Playing Jaxx

The weekly raid was to kill one “Lord Jaxxarus”, who is the second boss in the Trial of the Crusader. I was rather looking forward to this, as this raid was a first to me. We gathered all of our interested members and 19 of us strode into the Arena to win Fordring’s blessings to join his crusade against the Lich King….or just reduce Jaxx into a thin paste, whichever came first. As spectators cheered overhead, I stood among my friends and allies with a vague awareness of how this was to all go down. As per usual, I read up on the battles beforehand and, as per unusual, I was feeling fairly confident on being able to handle it.

The first fight is actually three battles in a row with four bosses total: The Beasts of Northrend. The gate swung wide permitting entrance to the first ‘beast’, the magnataur “Gormok the Impaler”. For the most part, he’s a fairly straightforward fight from a DPS perspective. Every now and then he’ll throw down a patch of fire that should be stepped out of, but very minimal dancing is involved: almost a two-step. The other ‘curious’ attack is one that gave me flashbacks to City of Heroes. Periodically, he’d fling a ‘snobold’ from his back onto a random player. The snobold would climb up on the players head and generally do very bad things until it was killed. As the lucky recipient of the first snobold attack, I heroically freaked out. “GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!”, I screamed. Fortunately, others were able to slaughter the vicious thing without much difficulty. We took down the Impaler and immediately the next challengers appeared.

Twin giant jormungars (worms), Acidmaw and Dreadscale, tunneled in and attacked. These were substantially trickier. Casters were under orders to burn down Acidmaw first and I quickly saw why. Although both critters left slime pools to be avoided, each sprayed and spat bile and poisons as well. Acidmaw’s shtick was a paralytic poison that rapidly turned your movement and attack capacity to zero if it wasn’t removed. The only way to remove it was have it burned off by being close to someone covered in Dreadscale’s burning bile. This led to quite a bit of hilarity, as burning people had to flee the party, lest they damage those around them and poisoned people had to catch up to them or try to get hit by Dreadscale on their own. Periodically, they would burrow back underground, clear their aggro stacks, and re-appear elsewhere in the arena to wreak havoc. Once one was slain, the other enraged. Although I managed to avoid the various sprays, bile, pools, bites, and sweeps, others were not quite so fortunate. Our tiny party was whittled down and by the time both worms were slain, we were down four DPS and no way to resurrect them before the next encounter: the Northrend yeti, Icehowl.

Even though he weighed in at around 15 million health, Icehowl is fairly simple once you knew his ‘routine’. He’ll fight for a bit, then leap towards the middle of the ring. When he lands, there’s a massive impact that knocks everyone back, stuns, and he picks a target at random to charge. If the stunned target is able to break out of it and get out of the way in time, he’ll slam into the arena wall and be a little extra vulnerable for a time before the cycle repeats. Although I was targeted for annihilation early in the fight, I found that “blink” would easily let me avoid the charge.

We fought hard, but a couple more DPSers were laid low by the yeti and combined with our earlier losses, there was simply no way we’d be able to down him in any sort of reasonable time. It had taken far too long just to get him down by a third of his health pool. The call was made, healing was stopped, and I pounded on the yeti with my staff until he noticed me and let me die, some sixteen minutes after the encounter with the Impaler had begun.

Returning to the Arena, we’d be faced with the entire encounter again, starting with the magnataur. This time we changed things out a bit. We had suffered from an abundance of healers, which seems like a really funny thing to say given the number of casualties we had taken, so a couple of them flipped over to their ‘damage’ spec, and we picked up a couple more guildies, bringing us to around 21.

This time the fights went a bit smoother—Gormok went down in a couple of minutes and we faced down the worms with a bit more experience and caution. Although we lost a few DPS during the fight— you’d think we’d learn that bathrobes do NOT stop gouts of acid, we were much stronger when it was time to battle the yeti again. We lit into him and mostly avoided all of his charges. There’s an enrage timer that results in 5x damage dealt if the fight goes too long, so we pushed hard. It was down to the wire with his health ticking down alongside our clock. With a sliver of health left, we ran out of time and it turned nasty… giving it our all, everyone who could slapped damage-over-time spells and skills on him, then he leapt towards the middle. The resulting blast wave killed everyone except one person and I hate –HATE- that my slamming Ice Block came half a second too late. With little else to do, we were all fixated on Icehowl’s health bar. We had carved him down to 150k (1%!) from his initial total and the DoTs were ticking. From my vantage point, I couldn’t see what the sole survivor was doing—I was mesmerized by a dwindling number that, despite my silent pleas of “C’mon…C’MON!”, stopped at 32,000. We had failed the encounter by the slimmest of margins.

We were stunned. Cursing, we filled what we could of the roster with random people and tried one more time. What a difference three people can make! We smoked all of the Beasts of Northrend in under nine minutes and we were ready to face the object of our quest: Lord Jaxxarus. The demon lord was summoned by a gnomish warlock whose reach exceeded his grasp and we were charged by Fordring to slay the demon before he could escape. Oddly enough, he posed remarkably little threat compared to the last encounter. As a mage, my job was to blast away at the various elemental and demonic henchmen he summoned, occasionally counter one of his “fel fireballs”, and steal a “netherpower” buff whenever he cast it. Otherwise, it was a fairly straightforward blast-fest that went as smooth as silk. We disbanded afterwards—the delays had cost us precious time and some members had another raid already running late.

I hustled back to Dalaran and after turning in the quest, I found I had accumulated enough badges to upgrade both my shoulders (with frosties) and my hat (with triumphs). This broke up my T9 set, but I wasn’t terribly upset: my gear score had now exceeded 5400 and after streamlining gem choices, I was now some 150 or so spell power above my previous total and had enough bonuses to ‘hit’ that I can now consider re-spending some of my talents to better benefit from it.