Brew-Ha-Ha

Well, the joke was definitely on me. After the previous day's pain that was Blackrock Depths, I discovered that I could just queue up for the damn event in the random dungeon finder. I was mildly annoyed at myself and gave it a whirl. In under two minutes, I'm teleported to an instanced basement of the Grim Guzzler.

I greeted the party and threw on the Obligatory Party Buffs. When I turned around, I saw the tank had already engaged Direbrew and had gnawed him down to 80%. All righty then! In a matter of seconds, the Dark Iron Dwarf was vanquished and we were picking over his dubious treasures. The trinket (a pickled egg) was of no interest to me, but the Victory itself granted us a couple of frosties each, so for the time expended, it was amazing.

Heady from the win, I ran the Brewfest daily quests. Although the 'Defend the Kegs' and 'Brew Barking' quests went flawlessly, I completely failed the keg run. I missed not only the dropoff point for my keg (and didn't notice until halfway back for another one), but every single apple basket that would've refreshed my poor mount. In annoyance, I jumped off the steed only to find I wouldn't be able to restart the run until the next day.

There's still a number of days left in the festival, so I'm confident by the close I'll be able to join the Brew of the Month Club, which gives free booze throughout the year. Additionally, the brews grant different unique buffs based on flavor, so we'll see how all of that goes down.

I had some time to kill, so I queued up for a daily heroic, which led to Azjol-Nerub, a cavernous dungeon crawl infested with creepy-crawly things. This is normally a relatively painless dungeon run. About a third of the way in, however, the tank plopped down in the middle of a cleared hall without a word of explanation. A bit unusual but not unheard of in a pug, the rest of us waited for a couple of minutes near the top of the next ramp, eyeballing a pack of nasties.

Since we had the down time, I decided to make myself useful by summoning a table to provide tasty mana strudels for any who wanted them. I began casting and the portal began to form. The portal requires two other players to click on it for the casting to complete and our rogue diligently rushed forward to help. This put him in aggro range of the nasties at the top of the platform which descended on us en masse. Tankless, we were slaughtered and I can now say I'm possibly the first person in Warcraft history to cause a party wipe with a mage table. Fortunately, I had much better luck with a quick run through the Trial of the Champion.

The main event for the night was a trip to Tempest Keep, the biggest and baddest of the Burning Crusade 25-man dungeons. Our guild had scraped together 10 of the best and brightest, plus me, and we were ready to take it on!

Tempest Keep is a very bright and hideous cathedral type dungeon very reminiscent of an Exodar if it were designed by a colorblind child with watercolors. The layout was simple enough (large rooms + large halls) and the packs of enemies were, for the most part, easily neutralized. We had a couple of characters in their mid-70s which met with a number of unfortunate ends due to the sheer volume of AoE attacks, but most of the 80s survived the trash pulls with minimal discomfort.

We did learn the hubris of attacking 25-man scaled bosses without foreknowledge of the encounters. The first boss, a stunningly beautiful phoenix god, led us on a merry chase from platform to platform around the top of a large vaulted room before exploding in a feathery blaze, causing our first raid wipe. As we regrouped, we took a moment to learn valuable knowledge ("Fire BAD!") and how to avoid cataclysmic damage ("Jump in pit when bird make spinny move!"). Consequently, the second run went a lot better.

On the whole, the rest of the keep went smoothly until the final encounter, a three-phase battle against the blood-elf leader(?) SunStrider and his court. With five of them versus eleven of us, it seemed hardly fair. After all, they only had around 200-300k health each, right? What could go wrong?

Nanubren, our fearless leader, gave us our strategy and we readied ourselves. Plua and I, the mages, were to tackle the Astromancer, who was a caster that spammed nasty arcane explosions. Sunstrider would be tanked along with Nasty Fear Guy (yeah-- I don't pay attention to names) by Nanu. Our offtank would pick up the engineer (who threw bombs), Scary Walking Guy wasn't tankable, so whoever got randomly picked would just have to kite him. A kill order was set and targets were marked. This plan lasted all of four seconds.

We charged. I popped my trinkets and cooldowns so they'd be ready again by phase three-- when we're stopped cold by a wall of text as Sunstrider begins a long and rambling speech. To our delight, however, we don't have to fight them all at once. The Court activates one at a time and we burn them all down dizzily fast. Sunstrider was nonplussed as he stood among his dead advisers and bragged that he had many weapons at his disposal.

Enter phase two. It turns out Elfie-poo was quite literal as a whirling barrage of weaponry flew around like a macabre homage to Dragon's Lair's smith room. We blasted them to bits and the weapons fell to the floor. Each "body" allowed everyone to loot a copy of itself to equip in the coming fight. They were legendary weapons with powers and abilities that far exceeded anything any of us had ever seen...two years ago. Realizing the legendary staff would actually drop my DPS by a solid 20%, I stuck to 'old reliable' as did most of my compatriots. Unfortunately for all involved, most of us were all still huddled over the weapons when phase three began.

Phase Three: all of the court gets reanimated with double the health they had previously to fight us all at once. Hilarity immediately ensued. Fear Guy leads off with a Fear Bomb, catching nearly everyone, and Scary Walking Guy (whose sole power seems to be walking slowly towards a victim and beating the crap out of him in seconds) slaughtered people with impunity. It was a massacre of Custer proportions.

We regrouped and there was additional hilarity as we tried to raise the dead, accidentally triggering the fight again in the process. Scary Walking Guy was kited around the entire dungeon and refused to reset until his victim was slain and those outside the instance were locked out until the fight reset again. From my vantage point on the floor, I could tell when everything had finally reset again.

This time, we knew what to expect and planned accordingly. Phases one and two went smoothly and we repositioned ourselves around the room giving the soon-to-be-walking corpses wide berth. Phase three began and it was still ugly.

Scary Walking Guy fixated on me and I kited him around a bit before Ice Blocking. He turned away and I broke the block, only to have him 180 and slam me through the floor before I could do much of anything else. Eventually, one of the Court was felled and Nanu desperately called for ranged to take out the Astromancer. This proved to be impossible, as Plua was also sharing floorspace with me.

Try as we might, we just lacked the manpower to effectively down the forces against us before Phase four began and Sunstrider himself entered the fray. We wiped hard.

We'll be revisiting this guy. Win or lose, it was still a lot of fun!