Date: 1/1/2014
Dungeon: Castle Never
Team: Hrothnor (Iron Vanguard GWF), Tyrandil (Sentinel GWF), Phelaia (CC/DPS), Thorgrim (Max CC), Sophrosniscus (DPS DC)
This run was planned over the weekend, because what's better than starting the year off with a run to Castle Never? Soph and Thorgrim had never been here before. This is also Sophroniscus's first guild run with NOR, and Tyrandil is dragging him to Castle Never already. Last time NOR was here, the team was stared down by the Beholder(Boss #2) at 75% health. Even Hroth, our most well-geared teammate, had never been much farther than the Beholder. If we get past the Beholder this night, we'd be forging new territory for the guild. All of us got on Teamspeak, even just to listen in. Here we go:
Boss #1: The trip to Valindra's Pet was uneventful. Phelaia fell once at the hall of a hundred skeletons due to a massive lag spike. As we got to the stairway before Boss #1, Phel noticed that the campfires at the bottom and the top of the stairs were gone! Oy, because if we wipe here, we wouldn't be able to just keep running back in like we did last time. So we go down the hallway towards the giant spider and proceeded to clear the boss room of little guys. Along comes Valindra's Pet, and the blade spiders start to spawn every 5 seconds. Soph used Chains of Blazing light to constrict the adds, while the two wizards tag-teamed Singularity to mop them up and dump them on top of the boss. Tyrandil and Hroth hacked away at the boss and the adds. This fight went smoothly, and no one even came close to falling. This is looking good.
Boss #2: Onward towards the Beholder...the strategy was much like Mad Dragon: Hroth tanks the Beholder and get it to face the back wall, while the rest of us deal with the adds by dumping them on the boss. Everyone stayed close and around the boss. The wizards tag-team Steal Time, Singularity, and Shard of Avalanche, and the adds were actually getting cleared. Soph was critting and crit-healing. This fight went smoothly, and no one even came close to falling. This is looking better.
And we keep going...we go into a zone called the Shadowfell, and there were more adds in the random encounters. At one point, they came in groups of 15 to 20 just around the corner along a walkway. Phelaia and Thorgrim got into a little co-op game of Singularity and Repel to launch the ball of adds over the railing and down to the abyss. At one point, Hroth, Tyr, and Soph jumped off a ledge and discovered--to their surprise--a Gelatinous Cube, and as Phel and Thorgrim were going to to them to help, Thorgrim launched some skeletons over a gate off to the side, perhaps thinking that they wouldn't come through. Wrong. Tons of Skeletons, Witches, Wight Commanders started to pour in THROUGH the gate! No, that gate is not operable by the players. Soon there was so much red, there were no place to stand. We wiped once here. We try again. This time we knew and fought smaller groups by kiting a little bit and making the Cube walk a full circuit up a long flight of stairs and then fighting it. At this point, Tyr commented that the dungeon has become a parody of itself. It also dawned on Phelaia that if we get to the last boss, it wouldn't be possible to vacuum up the adds and launch them over the front gate and leave them stuck behind the gate (seen this in a video), because wouldn't the adds just walk back in anyway?
Boss #3: We get to something that looks like an arena, and Thorgrim asked, is this it? No, Boss #3 is some kind of buff, naked, Undead humanoid. Same strategy as before. The circular arena is shaped like the lid of pot, and it's raised a little in the middle. This fight was noticeably more difficult than the last one. We were starting to go down a bit more often and had to rely on the Soulforged enchantment in our armor. After the boss went down, Phelaia looked around and wondered why there were only three other people standing around. Then Thorgrim said in party chat, "I can't get back. Too many adds." What? When did he die?! How did we not see him go down and save him in time? And, who would design an arena where you can't even see if your teammates went down across the room? Now Thorgrim was stuck at a campfire quite a ways back. We all backtrack to get him and indeed discovered a whole host of respawned adds between us and Thorgrim. With one wizard short, we nearly wiped here. Nearly. Why do adds respawn in a dungeon?! Oh right, this was a "feature" not a bug. This was starting to get a little ridiculous. At this point, wading through 15-20 adds of complex composition had become the standard, and the random encounters have become "the greatest hits" of the lesser dungeons.
Boss #4: Not long after Boss #3, there was another circular arena, and there was clearly a ginormous zappity blue dragon behind it. After 2.5 hours, we're finally here at the infamous Dracolich we all remember from the game trailer. Phelaia knew that if we didn't get through this fight, it's ok, because we've gone where no NOR team has gone before. Thankfully, there's a campfire right outside of the gate. We potioned up and decided to use the strategy that has worked in the previous three boss fights. As soon as the fight started, the Red Wizards and skeletons started pouring in. The two GWFs were on dragon. The wizards dumped adds on the dragon, while Soph kept us all going somehow. The Red Wizards were particularly hard to dodge, because they practically fill the room with stacked red areas that do knock down. The red areas are not accurate either. Then came squads of the mini melee wights that we've seen in Malabog. At 90% health, one of casters went down, and it was downhill from there. For our next two attempts, we tried to pull the adds to the edge and kill them there, but these adds are impossible to kill in one rotation by either wizard. Knocking them off the arena is no longer possible because invisible walls have been added. At this point, It was well past 10p PST, and Tyr and Phel were getting tired. Phel was starting to lose focus and make bad mistakes. Our final attempt involved the three casters running and kiting the adds around the edge of the arena, and the casters went down one by one while kiting. The only person who could stand in that room for longer than a few seconds was Hrothnor, and even he needed his Soulforged armor to save him once. A total of four attempts, and we haven't even gotten to the purples hands phase.
I am very very proud of how we all did in this full-NOR run. Having been to Malabog and back, I can confidently say that this is harder than Malabog. There's a lot more BS here than in Malabog. No matter, the castle has somehow become a repeatable quest. We will go back when we're all a bit tougher, better geared, and better skilled.
