Heroic Magisters, Frustration, and a New Trinket

Wednesday night, I learned that one of my old friends had come back to the game. We spent a couple hours leveling some alts, and then he wanted to run some heroics. I suggested that we start with Magisters Terrace - since I desperately needed a Commendation of Kael’Thas.

We grabbed a Rogue in guild, and then had to pug two spots. An Elemental Shaman and a BM Hunter seemed like good choices. Both had Kara or better gear, all epics. It seemed like we had a decent group, and we should have no problems.

Boy, were we wrong. We had a little trouble early on with the healing. My friend brought his Resto Druid along, and he was a bit rusty. He also wasn’t prepared for the large amounts of burst damage I’d be taking when I tried to tank most of the pulls with little or no CC. After we determined that would just cause headaches, we started using sap and freezing trap more often, and we cleared to the second boss pretty quickly.

Beware the Thorns, Vexallus Hates Them

We wiped… repeatedly… on the second boss, Vexallus.

In case you don’t know the fight, he spawns adds every so often. Whoever kills those adds gets stuck with a 30 second debuff that deals a decent amount of Arcane Damage. The debuff is no big deal, unless it stacks 4-5 times on the same person.

With the initial group, we had some trouble dealing with the adds. The Hunter and Shaman were supposed to be switching off, but the Hunter ended up killing all of the adds and the Shaman did none. Several times, we wiped due to this miscommunication.

At one point, we also noticed that the adds were getting on me. 1-2 of the debuffs would be ok, but 3-4 was too much for our Druid on top of the 3-4k hits that Vexallus was dealing out. The question that bugged me, though, was how did I kill the adds in the first place?

Initially, I thought that Consecration wasn’t supposed to kill them. Nonetheless, I cut it out. In retrospect, it definitely seemed to hit the adds… so don’t use Consecration on Vexallus. You’ll overload on debuffs and die.

After I stopped Consecrating, I still killed some adds. This was particularly puzzling. I wasn’t using Holy Shield, I wasn’t using Consecrate, I wasn’t using Retribution Aura. What else could be attacking these things?

It turns out… thorns. They were attacking me, and thorns was reflecting enough damage back to kill them. They only have 1 hp, after all. I then got stuck with several debuffs, and eventually became un-healable. Doh. Beware the thorns!

The Trinket Drops

We kept going, and we eventually cleared (with a largely different group) to the third boss. After one bad wipe on the event, we managed to take out the set of NPCs (Mage, Warrior, Rogue, Warlock). By the end, it was me, a Hunter, and a Mage alive. Our Rogue and Holy Priest bit the dust when there were two NPCs left.

We raised the dead and looted. Low and behold… Commendation of Kael’Thas drops! I’m thrilled that I got the trinket, and I no longer need to go back in there.

I’ll probably head back with some guildies from time to time to help other people get their trinkets, but I was dreading the idea of farming that place on a regular basis for that trinket. It’s an awesome piece of gear, and it should take me one step closer to being a viable tank for Hydross. Woot.

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