I decided I wanted a quick and easy heroic dungeon to get my "daily random" out of the way before settling in for a quiet evening of reflection before an open bar, so I decided to trick the random queuer into giving me a dungeon substantially less painful than Halls of Reflection. I did so by slipping out of my pants. If college should've taught me anything, taking off ones pants will end in trouble and today was no exception.
I watched my gear score drop by a respectable chunk, then traded out my staff for a fishing pole and grinned as it plummeted. This would be a cake walk! Never being one to leave well enough alone, I also shuffled out of my boots, robe, and hat. My tabard covered my gnomish dignity and I queued up. A short while later, my group assembled and we landed in Utgarde. I was tickled pink. I -love- this dungeon or did anyway.
Our party was a rough mix: rogue, warrior, hunter, myself and a paladin healing. As a note, I really don't have an issue with paladins healing. Well equipped, they can handle five-man heroics with ease. Ours was not well-equipped. In fact, all of our party was in the 2.8-3.4k Gearscore range. No matter, for my glass cannon is large!
I chuckled and quickly dressed as visions of us plowing through the dungeon with a couple of frosties waiting at the end. The warrior moved forward to pull the first skeletal abominations...
For those of you unfamiliar with Utgarde, it's a pretty snazzy dungeon laid out like a castle populated with various undead and evil norsemen. I'm certain there's a great story behind it I haven't bothered to read, but I digress.
We lay utter waste to the first few bosses and I'm having to be very careful not to pull too much aggro from my targets. I'm outputting nearly twice the damage of the next highest player and that makes for tricky tanking. The heal-adin is doing fairly well keeping both the tank and me alive and we only lost the rogue once on the first boss, a valkyr named "Svala Sorrowgrave".
Fighting her is fun-- there's an extensive cutscene as she bargains with some demon thing, then rips into the party, flapping around, trying to sacrifice them and occasionally flying out of melee (but not nuking) range. After burning her down in nearly record time, our team morale was high.
We proceeded through the halls and room and soon found ourselves against the second boss fight: Gortok Palehoof. This one starts off in a large room with five giant statues: firbolg, worm-thing (jorgmund? Jaegermeister?), rhino, umm...something else... and Gortok, the centaur.
A glowing ball of reddish energy floats along, animating each in turn. None are particularly difficult and each get burned down rapidly. This was shaping up to be exactly what I had envisioned: a swift run. Ah misplaced arrogance, thy name be "Strev".
Our comeuppance came shortly thereafter when we reached the third boss fight, Skaldi. This has the most complex mechanics, so detailed explanations are in order.
Phase one of the fight begins on one end of the castle ramparts. He hops on his faithful drake and flies away as legions of his troops appear at the far end of the rampart and begin charging. At this point, normally the group will charge and meet them halfway to minimize the amount of time in the 'death zone'. I call it that because periodically Skaldi's drake will hover near the far end and unleash a torrent of frost breath, leaving half of the rampart a death zone, ticking off a few thousand health a second. Our warrior was having none of that and stood his ground.
The first couple of waves swarmed us and I had to fire off a couple of rounds of blizzard back to back to help save the tank, who was completely overwhelmed. The paladin couldn't quite deal with the massive amounts of damage hitting the warrior. Now a few of the enemy had me in their sights. I hastily turned invisible to reset the aggression against me and barely survived the initial onslaught. Each time I'd try to AoE attack, the enemy would peel off to come after me and there were far to many to single target. It was beginning to become manageable, but then the frost breath hit us, wiping half the group including yours truly. From there, it all went to hell.
Our second assault fared a bit better. The warrior charged down the tight passage and we held our own against the enemy, picking up a couple of harpoons along the way. Unfortunately, the frost breath still caught a party member unawares and he was laid out cold. (sorry) I was still having issues with aggro control, but we defied the odds and made it across. At the far end of the rampart are a few harpoon guns. We loaded them and fired on Skaldi's mount. He landed as the drake died and "Phase 2" began in earnest.
The party member who had died to the frost breath was, naturally, the paladin so without healing our end was bitter and swift. Undaunted, we returned to try again.
Arriving again on the dread rampart, I noted the boss had fully reset and we'd have to run the gauntlet and shoot down the drake again. Terrific. This time through, I had swapped to my old leveling Frost spec and it handled the throngs better. The slowing effect added to blizzard meant the tank had much more time to regain control and I only sacrificed a few hundred damage per second. This time we were going to do it or so I thought.
One of Skaldi's special attacks is a devastating whirlwind you MUST run away from. It does gobs of damage to everyone nearby and our beloved paladin did not get the memo. Insert team wipe here.
By this point, we're getting a bit frustrated, but decided to give it one more go. We storm past the ramparts with relative ease and again face Skaldi. The team knows when to avoid the whirlwind and I happily nuke away. Even with all of this, the healer simply can't keep up with the damage being dealt. Shortly the only three left standing are Steve, myself, and Skaldi, who has now been whittled to seven per cent health. Despite the cheers from my dead companions, I'm unable to withstand two shots from the Norseman from Hell and the wipe is official.
We're about to pack it in, when the Paladin takes one for the team and suggests dropping him from another healer. I waste no time initiating the vote and before we can get back to the ramparts, we're joined by a Shaman named "Shamwow" and with our new-found friend we plow through both Skaldi without a lick of trouble as well as the final boss, King Ymiron.
Ymiron parades around, stunning the party every few seconds as he calls on ancient spirits to help him, but he should not have bothered: his fate was sealed the second we had him targeted.
In the end, the repair bill cost nearly 50 gold and I had died more than I would before a typical Halls of Reflection team disbanded. So from now on, I'm going to do what I should have done all along: keep my pants on.
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