On Raid Design Part 4 – UBRS
In the fourth part of my raid-ranking-series (up to Ulduar) I’ll have a look into the first raid that one could get into from back in vanilla wow and give a little look into the world that was all about farming for your blue dungeon set.
Setting
The blackrock. This is where legends are made my friends, gigantic mountain full of dragons and baddies, home to Ragnaros and his closest minions. Sweat and blood mark the scenery and it’s pretty much clear that death lies within the very halls of all instances in this dangerous mountain complex consisting of nothing less than five dangerous dungeons, that are the blackrock depths, the lower blackrock spire, the upper blackrock spire, the molten core and blackwing lair.
Once you hit level 60 you wouldn’t go out and get epics crafted, farm for more epics in 5-mans and then head into your first raid decked-out. Back in the days every purple piece was hard-earned work, and before you could even think of tier 1 you would be on the quest to collect tier 0.5, your blue dungeon set. It wasn’t mandatory to collect that, but you had to do some decent running of those pre-epic-raids to be a viable addition to a molten core group.
And most of this running was happening inside the blackrock. Quest chains, keys, mini-bosses, summonable extra-bosses – it was all there, and all those instances were long-winded and packed with trash to an extent beyond bearable. So, yes, the blackrock was an epic place to be. And the upper blackrock spire was the first instance for more than 5 players. It was a 10-man raid and it offered quite a challenge.
Flair
The blackrock is all about iron dwarves, dragonkins, dragons, cultists and fire. The tier sets would be tied to a certain element you would face on the way there, and tier 1 content was all about fire (tier 2 was nature in Ahn’Qiraj, tier 3 frost in Naxxramas, and afterwards they dropped the elemental tie).
The flair is cool, for those raids all had a shared and impressive entrance. The blackrock features a gigantic rock, held in the air by as-gigantic-chains, above the deadly (as many a raider found out) lava pool in the middle of the blackrock. Walking through the gigantic gate and seeing that scenery alone made the place look dangerous, it wasn’t meant for adventurers to be here.
Inside UBRS you would face pretty regular architecture, just a tad bigger (you know, dragonkin-size). Other than that it is a lot about hallways, rooms, corners, doors. It worked as what it was: A hideout in a mountain, carved into the stone by iron dwarves and populated by dragonkins.
Trash
Upper Blackrock Spire is full of dragonkins and all kinds of regular-race mobs whom decided to follow their lead. Casters and melee, straightforward stuff. Nothing to be seen here. The tricky part about most pulls was the sheer amount of enemies. This was before “everyone AoE now” times, where AoE was pretty much exclusive to mages and – to some degree – warlocks and hunters.
Also the trash used to hit quite hard, so CC was an important thing. Saps, sheeps and traps were made heavy use of. Still, the trash was rather boring. Hard, yes, but not interesting. Except for some pulls, larger packs of lethal dragonkins, which were almost as hard as mini-bosses and required some well-thought-through execution.
Encounters
Five-man instances weren’t all too impressive in vanilla, so the giant monsters to be fought in UBRS were quite something new. The encounters had some basic mechanics to them and there certainly was a good variety of them around. Who could ever forget Rend Blackhand, riding his dragon and being buggy more often than not? And, of course, The Beast. Skinners would fight for this corpse, that could only be skinned if you had the special knife that increased your skill far enough.
How could anyone ever forget Solakar’s room? (his name, yes. The eggs? Nope!) And no hunter that hasn’t kited one of Drakkisath’s adds can claim to “have seen it all”. And what an amazing thing was it when Drakkisath let go the one and only epic in his loot table?
Summary
This raid was so required that no one really liked it after some time. Drop luck was everything we had, there were no emblems or badges and the pain of gearing up was much harder in vanilla. Still, looking back, it was cool to raid UBRS. You would go back there again and again, be it to get your guildmates keyed for Onyxia, help someone collect their tier 0.5, or for as little a reason as skinning The Beast.