Zul'Gurub is not an abomination

| Wednesday, February 8, 2012
I had low hopes for the remade Zuls. I expected watered-down shadows of the awesome they once were. And certainly they are not the same. But they are similar and a good sort of different.

The plethora of mini-bosses was odd. More like glorified trash mobs. But whatever. These days you gotta have the flare.

Venoxis was nothing like what I remember, but was a fun new fight anyway. At least the theme was somewhat consistent with the venom, though it lacked snakes.

Broodlord was a fun fight, which I think stayed somewhat true to the original, though obviously not exactly the same. I hadn't looked it up before, so when I started seeing people getting one-shot, I was worried. I didn't realize that the fight was designed with the expectation that people would be dying a lot. Thankfully, my habit of attacking the raptor was still correct.

The Edge of Madness was... confusing at first. I didn't know how it started, figuring it would just be a random boss. I didn't want it to just be yet another boss, but I figured that these days, that's how things are. Thankfully, I was wrong. Apparently it requires some moderate level of archaeology to activate, and a lot of rummaging around to find the artifacts to activate. I thought that was cool. The boss we got was a crazy troll rogue, who I found silly in a good way.

Zanzil was sorta neat, but I think the cauldrons are a little too far apart.

Panther boss was strange. Ignore her, kill cats, then kill her? She's already tormented and the first thing we do is kill her cats? Killing a crazy cat caricature's cats is cruel.

Jindo was a pretty awesome fight, once we figured out what we were doing. Well, most of us... A warlock in the group was very skilled at never being anywhere near the chains, so we had four or five failed body slams, dragging on the fight, and then the healer died right before we were able to get the last chain.

I got a big mace. I turned it into Might of Menethil. In the end I walked out with a new healing hat, a new DPS hat, a big mace, a treatise on strategy.

I think I might go again.

6 comments:

Kring said...

How did you get your group to kill all bosses?

Klepsacovic said...

Have you seen the painting of Washington crossing the Potomac? I was like that: Standing there looking leadery.

K. White said...

I love the Broodlord fight. "DING!" "Hey, grats mon!"

Coreus said...

we had four or five failed body slams

Wow, that place has really been de-fanged. The way I remember Jindo, two or more failed slams pretty much guaranteed a wipe.

I really disliked the overly-gimmicky fights in ZG [was the level 60 version this gimmicky?] especially Raptor guy. I want to punch the face of the guy who though killing the players over and over would be a fun mechanic.

Klepsacovic said...

In the original fight players died a lot, not by an outright one-shot, but by other mechanics, such as one where you'd watch you and if you looked at him the wrong way, he'd run over and give you and everyone around you a good smack. This tended to kill people. And then he'd level up.

If you want gimmick, oh man... The original final boss was Hakkar and to beat him you had to drag a trash mob over, similar to now, except rather than waiting for a slam, you instead had to time the kill just right so that when it died and left a puddle of poison behind, you could all stand in it before Hakkar drained the entire raid's health. Success hurt him a lot. Failure healed him a lot. Getting the poison too soon just hurt you a lot. Poison cleansing totem was a problem.

The fight is gone now, but there used to be a boss, a trio really, who had to be killed within a short time of each other, maybe 10-15 seconds, and who also healed each other and if they were not killed close enough together, would res the others. So kill one, kill the next, but if the last isn't dead in time, the first is back up again.

To prevent players from bee-lining to the last boss, the other bosses, except Jindo (he used to be where Zanzil is) and Broodlord, would give him ridiculously dangerous new abilities, such as killing everyone, mind-controlling everyone, and healing himself for insane amounts of health.

Also the old edge of madness required some extra effort, as in, rare ingredients for a rare potion that not all alchemists even knew how to use. And still being random, they dropped an item needed for a class set, part of which came from voodoo piles which would mind control players.

It was a giant gimmick and I loved it.

Christopher said...

We had a Druid healer in vanilla who was from Taiwan and spoke very little English. Our first time on hakkar we got the add, killed it, and this guy starts spamming cleanse like a maniac. 2, 3, 4 attempts go by and NOT ONE SINGLE poison got past his machine-gun cleansing. Everybody is yelling in chat (no vent; ah, vanilla, I miss you) Stop cleansing! FFS!! STOP CLEANSING!!! He knew his duty and would not be disuaded - hero Druid CLEANSE ALL then dance XD

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