A Pilgrim’s Digression

Last night in World of Warcraft, I ventured into Karazhan with my guild for the first time. Since everyone else has been inside Kara multiple times, I needed some one-on-one instruction and lots of patience from our raid leader. It was a memorable and throughly enjoyable night worthy of a blog post, I think.

Raiding Kara has been a long-term goal of mine since I first began hearing about it several months ago. Friends venturing inside brought back stories of the ferociously difficult battles and the superior loot to be had inside its crumbling walls. Having seen it for myself, now, after all this time, I have to say that everything was true.

It is a beautifully designed instance that shows off Blizzard’s attention to detail and sure grasp of what makes a game fun. Although we use the term “dungeon” and “instance” to refer to these special places in Azeroth where the bosses hit harder and the better loot drops like rain, what I thought of when I first climbed the stairway from the stables to the banquet hall was Hotel California.

Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device.’
And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast.

Karazhan is occupied by ghosts and Undead party-goers raised from the grave by the current evil occupant of the tower. In one of the first encounters at the undead “feast,” your group has to engage groups of five or six ghostly party-goers who, until you disturb their revels, are dancing a slow cha-cha-cha together to music that no one can hear.

In another part of the tower, your group will face smaller groups of Concubines who look like beautiful women until you have burned them down to about 40% health, at which time they reveal their true form: hideous demon. When they finally die, they say, “Too bad. We could have had such fun.”

There are other creatures that show off Blizzard’s flare for the humorous and campy. Just before the fight with Moroes, the zombie steward, you have to kill two ghostly wine stewards who, among other abilities, break a bottle of wine over the head of your main tank, stunning him for several seconds. When they break the bottl, they have a couple different sayings they may come out with, such as “That was wasted on the likes of you!”

Moroes himself is a fun fight. He comes with some ghostly party-goers, as well, who should be killed before he is fully engaged. At least one of his “guests” is a healer, so we chose to burn her down first.

Moroes actually dropped my first purple item of the night, the Nethershard Girdle. Yes, my gnome now wears a girdle. Again, I often think Blizzard chooses these names out of a sense of camp. It’s sort of like the various pants with the name “woolies” that drop at low levels: Prospector’s Woolies, Warden’s Woolies, etc.

Anyway, this belt should have been my only purple item for the night. Traditionally raids limit participants to one purple per run, unless folks agree that someone can have more than one item. Well, later in the evening, Ritssyn’s Lost Pendant dropped from some trash just prior to the Curator fight. Since it’s tooltip is very specific about dealing Shadow spell damage, rather than magic damage in general, the group decided that I could have it if I wanted. As a warlock, and with no Shadow priests in the group, I was the only one who could use it.

In an embarassing mistake, I also ended up with the Wicked Witch’s Hat for reasons I will elaborate on now.

One of the things I really looked forward to all evening was the so-called “Opera event” that people have written so much about. This is one of the real gems of Blizzard game design, in my opinion. Karazhan does have an opera house full of ghostly patrons and a stage manager.

When your group reaches the opera house, the stage manager will announce one of three shows: the Wizard of Oz, Little Red Riding Hood, or Romulo and Julianne. It is entirely random which event one gets. As you probably have guessed, we got the Wizard of Oz. Again, all praise to Blizzard for this fight. Our ten man group had to fight Dorothee and her little dog Tito, Strawman, Rawr, and Tinhead, with the Crone as the big finale.

Additionally, there were some trash mobs we had to clear leading up to the event, including my favorite of the evening, the “Ghostly Philanthropist” who has a spell called “Ill Gift” which deals 3000 damage and returns 1500 mana to him. One can imagine some disappointed former stage actor on staff at blizzard thinking of that one as a swipe at wealthy patrons of the arts who don’t give anything for nothing in return.

Despite having to fight Dorothee and her companions simultaneously, the fight actually seemed very straightforward. But most of the fights seemed straightforward to me. As a warlock in an instance full of Undead, I did not have much else to do but concentrate my spell damage on one target at a time. No multi-tasking in the way the priests had to manage their Shackle Undead spell and their healing simultaneously.

