Last night we sent out the call for guild mates to helps us take on the orcs and demons of the Hellfire Ramparts, the first instance dungeon in Outland. Salthier would be tanking and Lal would have heals covered, so we needed DPS. Help came in the form of guild members Delrael, 62 Rogue, Polymetis, 66 Rogue, and Norith, 70 Cat Druid. Needless to say we were severely melee damage heavy. With two of our members being over leveled for the instance, I figured it wouldn't be too hard, and for the most part it was a smooth run and only took as about an hour and a half to complete it.
The most difficult thing was finding the entrance. First I ran up to the Blood Furnace entrance. Hmm, not here. So I turned around but couldn't find anywhere else to go, so I jumped down to what I thought was another rampart that possibly led to the dungeon. It turned out to be just a ledge high above some Orc camps, with not outlet. I had unknowingly led Lal and Delrael to this spot to, so we stood around for a bit waiting on Polymetis and Norith to summon us to the meeting stone. After a minute or two of waiting, we decided to take matters into our own hands and jumped off the ledge into a bunch of orcs. Between the 3 of us we were able to kill them all, and I think Del even finished a quest to kill the Drillmaster
By this time Pol and Norith had found the stone, we all got summoned to the entrance and finally got inside. I'm going to have to explore a little bit and figure out a more straight forward path to the instance. It might save us about 20 minutes next time.
Okay, so we're in. Yay! I go bear and start mentioning kill orders and sap targets and what not. We start off well, and I'm trying to figure out this thing called tanking. True, we do have a level 70 druid cat and a level 66 rogue which make it a little hard to keep aggro, but all in all I think I'm doing well. Occasionally I pulled badly and we got more mobs on us than we bargained for, but with Lal super-healing, and everyone working hard, we didn't have any major hiccups. I am noticing that I have a hard time keeping the attention of more than one mob at a time, and the one's that I was not actually targeting tended to run off to the healer or one of the DPS. I usually ran out, taunted with growl and then went back to the one I was previously hitting. I didn't necessarily feel like I was doing bad, but I felt like I should be doing better.
We got to the second boss and we were at a slight disadvantage due to our group make up. Omor the Unscarred hates melee DPS and to prove his point casts a curse that doesn't hurt you, it hurts everyone around you. So ideally you would have everyone spread out and then the curse doesn't do a thing. Not really feasible for our fighters. The plan was to have Norith decurse anyone who got it, but in retrospect I think it may have been a spell, and not a curse and so it should have been dispelled...but I could be wrong on that. Anyway, we all ran in and started batting away. I kept his aggro, and Lal healed through the debuff really well. When we got him down to about 15%, he cast his little spell on Norith, who happened to be standing next to Lal, and before we knew it our priest was dead! Oh noes! Thankfully, since he was already close to dead, we were able to kill him and then rez Lal.
The next boss was also fairly difficult, but we all did our part and killed him with no deaths to speak of. I picked up a nice tanking cloak, and Lal snagged some good shoulders. Sadly, she did not get the britches from the last boss to replace her current leggings, which show just a little too much skin for Lal's tastes.
All in all, it was a very successful run. I learned a lot, Lal got more practice as a healer, we finished up our quest and are now itching to get into the Blood Furnace. Turns out there's a lot of nice priest items in the Blood Furnace, not the least of which is a robe which Lal is crossing her fingers for. It would solve a lot of the clown outfit problems.
After getting some advice and looking up some information about Bear tanking, I realized I had completely forgotten about my mangle ability. I never used it. I don't know what I was thinking. It actually generates a lot of aggro, and I think I was neglecting it because it had something to do with bleed effects, and I don't have any bleed effects as a bear at the moment. I also need to remember to use my demoralizing roar, something I knew to use, but just kept forgetting to hit. Armed with this new knowledge, I'm eager to get back in that and tank another instance. Perhaps the ramparts again, or maybe the furnace. Whatever we do, it'll be fun.
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