Halls of Origination 5man: Heroic
So I've been playing in the beta for a while, and to be honest, there seems to be a lack of skilled/knowledgeable players. Either the tanks/healers don't understand their talents and abilities yet, or DPS pull aggro, or there is so much lag that the instance is unplayable, or a number of other things could go wrong. So it was really difficult to get a 5man group capable of killing a boss. So I decided that if I wanted to see content I would either have to roll tank, or healer. Since I decided that there is so much damage in these 5mans, that a healer would be better, because I could at least work towards keeping everyone alive instead of just tanking everything. As with any new content Blizzard throws at us, Crowd Control is really necessary on virtually every single trash pull. So I premade a paladin healer since that is the only healing class that I have level 80 experience with. And I queued for a random heroic and found a group rather quickly. I was fortunate to get an experienced Death Knight tank. We had a shadow priest for mind control, a moonkin for entangling roots, me (paladin healer not warlock this time) for Hammer of justice and the warrior for...nothing really. So after clearing about 15minutes of trash pulls we finally arrived to the first boss.
Temple Guardian Anhuur
I've decided i'm not going to go much into strategy for defeating this bosses because that would make the post very long, and better strategies will be able to be found on specialized websites, and to be honest, it's not really all that difficult.
This is a screenshot from about 75% boss HP, the DPS and tank have to jump down and bring the snakes up to the boss and kill them to remove his shield. For us warlocks, I'm assuming that this will be easily done for us just by dumping our demonic circle and then jumping down, then porting back up once we have what we need and the rest will take care of itself.
This screenshot is taken right after his aforementioned shield breaks and the DPS are able to knock him again.
At this point, the boss is ~25% HP and the DPS have to jump down and kite the Pit Vipers up to the boss. At the very top of the screen you can see Temple Guardian Anhuur Defended by his barrier.
And this of course, is the loot, the sweet blue mail chest that he dropped.
Earthrager Ptah
Essentially, this dude is mini Lord Marrowgar. If you haven't experienced the Lord Marrowgar encounter in Icecrown Citadel (Patch 3.3), then you won't be able to relate to this boss as much. There is one twist with Earthrager Ptah, that is that he doesn't have a bonestorm, and instead of fighting him on foot, you're fighting him on a donkey. Yeah. Donkey.
Marrowgar Coldflame = Earthrager Ptah Fire
Marrowgar Impale = Earthrager Ptah Impale
He has the same boney look as Marrowgar and the same axe coincidently.
The nice thing about being on Donkeys when you are fighting Earthrager Ptah, is that you can cast while moving, so if you are avoiding his fire you are still casting and not losing any DPS which is great.
He deals a lot of damage and it's imperative to avoid all of his damaging abilities, and there's no excuse not too since you can still cast while avoiding everything.
At this point, we had our warrior DC and since the Earthrager Ptah has 4.5million HP he takes a while to kill and with subpar DPS this took quite a while. I believe the whole encounter took 7minutes total, which is really a long time for a heroic boss, nevertheless I finished with 95% mana, due to paladin's amazing regen.
At this point, the group folded since we had been in there for so long that it seemed no one had much patience to go on, which came right in time for me because I was playing with ~800ms of lag and was making it really annoying.
This week, i'll be posting level 80 Cataclysm specs for those of you still trying to finish up ICC/Halion.
-BeerAndchips