We burned Dorothee down first, to avoid her enraging at the death of Tito. Then we took down Tito. Then Strawman, Rawr, and finally Tinhead. Then the Crone appeared, and we killed her. She is actually the only one who drops loot.

Here is where I screwed up. I was getting some odd lag spikes during the fight, but nothing too damaging. The game would freeze for maybe 1.5 seconds and then start going again, as my Internet connection spiked. These continued after the fight, as well, so that when my raid leader started speaking I got short gaps in what he was saying. But I got that he was reminding us to pick up our Badges of Justice (tokens redeemable for more loot) off the Crone.

Well, meanwhile the loot window came up. The Crone dropped both her hat and a pair of Trial-Fire Trousers. I passed on both of them, then went over to the corpse to loot my badges. During the loot, I got a lag spike. I don’t know if that was what caused it or not, but somehow instead of looting my badges, I looted the hat.

I didn’t even realize it until the raid leader said, “Um, how did you end up with the hat before we had a chance to discuss who gets it?”

I was appalled. I stammered that I didn’t know how I ended up with it. I thought I was looting the badges. I had not looted the pants, which went to one of our Mages, but somehow I ended up with this hat in my inventory. I apologized profusely and after an initial tense moment, I think I was forgiven this lapse in etiquette. One of our rogues even said that the same exact thing had happened to him on a pair of boots once.

I honestly don’t know how it happened, though. When you loot a boss with Badges of Justice on the corpse, you get the loot window with both the items dropped and the badges and a prompt that asks if you really want to do this because “looting this object will bind it to you.” Clicking “yes” had, up until this point, always resulted in just the badges being looted.

My only explanation is that something went wrong when I had the lag spike at that exact moment that I looted. Otherwise I can’t explain it, nor can I explain why I looted only the hat and not the pants, nor the badges.

This was my noob moment for the night, and my team teased me about it the rest of the night, saying that I had the makings of a guild leader because all good guild leaders start out as ninja looters. I made a joke of it, too, saying that each person gets one opportunity to ninja loot something from guild mates, and I had squandered my moment on a hat that wasn’t all that great for me.

I felt bad about that, the rest of the evening, and though more sweet items dropped from other bosses, I made no attempt to claim them. And I waited until the loot had been divided up and dispensed before looting my badges off the corpse.

We stopped for the night after the Curator fight, having downed Attumen the Hunstman, Moroes, the Maiden of Virtue, and the Opera event. It was about 11:30.  We started at 8:30, so the run lasted for about three hours and we were about a quarter of the way through Karazhan.  The group is going to go back for the next quarter on Friday evening, but I don’t know if I will be able to join them.  Even if I don’t make it on Friday, I came away with two upgrades–a new belt and necklace–and a hat that I will probably only use for PvP, if then. I also have nine Badges of Justice, which I can redeem for more epic loot, once I have a few more of them.

More than that, I had a great time seeing this truly grand and beautiful instance. I was incredibly nervous, leading up to it, afraid of making critical mistakes or not being able to add anything to the group makeup that would help us beat the bosses. I am still not sure what I brought to the fights–I don’t have a damage meter installed, but I have a threat meter, and it seemed like my threat level was always below that of the priests and mages and even our one hunter. I don’t know if that is an adequate measure of how much damage I was dealing or not–I know some warlocks view it as a matter of pride that they can pull the monster’s attention away from the warrior with one critical Shadow Bolt. Others, like me, view it as better to say that I never pull aggro in a fight. I’d still like to think I was among the top damage dealers in the group, though.

Still, we succeeded in every fight, never really coming close to wiping, except on Curator when our healers’ mana got low and their potions were on cooldown. Fortunately that was at the end of the fight, and as a warlock I don’t need potions to keep my mana pool up. I can keep casting spells for as long the boss is still standing.

It was a memorable night, and I hope to return to Karazhan soon.