Molten Core - A Perspective from 70

So, last night my guild went to Molten Core. It was a great piece of nostalgia. From the perspective of someone who is now 70, there are some things that have changed, some things that still hold true, and some things which I had completely forgotten.


Things that have changed:

• It's perfectly viable to have one 70 protection paladin tank things that used to take 5 tanks and 4 off-tanks (mages, warlocks, etc.) like Major Domo Executus (tanked single-handedly by a paladin) or Garr (tanked by our feral druid/protection paladin team).
• Getting an unexpected add of Lava Annihilator, Lava Surger or even 2 Molten Giants is no longer an insta-wipe.
• One DPS class (like an elemental shaman) pulling a pack of imps leading to Lucifron doesn't immediately cause a party wipe.
• Fifteen raid members is perfectly viable -- even if some of them are low 60's types.
• Four healers for fifteen raiders is probably overkill. One of the healers could have brought a DPS alt.
• Paladins and Bears can actually tank and tank effectively.
• Shadow is a viable spec for a priest.
• Passing out water or healthstones is mega-super easy and doesn't require addons (like Vending Machine).

Things that are still true:

• Curses and magic effects still suck. For priests the addition of Mass Dispel cleans up a lot of the cursing duties, but there's still a ton of cleansing to do.
• Sulfuron Harbinger's adds still heal if you don't separate them. Instead of doing it the "right" way, we wound up running them out of mana.
• Packs of five core hounds still have to die at nearly the same time. We had one re-ignite problem. This reignition winds up getting the hounds out of synch health-wise and causes some rather serious problems.
• If you don't focus on the adds a boss brings with him, you're going to run into issues.

Things that I had forgotten:

• Lava cores and fiery cores drop from packs pretty regularly.
  
• Major Domo's chest isn't assignable via master looter.
• The gear drops are (nearly) all class restricted. Classes were only meant to have one viable spec before BC (Druids, Paladins, Shamans and Priests are all healers. Warriors are all tanks.)
• some pretty cool patterns drop in MC.

All in all, it was very fun. I went in there on my priest hoping to see one thing drop - The Eye of Divinity. I know that Anathema/Benediction is a completely underwhelming staff at 70, but I've always wanted one. Luckily, I had the Eye of Shadow from a long time ago, so now all I need to do is the quest.

Getting the Guildies Keyed

Well, I've not taken the warlock out of the barn for a good long time (other than fulfilling an adamantite bullet addicition for my hunter) and it was high time I did. Since a new 70 paladin tank (Owaru) needed his second Karazhan key fragment and what we really needed was DPS, I volunteered Bremette. (Bremagorn the hunter is already revered with Cenarion and Bremm's healing wasn't required as we had another awesome in-guild healer (Yorkshire) to pick up my slack) so the warlock seemed the obvious choice.

Due to time constraints we took a sneaky, meandering path with minimal pulls to get to the fragment jar and still down all 3 bosses. Alas, most of the drops were greeded for vendoring as we had no enchanter with us--and the second boss didn't drop my engineering recipe.

With that behind us, Owaru still needed his third key fragment. With some folks needing to log off, sleep, etc. we shuffled some characters around and ended up with a (mostly) in-guild run to the third fragment. Success. We even swapped out one of our (already keyed) DPSers for another Paladin tank (Noosh) when we were at the fragment. Two birds with one stone and two more tanks one step closer to offtanking Karazhan (or even main tanking for all I care)

Tonight we've got Onyxia. I know -- Onyxia, what sort of crazy talk is this. Isn't Onyxia like a 60 instance from back in the day when you had to walk to Molten Core, uphill (both ways) and in the snow with no shoes? Well, Yes. It is an "old world" raid. Lately what the guild has been trying to do (lately, ha. One other time) is set aside Wednesdays for the raid instances we are nostalgic about. Last week we did Molten Core (first three bosses) and this week Ony. In a couple weeks, we'll do Blackwing Lair. A good part of the loot was sharded (or crystalled as is more appropriate with epics) but we did take some pre-60's guys in there. All in all a warrior, hunter and mage all 57 or less got MC Epics last week. I'm not sure how the Onyxia hat drops compare to other outland gear, but for someone not at max-level it may be pretty significant.

But, Brem, I hear you decry, isn't this just a lot of time spent in old stuff when you could be doing Kara or something? Well, maybe is my definitive answer. I think even though the instances are easy-mode for 70's that it gives at least a glimpse of what a raid instance is like to the folks who've never seen it. And since we can safely take the 55-60 crowd with us, there's potentially some great loot for them. And besides. It's fun.