Into Magister's Terrace!

As yesterday's post (and the later subtitles for the hard of thinking) indicated, I went on last night with an agenda.

First things first, I went up to see G'eras to divest myself of badges. I bought the full set of plate Fire Resist gear as mentioned in yesterday's post, two Nether Vortices and on a whim, the Libram of Divine Purpose. I've been considering it for a while as a decent single-target threat libram for fights where I don't need the good-old Libram of Repentance (ie Heroics and Resistance fights). I'm not especially worried.

Then I grabbed the start of the quest chain from Aldor Rise, took a portal from Shattrah to Ironforge and flew from there to the Isle of Quel'doras.

Once there, I assembled my posse and charged into Magister's Terrace. As normal instances go, it's up there with the easier heroics (Mechanar, Slave Pens) in terms of difficulty. Entirely Aoe-tankable but there's a lot of caster mobs in every pull, so be prepared to use Line-of-Sight pulling, and make sure your healers position themselves so they can maintain LoS on you if you have to move with the mobs.

After we cleared it, we were attuned to Heroic mode, so it was time to go back in for another try. As Heroics go, the individual pulls aren't that much harder. I started the run in my Raid-tanking gear, but quickly downgraded into my "threat set". The bosses are tougher though.

The first boss is a pushover in either mode. He's basically the last boss in Steamvaults repackaged. The second boss isn't too hard in normal (DPS switches between killing him and the arcane sparks he generates, like the Curator), but on Heroic he generates two at a time and things can get a little fraught. Paladin Healers will have a nightmare here, since they don't have any HoTs or group heals, and this is very much a group-healing fight.

As for the third boss... well the metaphor thrown around is that it's like a 5V5 Arena fight. She has four adds, much like Moroes or Hexlord Malcross, and each of these adds has an array of annoying abilities. Also there doesn't seem to be much in the way of traditional aggro, since the adds will run around trying to kill the clothies, CC the dangerous people and generally act like a bunch of PVP players (without the /spit macros). For someone who's used to brute-forcing his way through heroics with aoe Aggro and good healers, this is a complete change of philosophy. I may actually have to start utilising crowd controllers on this fight. *gulp*

After that, we're onto Kael. He's a tricky fight to master. We two-shotted him on normal, but failed to kill him on Heroic (we gave up after two tries since our main healer wanted to go to bed). I've since found out you can bubble out of the Pyroblast he does in Heroic and that he only does it once per fight, so it should be manageable in the future. Gravity Lapse is fun though!

All in all MT is a fun normal-mode instance and a challenging (but rewarding) heroic.

After the rest of my group went to bed, I applied myself to the new Sunwell dailies. And I found myself running around a lot annoyed with no Mana. :-/ There's a lot of mana-draining mobs running around and I'm afraid I may have to invest in the new rare-quality Retribution set as a grinding set for the dailies. I just wish I hadn't sharded my Hammer of the Naaru now! ><

Ah well, tonight is CD's first run at Mount Hyjal! I can't wait!