It takes two baby, it takes two

One of the reasons I enjoy playing WoW so much is the clear progression you can see in your character. As you advance both through levels or tiers of content you (nerfs not withstanding) become stronger, things become easier and its obvious that you are moving forwards.

Now I’ve mentioned before that the Gnomeling and I find two manning things not designed to be two manned (two personned sounds stupid) relaxing. We had great success with Heroic Old Kingdom back in the first weeks of being 80 and managed to pick off a few bosses in various of other heroics as well. However we hit a brick wall with two particular bosses:

Trollgore in Drak’theron Keep and Meathook in the Culling of Stratholme.

No matter what we tried we just couldn’t get past the stacking debuffs they cast. However months have past and we have both collected a variety of loot since then so we thought lets try again.

Heading to Stratholme first (my favourite instance ingame), I was my usual holy build and I have to admit I was a little nervous. Neither of us can do particularly awesome dps and my memories of the last time we tried were a little depressing. When he spawned, Tabs positioned him against a corner so I was out of line of sight of the evil abomination to avoid the constricting chains. Aggroing a passing zombie in the first few seconds of the fight, it turned out that prayer of mending bouncing between us (hooray for zombies) was enough to cope with the bulk of the healing with the odd direct heal thrown in.

All in all, it really didn’t seem as it were on heroic. Sure, I think we will need either a massive increase in prot warrior dps or another 10 levels before we can do the timed event with us 2 of us. We did however clear the rest of the instance without any issues. I was actually asleep for 90 percent of the Mal’ganis fight which doesn’t say much for demon dps.

All happy with our success beating those naughty time changing dragons, we headed off to Drak’theron Keep to take on a big angry Troll. The last time we tried, we tanked him in the doorway and I tried to kill the trolls as they came down stairs whilst sustaining the healing required to keep up the gnomeling. It was a total failure. We felt the stategy was probably correct and just had to hope this time “I had learnt to play”. I managed to kill two out of three trolls everytime because the healing required was so miminal but I’m still going with it being skill not gear (its my blog and if I say its skill, it is, honest). On a side note, disc is completely awesome for doing this (I made my second spec disc for our General “I’m a great big annoying bluebottle bug thing from hell” Vezax hardmode tries and whilst I adore holy for raid healing, disc has surprisingly grown on me). Turns out from a 2 man perspective at least, Novos and his stupid blizzards are far more annoying to heal than the cannibal troll.

Stratholme and Drak’theron are both pretty similar in boss design. You have your dps race (or tank/healer test when 2 manning) first. Then you have some annoying caster type with randomish irriating stuff and for desert you have two completely trivial bosses who require virtually no effort from anyone. Which from a design perspective seems a little odd, surely the last boss should be the hardest not the easiest?