Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Temple of the Jade Serpent: Bronze

Monday night we had or usual fun run. This week it was a quick romp through Dragon Soul. Eeyan just needs one more run and then he'll have the legendary daggers. We even got achieves and transmog gear for a few people in the run last night. Including surprising our dps DK with the last achieve that he needed for the meta. Amusingly he hadn't even noticed until I saw the achieve spam in gchat and told him grats.

Because it was so fast to blow through normal DS with seven 90s, a few of us floated the idea of a challenge mode after the raid. Not everyone, of course, was interested or geared, but we did actually have a full set of five. The group ended up being Morn to DK tank, Kuan as ele dps, Saruke hunter dps, Smokeydeath dk dps, and Expendable as monk heals.

Kuan and Morn had tried challenge modes before with a slightly different group. Sadly, it hadn't been all that successful. Oh, we'd completed Stormstout Brewery and Siege of Niuzao Temple. However we hadn't succeeded in getting any ratings. We'd also previously tried to do Shado-Pan Monastery and been utterly blocked by the Sha of Violence.

Monday's daily challenge mode was Temple of the Jade Serpent. I suspect that is one of the easier ones, but it still felt good to work together and go through it. We actually managed to one-shot all the bosses except for Wise Mari. His new challenge mechanic is to aoe anyone who stands in the usual heroic spot. So you're forced to not cheese his adds, and in fact have quite a limited area to deal with them. Once we realized just where the limits were for us standing near him he died. The rest of the bosses were just a matter of paying close attention to their mechanics and using all your cooldowns.

We were all still on vent from goofing off while we killed Dragon Soul, which was quite helpful. There was a lot of planning that was made much easier by talking, and some nice intra-fight coordination. I also explicitly called out when I was pulling and that it was only one group at a time. I was quite intentionally not pulling like a suicide tank. Yes, challenge modes don't have repairs bills, but since I'd never seen that dungeon on challenge mode before I wasn't sure how hard the mobs hit.

We ended up getting a Bronze rating for the run. I was super happy when that achieve popped up for all of us. And I think that we could pretty easily get a silver rating. We had plenty of time for the Bronze, and if we hadn't had three wipes on Wise Mari we'd have had plenty of time for Silver.




2 comments:

Durandal said...

"Not everyone was geared"

How much gear do you need for challenge modes? :P

Clara said...

We had someone in 440-ish gear. While challenge modes scale down your gear they don't scale up your gear.

Which all worked out since we had 5 people who wanted to come and were in current raiding gear.