When we try for Netherspite next week, I’m not sure we’ll beat him, but I think we’ll get him to 50% health or below.
No badges, no loots for us this night…but lots of experience and a good amount of confidence I think.
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