umm hello? Hi im Zupa. Lets roll.
And so it began, more firsts for me, this time in the form of 3 new BT bosses. Last night Vision cleared High Warlord Naj'entus, Supremus and the Shade of Akama. We had a couple of wipes on Supremus but aside from that there were no real dramas. Took about 3 hours from start to finish.
I'd have to say Supremus was the most fun. It's one of those fights where 25 people have to be on the ball and focused for the duration of the fight for a successful outcome.
However, First things First.
High Warlord Whassisnameagain?
When the guild leaders started explaining the fight for the 3 or so of us who hadn't been before, I heard them talking about spines and bubbles and bubble popping macros. Ah-ha! Tuan over at SpicyTunas did a write up of this fight the other day, so i quickly brought it up on screen to see if there was anything extra I should know as a frost mage. Not rly. Don't screw up the macro.
Ok so how it works is, everyone stands around the boss. Look at who's standing next to you, if you hear that person has a spine in them you know to get it out. Every once in a while the boss throws a spine at someone and they are paralized until someone grabs it out of them. That person is then responsible for bursting the bosses bubble (with said spine)
If you dont bust his bubble with one of these spines then he will heal and not die. We did, he didn't, and he did. Bam moving on to....
Supremus!
What a cool name. He's also massive, and you have plenty of time to contemplate his massiveness while clearing trash around his feet. For this fight you will be requiring - your brain, your strafe key. Other gear optional.
So there are two phases in the fight. Each lasts for a minute and when one finishes the other starts. There is the kite phase and the tank and spank phase.
That pretty much explains the fight. The thing is anybody might have to kite him for any length of time, he randomly switches targets and chases you during this phase.
He also randomly creates volcanoes. They kill you, and require you to avoid their AoE which is rather easy as its blue and on fire and the volcano is erupting etc. He also has some blue flame earth split thing as well. Once again don't stand in the way or you die, otherwise just run around it and no problems. If you have managed to land yourself a spot in a BT raid but don't understand instinctively that standing in any kind of fire is a bad idea... well I suspect that wouldn't happen...
So what could possibly go wrong? Well in our case people kept dying during the kite phase. You will die if you fail at kiting him. Unfortunately there are a few different ways to fail when kiting and newbies and old school raiders alike demonstrated all of them last night.
mistake 1: you are too close to Supremus during kite phase when he switches aggro to you.
result 1: You go splat
mistake 2: you are too far away from supremus during kite phase when he switches aggro to you. he charges you.
Result 2: You probably go splat.
mistake 3: He was chasing you, distance was good, you ran into a wall.
result 3: He catches you. You go splat.
misake 4: He was chasing you, distance was good, you ran into a corner and suddenly no where to run
result 4: .... you go splat.
mistake 5: He was chasing you, and you ran way too far away from the raid. he charged you and you went splat... OR you ran him so far from the rest of the raid that when he swiches aggro... he charged someone else and they go splat. Of course they should have been keeping up to prevent this from happening but you made that difficult by blinking down the other side of the map, and there were about 4 volcanoes in the way that the raid had to avoid.
result 5: ... someone gets splatted... maybe 2 people.
See whats happening here? We were losing 2 - 5 people every kite phase. I think the most common mistake was being too far away and getting charged. This is understandable I guess. He's a big bastard. He's all intimidating and scary and casters dont like getting too close to him.
Eventually we got him down, I managed to stay up for all of the first two fights until the RL called wipe it, then on the third and successful attempt I was too close to him when he got down to about 20% and see mistake number 1.... I went splatz! I was absolutely spanking him too (fire mages are a bit gimped in this fight) I expected to see another wipe but thankfully nobody else went down and it was on to the easiest fight in BT...
Shade of Akama!
This fight was almost a non-event. Adds come out of the sides, have to kill the dudes with the purple beams to release the boss. Then everyone spanks the boss. Some ghost NPC fella helps out.
Thats about the extent of it from my perspective. I was assigned to one of the doors along with another mage, a warlock and a pally tank. We killed the adds. They were soft. I turn around when the time comes to spank the boss, press number 3 a few times. Game over.
And that concludes my first venture in to Black Temple. Hopefully I get to go back tomorrow to have a crack at the next bosses, and if we get one of them down I believe it will be a first for Vision. I might not get a spot coz its progression and I'm not a "core raider" in Vision (yet)... Then again, I helped clear the trash, my gear is up to scratch....
Time will tell....
