Life’s busy these days but whenever I have a free evening that coincides with a raid night within my guild, I sign up and bring along my extensive collection of consumables and a great attitude about doing my best no matter how many times we die or whether there’s a chance of a gear upgrade on my part. My joy is not in progression, exactly, but in being able to do something cool when I actually have the time to go.

In my guild that regularly fields 25-man raids in an evening, or breaks down into occasional multiple 10-man raids for badge runs on less-populated nights, we’re currently working on the boss “Al’ar” when it comes to Tempest Keep. Of course, we’ve already downed Void Reaver multiple times as well, but recent raids had us putting up attempts on Al’ar and learning new strategies to beat her.

In heading through the hallway which leads to Al’ar, there are some difficult pulls with Tempest Falconer humanoids and their swarms of Phoenix-Hawk Hatchling flying beasts… the beasts interrupt spells with a strong knock-back effect and are a major pain in the butt for a Mage who is trying to cast a channeled AOE spell to burn (or freeze, in my case) the flying beasties down.

I don’t recall if this happened before, but this recent run I noticed that the knock-back effect was blasting me up onto the walls, and I believe after I got blasted up high enough, I was out of the range of the AOE knock-back effect and could Blizzard away quite freely.

Unfortunately, between pulls I was to exit the hallway to let the tanks get aggro on the swarms before I joined in, and therefore I didn’t stay up on the wall to test my theory about being out of range of the knock-backs.

Does anyone know?

And hey, I finally figured out how to highlight a certain portion of my pictures in a useful way - go me who isn’t used to Photoshop at all… ;)

Tags: 25 man raids, al'ar, Dungeons, frost mage, instances, level 70 mage gear, mage, raiding with a frost mage, solarian, tempest keep, tempest keep bugs, void reaver, warcraft bugs, warcraft glitches, warcraft raider, warcraft raiding mage, warcraft raids, warcraft screenshots, world of warcraft, wow pics

Well, I’m sure this won’t be a proper “Ode” since I’m not sure what that would be. In my world, it’s just about giving reverence to something that has influenced you in some way.

Blackrock Depths is a HUGE instance that, before the expansion pack hit with its extra 10 levels and huge improvements on gear, was a “player barrier” for me in my leveling guild. The difference between taking a group into Sunken Temple and into Blackrock Depths was quite noticable, to the point where I actually had to think about a little bit of class balance when forming groups to go in.

It made sense, however, because Blackrock Depths and the whole Blackrock Mountains instancing areas were End Game raiding zones or preparation for End Game raiding, and there had to be SOME kind of transition between easy-to-zerg dungeons and the ones that required 10+ people to tackle.

These days, however, BRD isn’t near the challenge it was. Between improvements to the strength of equipment and the nerfing of the difficulty of the dungeons and bosses, players can be much lower level and survive in BRD where before the small guy would have caused a wipe of the entire party (at least in the guild I was in) prior to expansion.

But, it’s still a great dungeon for getting experience through mob murdering and quest turn-ins, along with upgrading gear for your 50s characters so they can be dressed in pretty blues and occasional purples before they hit the Outland where a lot of greens are huge upgrades over those dungeon blues and purples.

But with how much easier Blackrock Depths is than it used to be, it makes me wonder - what level should I start considering taking my healer into the old 60s dungeons of Dire Maul, Lower Blackrock Spire, Strat and Scholo?

Tags: azeroth gear, bael'gar, blackrock depths, blackrock mountain, BRD, dark iron dwarf, dark iron dwarves, dungeon guide, dungeon playing guide, Dungeons, gearing up in azeroth, healing in dungeons, holy priest, instances, lord incendius, priest gear, priest gear in azeroth, warcraft screenshots, world of warcraft, wow pics