Starting Tempest Keep: The Eye

March 19th, 2008 | Posted in blog posts, gaming |

My World of Warcraft guild is progressing onward from raiding Karazhan and Gruul’s Lair. We’re moving on to tackle The Eye in Tempest Keep, a 25-man raid that is the starting point for Tier-5 raiding. It marks an exciting step for our raiding group because we are maturing quite a bit and starting to work together well.

To learn the first couple of bosses and to become more cohesive as a group, we’re raiding The Eye on two nights. Tuesdays and Saturdays. Tuesday nights we are working on learning to fight the first boss, Al’ar, and on Saturday we will work on the second boss Void Reaver.

The reason we are doing it like this is that there aren’t as many trash mob pulls to Al’ar so it fits well with our limited play time during the week. Yes, most of us have real life obligations to consider. But the weekend isn’t as limited on time, so we can spend more time on the arguably harder trash mobs to the second boss.

I know a lot of people focus more on Void Reaver first. You can actually get to him and skip the first boss, and Void Reaver is easy to the point that people call him “Loot Reaver”. But really the mobs you have to fight before him require a LOT of coordination we’re finding.

Anyway, last night we made our first attempt at Al’ar. People telling us that “oh you don’t have the DPS for this” and “he’s so hard, let’s just skip him”. I am happy to say that while we didn’t get him down, it wasn’t because of a lack of DPS or healing. We wiped because we’ve never faced him before and don’t know the fight very well. Our tanks were struggling to keep coordinated so we kept getting Flame Buffets hitting the raid, and some tanks couldn’t get away from the Flame Quills . Nothing that practice won’t solve even if we don’t change up our gear too much. It was pretty exciting.

I had the privilege of being the Warlock to stay on top of the threat meters. I removed the Blessing of Salvation buff, changed up some gear to output more raw DPS, and threw everything I had at Al’ar constantly. The reason behind this is that in Phase 1 you can’t pull aggro from the tanks but in Phase 2 the main tank needs to build up a lot of threat. So the idea is for me to get as much threat as I can, and as Phase 2 starts and Al’ar makes a beeline for me, the main tank Taunts him and I Soulshatter, dumping all my threat. It basically slingshots a ton of threat to the main tank. Quite a neat idea!

Doing that gave me the honor of easily topping the damage meters for that fight. I was quite pleased by that and look forward to continuing our progress in this raid.

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