On Raid Design Part 6 – Molten Core
In the fith part of my raid-ranking-series (up to Ulduar) my way once again leads back in time. We’ve seen UBRS as one of the blackrock instances, and now with Molten Core there’s another challenge in that mountain to be reviewed onto rank 3.
Setting
Much of the UBRS-Setting belongs to the Molten Core, just there’s one more thing to be considered: Molten Core was Tier 1 land. Back in Vanilla this meant that you would have to have enormous luck to get that set. First of all there were no tokens, there were only set pieces. Second, this was a 40-man-raid for 8 classes, so you were more certain than not rolling against someone on that tier-piece.
Additionally, the set was made of 8 pieces, almost twice as much as nowaday’s 5-piece sets and the set boni were nothing short of awesome. Most molten core raiders would sport a lot of dungeon blues, and being “fully epic” was a hard-earned thing (I myself never quite got to back in the days).
So Molten Core was big, in terms of being the first real raid, offering the first tier tokens and being fought with 39 other people at your side. It was new and exciting, it was something you had worked towards and offered a huge challenge.
Flair
Dangerous. From all raids I’ve ever experienced, every instance or area I ever entered, MC felt the most dangerous. You enter the instance and what you see is that narrow bridge over a deep canyon, and lucky you are that this bridge is as narrow as it comes – for you’d already see the core hounds on the other side, lurking around and waiting for some foolish adventurers to chew on.
Everything felt hot, you clearly were in a place of fire and death down here, trapped in a gigantic rock, sweating from the heat and fighting for no less than your life. Then there was always that feeling of awesome that came with a 40-man raid. That’s a lot of people.
The design was really good, the cave system that is the Molten Core manages to get across a “natural”, yet mysterious feeling. The fire elementals, core hounds, imps – it all worked and contributed to the big theme of “hell”.
Trash
The aformentioned core hounds were regular trash, but they were scary puppies indeed. In the beginning every core hound pull was a well-organized encounter and wipes were nothing unusual, even for more experienced raids. The trash in here worked pretty much the same way throughout the whole dungeon: Dangerous, but managable. Still, wipes on trash were a regular thing as long as the raid didn’t outgear the content, or knew it like the back of their hands.
I didn’t really fancy Molten Core trash. This was a huge part of that raid and the way from boss to boss used to feel a little too harsh and repetitive. Challenging trash is nice, but Molten Core kind of didn’t get it cool enough to make it worth the hassle.
Encounters
The boss fights in Molten Core were tough and very chaotic. There were adds to CC, offtank, kept at a distance to each other, kite – you name it, Molten Core has it. Kill order used to be a big thing and Blizzard had made sure that every class had to use their abilities to allow a silky-smooth kill. Also we’re talking days way before wowwiki.com – if you wanted a boss strategy you would either have to work one out or ask around for advice. No pre-made strategy guides with positioning diagrams and ability rundowns were available, only painful steady trial & error won the race.
Until this day and all raid encounters I’ve experienced (remember I’ve not seen T5/T6) nothing, and I mean nothing, ever came any close to the most impressive final boss encounter: Ragnaros.
You would enter his chamber, a gigantic hall, filled with lethal lava. There was a spiral-formed stone walkway in the lava pool, leading to it’s middle. And as the tank would walk in there – fully buffed at about 6,000 – 7,000 health – that thing would rise: A gigantic, gigantic, gigantic creature of fire. Damn, did I love seeing that boss spawn.
Overall the boss fights were very good, but very hard – there was no such thing as outgearing in the beginning, and gear did matter a lot more than these days. We had a regular raid in there and used to get Ragnaros down here and there, but there were also nights where the same raid would get stuck in the middle and call it quits for the night. Only when we started to outgear Molten Core would it become a walkthrough.
Summary
Molten Core, the very root of raiding, still has a solid place in this raider’s heart. Never will I forget Ragnaros and the first time we killed him. Never will I forget the ridiculous amount of farming that had to be done for the tank’s fire resistance gear, the gold and effort a whole guild had to throw in to succeed. An awesome raid that left me with lasting memories and I am sad people are missing out on these days.