I had a suspicion before entering Ramparts that my AOE Disc/Holy spec wasn’t going to work. My adventures in Stratholm, where I’d gone to test out the 5-man configuration and bring the lowest two priests to level 55, highlighted the holes. Chief among them is that the team I was trying to mimic hadn’t gone into Outland until they were level 60. I had two level 70 characters in my group but the other three are only level 55. AOE styling the Priests and Mage meant they had to be close to the mobs and would routinely pull aggro. The damage output was acceptable but they folded too quickly when attacked. At level 55, I was missing an important element to that style, damage mitigation using Pain Suppression.
Even though we made it through Stratholm, it was more painful than I expected. Determined to get away from content and quests I’d done more times than I wanted, I went forward with my strategy to head into Hellfire Citadel anyway. Realizing that the AOE wasn’t going to work, I switched the Priests back to Shadow again.
Going Shadow would provide passive tank healing. More importantly, it would keep the casters further away from the fray. I reconfigured the casters for ranged DPS. The Priests were given self-healing macros, which also necessitate getting right back into Shadow. And while I was at it, I decided to setup one Priest as the only one who’d drop form to heal the tank, while the others continue doing DPS. Two play sessions later, we were ready to rumble.
The Rocky Parts
It takes a time remembering how many commands are tied into each macro so that you use the appropriate number of button clicks to execute your skills. When you have a mixed class group - some could be doing 3 moves, someone 1 and others 2. It depends on what should be happening at the same time, combined with factoring in the casting time for the individual skills. After the first few pulls I had most of it memorized and was moving along.Sufficient crowd control was non-existent. I tried it. I had polymorph all setup and attempted it a couple of times but one errant AOE from the Paladin or emergency Holy Nova and the jig is up. Silence worked to a degree, except that the caster immediately has aggro which I have to quickly regain while multiple mobs are also in the fray. I suspect a more seasoned boxer can handle pulls with 3 to 4 elite mobs, include CC, hold aggro, get all the important DOTs on the main target, DOT a few others and return to burning them done one at a time, all while keeping everyone healed, de-buffed and watching their mana. Adding in CC was way more than I could handle so we just took our chances.
Casters were the Worst!
Pulls with multiple casters were a crap-shoot of mayhem-inducing button-slamming panic-riddled cluster-fuking my way through combat until everything was dead. There was at least one pull with 5 casters. My eyes bugged out of my head when I saw them, knowing the insanity that was about to follow. We persevered and never had more than two deaths on any pull. The deaths were far and few and when they did occur, it was usually just the Mage. I knew there would be more reasons for me to dislike that class.Rampart Boss Kills
Gargolmar was easy. I was so used to killing Orcs by then that I didn’t immediately realize he was one of the dungeon bosses. He went down without a hitch. *Flex*Omor was equally straight forward. My only foobar was getting knocked WAAAAAAY up in the air and not checking my position after I landed. It was a few seconds before I realized I’d landed BEHIND my team, who being battery operated, couldn’t turn themselves around to fight. DOH! After maneuvering the bad boy back into their LOS, he toppled quickly. This fool unfortunately dropped a piece of mail gear.
Last but not least, was the only boss that had to be restarted, Vazruden. I knew about the fire. I used the trick to DOT kill the dragon before the fight. What messed me up was running the tank back up the ramp to get two of the Priests to “follow”, in order to turn them back around. Heck, I don’t even know how they got turned the wrong way. I might have forgotten to break follow at some point before the fight. Unfortunately, going back up that ramp restarts the encounter. Boooooooo! We restarted it, kicked his butt and received the Ramparts Achievement. WOOT!
I should have timed the run but didn’t. All in all, it was fun, extremely challenging and a lot of work! I guess I should have expected that right??? Doing 5-man content solo by 5-boxing shouldn’t be easy. I’ll have to admit that the videos I watched of others doing the same LOOKED easy. I guess that’s because we don’t see all the underbelly work or the failed attempts. We just see the smooth successes. Any who, I think I’d run Ramparts a few more times to smooth out my technique before upping the ante to Blood Furnace.
We got some nice lootz which is always cool. Too bad we couldn’t use a single item since they expect you to be level 60 in the Citadel *Cries* Something else I hadn’t factored into my Mad Hatter scheme – going in this low means they won’t be able to even use the drops. *Sigh*
P.S. As much as I love taking pictures there was way too much stuff going on take screenshots.
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Posted by: Jasonangiesmith | May 27, 2010 at 08:38 PM