Cataclysm Edition Part 3: Dungeon Diving

One of my earlier priorities in the expansion should have been finding the entrances to all of the new instances to enable queuing for them. Honestly, none of them were terribly hard to find, but general laziness kept me from hitting them up until the second time I had to be summoned to a dungeon for a ‘discovery’.

Due to the increase in complexity and difficulty in the dungeons, I’ve been avoiding PUGs like the plague and have been running with the Guild when possible, which surprisingly isn’t that often. The ‘regular’ versions of the dungeons (for the most part) don’t offer nearly any gear that would be upgrades and I can’t earn any reputation there, so fighting there is either practice for honing my skills or charity for guildies who haven’t hit 85 yet or need the i333 (or under) equipment.

Presently, we have few members that qualify for heroics and I’m exceedingly bad at being available when these runs start. That is changing gradually as more players become “heroic ready” by hitting that magic i329-average level and the opportunities to participate in daily runs increase in the coming weeks.

I’ll touch on each dungeon in these blog posts in the coming days and for today, you get the Throne of Tides, the first dungeon I ran in Cata.

The Throne of Tides is accessed by heading down the giant underwater whirlpool in the abyssal maw, taking you deep (DEEP) within the earth into a secret cavern. The dungeon itself is utterly beautiful with an (very no-surprises-here) aquatic theme and home to Neptulon, the unoriginally named God o’ th’ Sea. It’s an open-air environment, so there’s no swimming involved and plenty of naga, gil-goblins, murlocs, and water-elementals to keep the pace err…fluid.

The dungeon layout is fairly straight-forward and houses a very ‘nifty’ features in addition to several bosses you catch glimpses of throughout your travels in Vashj’ir. There’s a large shimmering elevator to ride, a teleporter that allows you to return to the dungeon entrance a lot faster than waiting for the elevator, and several ‘gauntlet’ hallways that constantly spawn groups of trash mobs until the paths have been cleared.

Trash follows typical Cataclysm-sized groups of five or more, making crowd control necessary for appropriately-leveled parties and the mixture of types favor mages and warlocks both.

Bosses you encounter along the way include Lady Naz’jar—a naga who periodically becomes invulnerable as she summons minions, Commander Ulthok—a fairly straightforward tank’n’spank, and my personal favorite: Erunak and the Mindbender. Erunak starts off as an Earthen Ring-lookin’ dude with a large pulsating head. After you blast him down to half health, it gets awesome. The hat is revealed to be a PSIONICALLY ENDOWED OCTOPUS who runs around alternately possessing people until they are (literally) beaten half to half, blasting the party with beams of inky darkness, and surrounding itself with a shield that heals it when damaging spells are cast.

The final encounter is a ‘defend area’ with you assisting Neptulon as he attempts to “cleanse the waters”. I’m guessing naga have been peeing in the pool. In this encounter, the party deals with waves of cultists and thingies summoned by them until Neptulon’s ritual is complete and the killer octopus who sank your boat shows up. You receive a MASSIVE health and damage buff (Strev was some 30 feet tall and critting for over 700k damage) and you must blast the cephalopod into sushi as it lurks overhead. Completing the encounter allows the party to loot a chest of Neptulon’s treasures.

Overall, I rather enjoy this dungeon. Tune in next time for Blackrock Caverns!