Ever since The Burning Crusade came out, I've been a fan of the Caverns of Time instances, and Old Hillsbrad is probably my favorite. Being transformed into a human, saving Thrall, and seeing a favorite zone from the game returned to its previous state is just too cool. So you can imagine that as Saturnalia have been leveling and 3-manning all the 5-man instances, I've wanted to know how we would fare here....
With this in mind, we went there with our 67, 68 and 69 characters last
night. We're in the home stretch toward 70 and this instance was a
really nice reward for the effort. We easily cleared the first two
bosses with only one problem: massive server instability issues. At one
point we all had to re-log, but most of the issues were short-lived and
simply resulted in a wipe as one or more of us became unable to cast
spells or do anything else. One solution was simply not to loot.
Looting, oddly enough, seemed to cause the issue most of the time.
The final boss was really hard, but we did manage to take him out on our second attempt and he gave up some nice feral loot for our druid.
As for strategy, I'd say that this is now a nearly ideal instance for a paladin tank. Most fights are pretty obvious, but the final one took some discussion. Eventually we settled on throwing my shield at the melee mobs that ran in at us, and then running up to the caster to judge it. These minimized the amount of time that it took for me to get agro on the whole group. The final boss was tough with our reduced dps, but our healer was 69, and that helped. At 67 and weakly geared, I'm not an ideal tank and keeping me alive isn't a cake-walk.
Once again: thanks Blizzard for making a great instance with some real challenges. This is no simple dungeon-crawl and its dungeons like this that make the game interesting!
The final boss was really hard, but we did manage to take him out on our second attempt and he gave up some nice feral loot for our druid.
As for strategy, I'd say that this is now a nearly ideal instance for a paladin tank. Most fights are pretty obvious, but the final one took some discussion. Eventually we settled on throwing my shield at the melee mobs that ran in at us, and then running up to the caster to judge it. These minimized the amount of time that it took for me to get agro on the whole group. The final boss was tough with our reduced dps, but our healer was 69, and that helped. At 67 and weakly geared, I'm not an ideal tank and keeping me alive isn't a cake-walk.
Once again: thanks Blizzard for making a great instance with some real challenges. This is no simple dungeon-crawl and its dungeons like this that make the game interesting!
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