Northrend Dungeon Master

Last night, to get Boon the Northrend Heroic Dungeonmaster Achievement, we went into Heroic Halls of Lightning and Heroic Oculus.

I came as Keiji, The Awesome.

Sitting at a little over 27k health and 27.5k armor unbuffed, with 35% dodge/parry and now with Lichborne, I felt supremely confident that we would pwn Loken and Eregos.

We started with Loken and he did go down like a pansy. That's right. Pansy.

Oh, Lightning Nova? HAVE SOME ANTI-MAGIC SHIELD, bish. Ditto with Ionar, oh, gonna do some static charge thing to me? Uhnuh, I don't think so. BAM.

We got the three achievements for heroic Halls of Lightning: Lightning Struck, Shatter Resistant and Timely Death. Boon died to the slag because he somehow misplaced his bubble. That's right. A paladin. Misplacing his bubble. So sad, so sad.

Then we moved onto Oculus. We didn't do any of the achievements.

We had some... issues. People hopping on their drakes, not waiting for those of us who haven't been there as frequently, and riding off into the wild blue yonder... and getting lots of aggro from the pesky elites flying around. We wound up dying more to trash flappy elites than we did to Eregos. And we did die. A lot.

And on the Mage, when the tank has to kite him out of his frost bombs? Yeah, ranged DPS opening up and grabbing aggro meant that he was constantly frost bombing the healer instead of the tank.

I can see why a lot of people do not like Oculus (and Malygos), because it has nothing to do with your skill as your chosen class, or your gear on your chosen class. To some extent, this is a GOOD thing, you don't have to be uber-elite to down Eregos or Malygos necessarily, just have experience in how to handle your drake and you can have as many DPS or healers or tanks that you want, regardless of what classes you really took in there.

We did finally get Eregos down. I was tanking on a Ruby Drake. Some of it was me learning the best way to use Evasive Maneuvers and Martyr and ... so frustrating. Boon was healing on an Emerald Drake and our three DPS were DPSing on Amber Drakes.

Getting the DPS to realize that doing whatever damage they did with the stacking whatever on the boss was better if more of them were doing it, where it could stack to 10 times? We had one DPS doing 15k damage for the fight, and the other two doing 6k. I kept going, "Whatever DPS 1 is doing, can DPS 2 and 3 do it also?"

I have no idea what it was, other than going in there as Keiji last night, I've been in the Oculus a grand total of ONCE.

But we succeeded and to my surprise, I also earned Northrend Dungeonmaster. Regular, not Heroic. I still need to whomp three heroics, of which I can't remember which ones they are, other than H.AN. *whimper*

Now I'm working on getting badges, badges and more badges to try to work towards getting the chest upgrade for Keiji. And I'll keep trying to run VoA 10/25 to maybe see if the Watcher will treat me as kindly as he treated Kikidas the other day.