Karazhan Revisted

I don't know how I forgot to post this before, but since my last post about my first time in Kara, I've been there twice more. And each time it was from the beginning with some fine members of Veritas. I absolutely love this instance, and it grows on me the more I'm in there. The music is great, the layout is fun and the place is just gorgeous. The boss encounters are challenging, but not so much that you give up on them. And when you finally down the boss, you feel great. Before I went in here, I read The Last Guardian which is all about Medivh and Karazhan. It was a great primer for the lore and NPCs in Kara.


A view of the opera house from behind the seats. Love the ceiling and chandelier and the pipe organ on the left.

Within the last few months, my guild has started regularly running Karazhan. Elionene was already geared enough for it, but the timing of the first group's runs just wasn't good for my schedule. On top of that, Lal had just started playing, and I was really excited to be leveling my new Druid, Salthier, with her.

Eventually, we had enough people and interest for a second team, and they chose a time on Saturday that made it possible for me to sign up! So in I go with 10 people also mostly new to the instance. We weren't sure how well we'd do. I was prepared for massive death, but hopeful for better. A couple of our members had been to Kara before on alts or in old guilds, so we weren't completely blind.

Our first accomplishment was to down Attumen without any wipes on trash or the boss. We were ecstatic that we'd done it on our first try! Thrilled to bits, we continued on to the Banquet Hall to confront Moroes. I'd read up on this fight and knew that he had random guests with him. As it turns out, he had several of the harder to control guests this time. WoW Wiki has a good page on the different guests, suggested kill order, and why they are dangerous.

I don't remember the exact guests we had, but I know it involved at least two of them that could release the others from traps and shackles, thus meaning we had to utilize our Crowd Control to the best ability. The other two were harder hitting mobs, and of course, Moroes. We wiped once, tried again, and wiped at 1% on Moroes. Argh! Third time's a charm though! and Moroes and his guests went down. Pats on the backs all around and then, holy cow! It's already been 3 hours? Yeah, time to call it a day, but for a group that's first day in Kara saw two bosses go down, we were pretty happy with ourselves.


Yes, that's Elionene, naked on stage in front of however many ghostly spectators. No, she's not putting on a show. I was the sacrificial lamb to discover the opera for the night, and I didn't want my nice armor to get any dents.

Two week later, we team up for Kara again. Today's goal is Curator. We take down Attumen quickly, and one shot Moroes. He had easier guests with him, which we were thankful for, but we could tell we were getting the hang of it. Onward to Maiden and she went down without too much trouble. Then we walk into the Opera Hall. I love the way this place looks, and it's fun to take part in the "play." I volunteered to walk out naked on stage, mainly because I had the bag space to disrobe. For those who don't know, the opera event can be 1 of 3 things. In order to determine what it is, so you can plan before hand, you send one person out first, removing the armor to avoid repair costs when you inevitably die from facing a boss mob on your own.

We had Romulo and Julianne, which was exciting for me because the last time I was here it was the Big Bad Wolf. After being brought back to life, and putting my armor back on, we discussed how it would work. Julianne would attack (and die) first. Then Romulo comes out, and he dies. Then they BOTH get up and attack at the same time. The trick is they then have to die within 10 seconds of each other or they will resurrect with full health. Scary! Our first attempt, we got to the third phase and somehow just lost it. We all died, but one of our healers was either Soul Stoned, or maybe he was a Pally and bubbled, because we didn't have to corpse run. On the second attempt, we agreed to get Julianne down to 10%, and then focus on Romulo so that we could kill them together. But somehow, each of them lost health at about the same rate, meaning we killed them pretty much together anyway. Go us!


Isn't this hallway amazing? And that's the Curator lumbering towards us.

It was getting late, but we were almost to our goal so we hacked and slashed our way to the Curator's room, and what a room. A lot of us had tried (and failed) to get Ahune down during the Fire Festival, and we often heard the he was like Curator on steroids, so we were pretty sure we could do this. Our first attempt, we didn't have good enough focus fire on the Astral Flares that Curator sent out. We went through 3 evocations before he enraged and killed the tank, and then dispatched the rest of us. Our last person died with Curator 2%. Doh! On the second attempt, our warlock changed up her tactics, using direct damage on the flares instead of DoTs, and we positioned better so that the flares were easier to kill. This time we had it, and the Curator went down!

He dropped The Gloves of the Fallen Defender. We had one priest healer, and both of our Main and Off tanks were druids. The main Tank was our leader, and was really hoping to get them, but was willing to let the roll determine the winner. However both the priest and the off tank bowed out, having both received upgrades earlier in the dungeon. Even though Tier 4 would have been better for any of them, we were all excited that our Boss Bear got his gloves. The next day I saw him in Shattrath sporting his Gauntlets of Malorne.

By then it was late and we'd been in there for nearly 5 hours, but we'd reached our goal. We discussed going on to Chess (where I'm hoping for some boots to drop for me!) but we'd already done enough and there was always next week. I can't wait.