Visiting the Throne of Tides

I broke down and took Merinna to her first dungeon finally. My curiosity about the challenge level of new healing mechanics got the better of me and i just had to go see for myself. It was certainly...an educational experience. I'll write healing specific observations in another post, since I have a lot to note about that

The biggest impression I got from The Throne of Tides was how utterly tiny it is. Minuscule. Itty-bitty. There's a hallway with an elevator at the end that leads to ... another hallway. You meet the first boss at the end of that second hallway and additional bosses appear as you make your way back to the entrance. The hallway peeks out into a larger watery world, but the place still feels a bit claustrophobic. Truthfully, it seemed a little like the elevator is only there to provide the impression that the environmental artists had something to do.


This place is still far from complete. That elevator doesn't even work yet,with "Blizzard Construction Co." cones blocking it off. A goblin stands there to teleport you down. There are cut scenes of something fairly epic happening, but I have no idea what since most of all that is still place holders. And boss dialog is also still placeholders.

The first boss was a horrible blur of me worrying about my mana supply and keeping the tank alive. The first tank in the group shame quit when the wipe happened. But the next person in, and we did alright there.

Oddly, the second boss one-shot the tank, but couldn't kill the dps. The result was a tank dead in the first 15 seconds, but a win on the fight. He has one killer slam maneuver that took out the tank, but everybody else evaded long enough to kill him. He also grabs one party member from time to time and it looks like he's playing paddleball, with the char at the end of a shadow tether. But that was imminently healable. That boss just doesn't hit like a boss. A tankless boss fight? Definitely a new idea and I can go with it. Bring your dual specs.

The third boss is a good guy with an octopus thingy on his head doing mind control on him. Get the boss to 50%, and then the octopus flies about the room trying to jump on party members to mind control them.

In the last encounter, I really have no idea what is going on. Neptulon, who we seem to be assisting, literally says, "Ready? K go" and a bunch of adds start appearing. Halfway through he says, "ohnoes! The octopus thing is back." And at the end, it's just, "We won! Here's some loot! Thx." The fight itself is an add rush of some kind and it was really hard to really tell what was going on. Many of the adds started radiating some inky looking fire (Don't stand in the fire!) but it quickly covered about 90% of the floor. Technically, it wasn't burning anything, but may have had a delayed effect. The other guys finally focussed on this one thing, but it appeared to have pathed most of the way into a wall, so, once again, I couldn't see it.

Trash was spread out. This group did not attempt any CC, though they probably should have. There were two occasions when the tank was just splattered. There were three wipes and a lot of dead dps in those trash pulls. These trash groups had 5-6 critters in them, so the tank is going to have to AoE tank and move around CC. That said, there didn't seem to be the tight corners that featured heavily in BC raids, where you had to be extra careful not to accidentally pull another group.