Azgalor no more!

Vision made another first kill last night, and I had the honor of being present, being ALIVE, and doing respectable DPS throughout. I've said before that there is nothing quite as much fun in WoW as the first time your raid is successful at a particularly challenging encounter, and last night was no exception.

It might be Prince in Kara, It might be Onyxia in her cave, but there's always something special about that moment when a team of 10, 25 or 40 people achieve victory after seemingly endless attempts. Everybody cheers, everybody feels good. Petty squabbles and personal disputes are put on hold while the raid (and guild) celebrates, takes pictures, jumps around a lot and is happy in general.

So Azgalor. My first step into Hyjal, my first boss fight in Hyjal. There was a fairly steep learning curve! It became apparent after the fight began that everyone else was there on Wednesday when they cleared the first few bosses. The raid leader must have assumed I had been there before also and knew what to do. Oh how very wrong he was!

For those who haven't seen it, the Azgalor fight is akin to the Black Morass. Waves of mobs come in, you kill them, then a boss comes along, and you kill him. You get minimal time to med up between waves, and a tiny bit more time before the boss fight starts.

Now while we are going over the boss fight strat, there was no mention of these waves. I jumped over to mmo-champion to have a look at the positioning for the fight, what to do when you get the doom thingo on you, etc etc. Also no mention of any waves. It's all boss abilities, postioning, raid make up, etc.

Why didn't anyone say "oh but before the boss fight we are going to take down about eleventy billion mobs which come in waves every few minutes"?!?

Instead RL says "right, everyone in your positions... pulling now"

wait.. what? right. Ok, lets do this.

*wave of about 20 mobs comes in*

Hang on what's with all the little guys? (by 'little' I actually mean freaking huge and scary with 100 - 200 thousand HP... but in relative terms, they were little guys)

Some are tanked by the MT close to the entrance, others are taken up the back where it looks like some of the NPCs who are on our side are fighting them. I'm far too busy at this point to worry about whats going on back there, im trying to figure out what mob to target. I think I heard somebody say something about Thrall. What? err.. not my job, worry about Thrall later*

Keep in mind we just spent 10 minutes talking about the boss fight, I have no idea about the waves of mobs or anything, so im kinda just winging it at the moment. I tried my standard trick when i'm not sure what to do, which is to target a more experienced ranged DPS. Steal their target. Fire frostbolts. Generally works pretty well and I can totally appear to know whats going on even if I don't... sometimes.

Not so much this time! Every single mage, warlock and hunter had a different target. What the hell is going on? Why is there no skull? Why is there no X? Why didn't anybody say anything about this before, and where is the boss?

Another wave of mobs! This time its freaking giant elementals falling from the sky! and massive felhunters! Things are happening quickly here but I manage to shoot a quick tell to another mage since he is dead I figure he can help me out a bit... "So... umm what the hell is going on and what do I kill here?" His reply was simply "AOE where the consecration is"

And that, my friends, was all the instruction required. Bring out the blizzard, and things started going much much better. So that first 2 or 3 minutes was a bit crazy but by this stage I had figured out what was going on, what I was supposed to do, and where I needed to stand, everything was fine.

After we eventually burn our way through 8 waves, it's been like 20 minutes maybe? and then FINALLY the boss decides to put in an appearance.

'Bout time you big slow ugly lizardman thing!

Ok now this is a FUN fight! I found the perfect spot to stand, just outside of his rain of fire, just inside max range, I didn't move an inch during the entire fight, I just sat there and pounded out the damage. I think I did over 300k damage during that fight, although to be honest I don't remember the figure very well. Perhaps when I look at my screen shots it will be there in my damage meter. I did, however, maintain 1200 odd DPS for the entire fight which was a decent effort I thought. The fight does take a while. I managed to use up my entire emerald plus my ruby and an evocation, 1 cold snap, 3 pets, 3 icy veins and who knows how many times I used my trinkets.

At last he was dead. We received our first T6 items, and the first of the first went to one of the mages! (Gratz Themo) All in all it was great fun and I look forward to doing it again next week.

Will we tackle Archimonde? Will we keep pushing through BT? After all, we did get Gorefiend** down to 4% after finishing Azgalor, and that really should have been a kill...

Lady Vash is also still standing in SSC... So plenty of new acheivable first kills on the horizon for Vision!

*Turns out Thrall was totally on our team and totally badass. He didn't get involved with the boss but I'm sure that he and his buddies were helping tank some adds or something.

**More on the Gorefiend fight later!