PuGGing The Eye
Patch and easy mode, and such. Yesterday some guildies and I joined a PuG for The Eye. The guys leading were some six or seven people from a guild that, obviously, has had the place on farm before the patch (some almost full T6 people along the way), so they knew what they were doing. The rest: Not so much.
Some of the people knew one or two encounters from filling up a place somewhen, but after all I’d say half of us didn’t have much of an idea what would happen. That said, we one-shot the whole place up to Kael. Void Reaver was an easy kill with, Al’ar worked just fine and Solarian we managed to get down with nine people left after someone exploding right in the middle of the raid.
The only downside was the slow pace we had. Not that I wanted to chain-pull the place, but we’d have between one and two minutes downtime after every trash group, for whatever miraculous reasons. Boss explanations took about 15 minutes, which was almost ridiculous. That way it took us about 2.5 hours to make our way to Mr. Sunstrider.
And that was as far as we got. Everything was fine until phase 4, where we’d always manage to have too many people die. We had five or six attempts and got him to about 20% each time, 18% on the best try. Eventually the trash would respawn and so the raid was called.
Needless to say, I didn’t get any loot. Seems like random-raids never want to give me anything at all. And I’ll never, ever get PvE-shoulders, I made my piece with that.
Now, I’ve seen that raid and I’m certainly glad so. On the other hand, I have to say that I’m kind of disappointed by BC-instance design once again. That place had interesting encounters, absolutely. But that’s about that. Thinking of AQ and MC, even UBRS, back in the days makes me crave for some atmosphere again.
Walking through the Core was impressive. That place was scary the first times to walk through. It was a dungeon, it was dangerous, and it felt like that. You knew “I’m not supposed to be here. There must be some bad-ass monster-stuff around”. In BC … not so much. Karazhan is a castle, not scary at all. The Eye … well … it’s blood-elf territory, so I dislike it as much as all the Tempest Keep places, from a design point of view.
So far Gruul’s Lair is my favorite dungeon. Huge ogres, dark walls, a cave of all places – you really want to slay some monster in there. Zul Aman … well … sure, it does have flair, but it seems too “linear”. I liked Zul Gurub better. ZG felt like an actual Troll fortress, while ZA is merely a bunch of bosses with some guards around. Karazhan is okay. No more, no less.
Today we’ll have our second Zul’Aman attempt, I’ll report in about it asap – looking forward to more guildie-fun (and who knows, I might finally be able to replace that felsteel helmet …).
Damn am I looking forward to WotLK. Can’t wait to set foot into Naxxramas, the one of all places where bad ass monster booting is gonna happen with style.
Hyjal as far as design is ‘meh’ too; just some open fields with a few buildings thrown in. The boss encounters are pretty mediocre until the second-worst cockblock in BC that is Archi. That’s a fun and infuriating fight. BT is imo very very fun. It’s sorta a castle/fortress but has much better layout and even trash. SWP is ok, but not spectacular. There’s a couple vistas in SWP that are very cool when you can see all around or when you’re looking down on the Brutallus/Felmyst area. Utgarde keep follows the fortress area in Lich King, but somehow feels much better. LK overall has a more epic feel to me even though I haven’t been to a raid in LK I have leveled to 80 and all the instances so far have been pretty cool feeling.
If you get a chance, at least poke you’re head into BT. It starts with the underground area, so if you can get at least past Najentus to Supremus you’ll get a feel what it’s like.
Good luck!
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