Emerald Nightmare on Elm St

This past Tuesday, Blizzard released the first three bosses of "The Emerald Nightmare" to LFR and I dutifully queued Strev up to see what the big deal was. I've always enjoyed Blizzard's raid mechanics and was eager to see how things have evolved after several years. Every aspect met my expectations.

The raid itself takes place in a corrupted version of The Emerald Dream, the "Plato's Purest Form of Azeroth" created by the Titans as a model for when they got around to creating Azeroth. The corrupting Nightmare has seeped in and the alternate dimension has devolved from Platonic to plutonic and we get to squeegee some of the evil from its windshield. After a short 7 minute DPS queue, I ported in… and recognized the place from Sun's class hall-- the main area is where Druids teleport when recalling "home", complete with portals to all of the druidy areas mentioned previously. This time each of those portals carries you to the nightmare version of Grizzly Hills, Ungoro Crater, etc which has their own themed boss to smite. Neat.

LFRaiders haven't evolved at all since Cataclysm and the boss mechanics were all watered down, but still failable. which we proved several times. After the first wipe, one of the angrier players started ranting about how people didn't understand the mechanics of a fight and, after checking, found that fully half of the players didn't have Deadly Boss Mods or an equivalent installed. For my own part, I knew I was half-assing it. To my credit, I had DBM installed and had read up on the fights in the dungeon journal. Against me was the fact I wasn't running with enchanted/gemmed gear, hadn't watched any videos of the fights, and was relying on the LFR method of "assume someone else will start screaming about what mechanics I'm screwing up".

The first boss was a Fairly Standard Dragon Encounter, which wasn't at all surprising for the first boss of an expansion, with a few tweaks. Players can get targeted with a debuff that puts pools of poisonous doom at their feet for a few seconds. Carry it to the edge of the room. Swarms of infected bugs appear… if you stand near them you're going to be in for a world of hurt when they explode. As predicted, LFRaiders absolutely covered the melee area with poison. We wiped once.

The second was a druid name Elerethe Somethingoranother. Apparently surrendering to the nightmare gives you cooler transformations than "owlbear" and "cat". He has two main forms, spider and roc, each with its own set of problems. This one was absolute chaos. Pick a mobile fight mechanic: it was there. Ground fire. People placing pools of poison. Tornados to dodge. Tornados SPREADING the poison people left on the floor. Many spiders, handle it! Chasing the boss to another area to continue the fight. Cleaves to dodge. We wiped once.

The final was a a giant eyeball on the side of a tree (maybe?) I'll need to get a better look, but it had a nice "elder god" vibe to it. This gave us the most problems, due to having several mechanics that required situational awareness. Basically, in addition to its slew of regular attacks, big ol' eyeball spawns a bunch of nightmarish adds-- tentacles, abominations, the usual gang of hellspawn. Every time one is killed, a bubbling slime spawns and starts fixating on a raid member until it is dead. The only way to significantly damage the boss is to kill one of these slimes while it is in eyeball-cuddling distance. Guess what wasn't mentioned in the dungeon journal?

Anyway, once the eyeball is downed, it reveals an opening into the tree where the REAL boss is. Run in and unload on him while he's casting an IKILLYOU spell. I'm just nuking happily away glad for a damage phase when I hear DBM kick in with "9….8….7…" I see a couple of people leaving the tree and it clicks instantly. Pivot. Blink! Blink! and I'm standing outside with five other people when the countdown ends and everyone but us are killed. Hilarious. The fact it happened a second time was just sad. The third time all but three make it out in time and we have done maybe 40% damage on the boss. Lather, rinse, and repeat and the thing is finally dead.

For all of my troubles and a couple of hours, I have a couple of new enchanting recipes that let me craft buff items players can use against raid bosses (you can use one per week and it lasts all week) and a cloak that served better as disenchantment-bait than as an equipment downgrade. As it stands, there is nothing that LFR can provide that would be an upgrade to Strev's grear, unless he gets a random 'warforged' or 'titanforged' bonus added to the loot. From just world questing, my gear already outstrips Ghetto Raiding.

For Sun, it is a different story. She's sitting at i824: one point shy of queueing for this hell herself and there's still a few things she could use. We'll see how that goes this weekend.